Book Review/Essay: 'The Intimate Merton: His Life from His Journals', Edited by Patrick Hart and Jonathan Montaldo, Oxford: Lion, U.K. paperback edition, 2002 [448 pages, with index]. Australian distributor: Hodder Headline.

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Let's start with the index at the back: a very interesting place to start. There are more entries for Buddha than for Jesus (15 to 7), and for birds and for 'Mary, Mother of God' than for the Bible (19, and 15 to 12). The largest (25-plus) entries are for dreams, prayer, solitude, vocation and writing. That's a fairly accurate reflection of the subject-matter of Merton's journals, as precised in this volume.

But first, a confession. I don't like Thomas Merton. Ever since I gave up reading his famous autobiography 'The Seven Storey Mountain' - at about page 100 - because of its non-irenic treatment of Protestants (I was one of them then), I've even had to struggle to like what Merton has written in the ten or so other books (of his 60-plus) that I've read. But all that does not prevent my putting his 'New Seeds of Contemplation' into my list of the 100 books any literate Christian should have read [1]. I believe it's a spiritual classic.

My progressive Catholic friends say of the present, ailing, pope: 'I like the singer, but not the song.' For me it's vice versa with Merton.

That said, Thomas Merton is probably the twentieth century's most influential English-speaking and -writing Christian contemplative. Time Magazine ran an article on him which they titled 'Merton's Mountainous Legacy' [2]

The publishers put a commendation from Frank (Angela's Ashes) McCourt on the front cover: 'A book I will keep by my bed for the spiritual nourishment and the pure joy in the writing.' Interesting. McCourt's childhood experiences of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland were not all pleasant. Nor were Merton's in the monastery at Gethsemane. Merton's diaries are an excellent commentary on his contemporary sociologist namesake's (Robert's) comment to the effect that 'all institutions are inherently degenerative.' One example: In 1963 the Trappists' abbot general ordered Merton to cease his writings on war and peace. Merton seethed: 'Monk concerned with peace. Bad image.' He obeyed the directive formally, but distributed mimeographed anti-war pieces. (In 1967 all censorship was removed). John of the Cross helped in this regard: 'He said I would have less resentment in me if I were more concentrated on doing whatever it is God wills for me and not considering the defects of this institution' (P. 214).

Merton began journaling as early as 1931, aged 16. Although his journals from 1956-68 were supposed to be embargoed until 1993, his most salacious episode - the affair with a nurse he calls 'M' - had already got out. He wanted his story to be read, but, more than that, he strongly believed his life would be richer if he wrote about it. Merton led an examined inner life. So his journals are 'a book of everything'.

'The Intimate Merton' is divided into seven chapters that correspond to each volume published by Harper San Francisco. The selection here is not representative. For example the authors have included every dream in the seven volumes, along with a more-than-generous portion of his prayers.

A true intellectual, Merton read widely, mastered several languages and many of the varieties of Eastern religious experience. He did not suffer fools gladly - particularly those in authority. He pitied 'so many priests I know in their strange sensitive isolation: innocent. men, hearty and unoriginal' (p. 74). 'I would hate to die in this monastery. It would be a complete surrender to mediocrity' (p. 184). 'Complete disgust with the stupid mentality we cultivate in our monasteries. Deliberate cult of frustration and nonsense. Professional absurdity' (p. 205). He made friends - personally and/or via letters - with many famous people (Maritain, the Dalai Lama, Dorothy Day, Dan Berrigan, Pasternak, Leclercq, Joan Baez). But essentially Merton was an introverted private person. He resisted making his hermitage into a 'poustinia' where people could come for guidance and help without an appointment.

Spirituality

Merton, according to Merton, was not a saint (but the church may disagree one day). Like the monks on Mount Athos, he 'got up and fell down, got up and fell down, he got up over and over again.' 'He stumbled home, but he has made it home' (p.16). He didn't seem to smile much. He wasn't as well-put-together as, say, Dom Helder Camara, or David Steindl-Rast (on whom, it is said, the mantle of Merton has fallen).

But Merton was very good at 'noticing', the primary trait of a good 'spiritual directee'. He was acutely aware of what all his senses were perceiving - the fly buzzing on the window-pane, a lame deer, a fly-catcher on a fence-post, the sound of the neighbor-farmer's dog, the feel of pine needles on bare feet.. But the root of spirituality, he believed, with the classical spiritual masters, is union with God. 'My vocation is PRAYER - that makes me happy.' And also justice ('God is with me; he sits in the ruins of my heart, preaching the gospel to the poor').

Writing

Merton (as was said about his contemporary Catholic writer-sociologist Andrew Greeley) 'never had an unpublished thought.' His life, he says, means two things - writing and voluntary poverty, both for the love of God. Even in purgatory he will have some asbestos paper on which he will write! 'For me to write is to think and to live and also in some degree even to pray' (p. 166).

What?

There are sentences here and there which you must re-read, and contemplate. Like:

* How many have become Christians through the prayers of Jews and Hindus who themselves find Christianity terribly hard? (p. 45).

