Sunday, January 25, 2015

Thomas Merton: A Man for All Seasons

January 31 marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Thomas Merton; while he may or may not be familiar to many of you, he was arguably the best-known American Catholic author of the 20th century (Dorothy Day is the only other person I think even comes close). While there are a lot of commemorations floating around among Catholic (and other) publications whose readership skews much older than the undergraduate age range, I would argue that he remains a strikingly relevant companion for young adults who are working to make sense of their spiritual lives and the part they will play in the world.

Thomas Merton was born January 31, 1915 in Prades, France to artist parents and spent a wandering childhood between France, New York, and Bermuda. His parents had both died before his 16th birthday, leaving him adrift spiritually as much as he had been geographically. Young Merton grew into a sophisticated and literary but somewhat aimless life, including a disastrous year at Cambridge University which concluded after he fathered a child and was summoned to New York by his guardian. Transferring to Columbia University in New York City, Merton surrounded himself with friends and mentors who gradually awakened his latent desire for maturity and peace, culminating in his 1939 conversion to Catholicism and his 1941 entrance to the Abbey of Gethsemane in the woods of Kentucky, a house of the austere Trappist order. His 1948 autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, became an overnight bestseller and remains a spiritual classic; nearly seventy years after its initial publication, it has never been out of print. While his early years in the monastery were marked by a rather world-denying split of the sacred life of monasticism from the worldly secular realm, he grew to realize that monastic life could not be about escape from the world as bad, but as critical distance to speak to the world as fallen and loved.


From his previous identity as a gifted but fairly pious and conventional Catholic author, his “second conversion” back to the world opened Merton to a new sense of dialogue with the world he had left behind nearly twenty years before. Nothing was out of reach: art, music, poetry, literature, religion, philosophy and more. Despite almost never leaving his monastery, he befriended and corresponded with some of the most significant figures of his generation, from Dorothy Day and the Dalai Lama to Thich Nhat Hanh and Daniel Berrigan to Martin Luther King Jr. and Pope Paul VI. From the atrocities of World War II, he gained fresh insight into the need to speak out against the same violent and dehumanizing mentality that made new terrors possible in his time: racism, the Cold War, the Vietnam conflict and more. At a time when monks were expected to remain in silent prayer, he spoke out against the seemingly imminent threat of nuclear warfare, writing essay after essay about the madness of an allegedly Christian nation manufacturing both weapons of mass destruction and the arguments that dared to legitimate their use. In the early 1960s his order silenced him from writing about nuclear war as a topic “unbecoming” of a monk; it was only after Pope Paul VI himself turned to writing against nuclear warfare that he was allowed to do so again.

When he died in December 1968 of an accidental electrocution while at a conference in Bangkok, Merton left behind over 60 published books, and at least that many more have been collected from his letters, journals, photographs, poems, drawings and book reviews. What makes him enduringly relevant nearly 50 years after his death is not only how applicable his writings are to the existential struggles and social problems we continue to face (although, that too), but his restless heart, always working to welcome a new perspective, to reach across another aisle to learn from someone else, always wondering what else is out there. In an era of information overload and media saturation, Merton paradoxically holds together the love of silence and solitude with the need to remain in conversation with the world. His best-known prayer remains one of my favorites and is a favorite of millions of people around the world who struggle to know how they will contribute to the reconciliation of the world:

“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 that 