* Work (ie. manual labor) is important - it is a mixture of penance and recreation (p. 51)

* In a monastery you are always discovering Jesus for the first time (p. 106)

* 'There is no solution in withdrawal. No solution in conforming' (p. 154)

* 'He who faces death can be happy in this life and in the next, and he who does not face it has no happiness in either' (p. 170)

* 'I remember my dream about Protestants. (They are perhaps my aggressive side) (p. 203)

* 'Humility is more important than zeal' (p. 239)

* 'The monastic life as a whole is a hot medium. Hot with words like must, ought, and should. Communities are devoted to high-definition projects: "making it all clear!" The clearer it gets the clearer it has to be made. It branches out. You have to keep clearing the branches. The more branches you cut back, the more branches grow. For one you cut, you get three more. On the end of each branch is a big question mark. People are running all around with packages of meaning. Each is very anxious to know whether all the others have received the latest messages. Has someone else received a message that he has not received? Will they be willing to pass it on to him? ' (p. 299)

* 'Blessed are the pure in heart who leave everything to God now as they did before they ever existed' (Eckhart).

* 'Not to run from one thought to the next, says Theophane the Recluse, but to give each one time to settle in the heart' (p. 395)

* Chobgye Thicchen (lama, mystic, poet) 'knows how to impart the technique of severing one's soul from the body' (p. 423)

* A question or two from the Dalai Lama to Merton: 'Did his "vows" have any connection with a spiritual transmission or initiation? Having made vows, did the monks continue to progress along a spiritual way, towards eventual illumination, and what were the degrees of that progress?' (p. 424)

Self-Esteem (Lack of)

Several times Merton writes self-deprecatingly ('I must be nuts'; 'Is there anything on the inside? I think perhaps not'). He wished (with so many of his readers, I might add) that he could write more simply. He was always questioning his motives - and his vocation. ('Seriously, my projects and relationships, including correspondence and much of my work, are sheer waste ' p. 259). As late as 1965: 'I still depend too much, emotionally, on being accepted and approved' (p. 307). There is a subtle - and sometimes not-so-subtle - narcissism ('the business of filing every little slip of paper I ever wrote on! .I imagine it is for real. That I will last. That I will be a person studied and commented on. This is a problem, man.' p. 374). Throughout his life, Merton wondered whether 'I'd really missed the point of life after all. A dreadful thought!' (p. 384). And he felt a pervasive alienation from others in his community.

But he is honest: 'In these notes I am leaving everything, permitting everything'. Everything? As a counselor I wonder why there's almost nothing about sex in the first two thirds of this book, in the light of his robust

Celibacy and 'the affair'

While sowing his youthful wild oats, Thomas Merton had sexual encounters with several women - some of whose names he could not remember later. ('My sexual adventures were always seductions - I wanted them to be conquests in which in reality I gave nothing, only "took"' p. 248). Sex was something, he wrote later, 'I gave up without having come to terms with it' (p.287). 'Chastity is in fact my most radical poverty. a desperate and useless expedient to cover this irreparable loss which I have not fully accepted' (p. 312). It's interesting how he 'lit up' when with women. After a visit with the Little Sisters of the Poor in Louisville: 'The moral beauty of the place, the authentic beauty of Christianity, which has no equal. The beauty of the Church is the beauty of her daughters. - more real than all the unreal people in the rest of the world' (p. 202). Another retreat with 'fifteen contemplative nuns. was wonderful. They were all really human. I have never before had such a sense of community with any group' (p. 382).

The first time in later life he was touched by a woman (a nurse) he fell deeply in love with her. Out of others' sight, they 'loved each other to ecstasy. It was beautiful, awesomely so, to love so much and to be loved, to be able to say it all completely without fear and without observation (not that we sexually consummated it)' (p. 243). Merton does not seem anywhere to distinguish 'love' from 'romance'; and has a teenage-type view that 'sexual outercourse' is somewhat O.K. but 'sexual intercourse' is sin. He writes about his guilt - 'though we are doing nothing radically wrong, ie. not sinning' (p. 247). We 'hugged each other close for hours in long kisses and saying, "Thank God this at least is real!"' (p. 350). Of course, this whole episode initiated a lot of soul-searching: 'I am humbled and confused by my weakness, my vulnerability, my passion. After all these years, so little sense and so little discipline. Yet I know there was good in it somewhere, nevertheless' (p. 370-1).

(The good in it, I hope, is that in a lifetime or two, Catholics will make priests' celibacy optional/voluntary).

I wonder

A couple of 'wonderings' to conclude. How can a contemplative further en route into union with God than the rest of us say so little about God? Here' s an exceptional journal-entry: 'A love for God that knows no reason because He is the fullness of grace. A love for God that knows no reason because He is God, a love without measure, a love for God as personal' (p. 397). There are not too many sentiments like those. Merton seems preoccupied with the via media of panentheism - nature (particularly birds, the sky, and the weather), ideas, the Mass, literature - than with God, the source and object of our spiritual desire.

Another: why does someone so steeped in the writings of Christian mystics - not to mention the Bible, which pervades the Office - write more about Eastern sages than the Christian masters (with the possible exception of Eckhart)? Perhaps Merton has a 'taken for granted' view of his Christian heritage, and his writing is a reflection of his 'journeys beyond the frontiers'.

When Merton died - accidentally electrocuted in Bangkok, Thailand on December 10. 1968 - he scored a front-page obituary in the New York Times.

Altogether, a brilliant read. Merton's great gift (in my view) is as a wordsmith (and 'ideasmith'). I'd suggest you dip into a life of Merton first (perhaps Henri Nouwen's 'Thomas Merton: Contemplative Critic') to get his time-line in rough sequence.

Merton's most famous prayer is an apt commentary on his life and insecurities: 'My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself; and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you.'

[1] http://jmm.aaa.net.au/articles/8073.htm

[2] Time, December 10, 1984, p. 68.

Rowland Croucher

http://jmm.aaa.net.au

April 8 2002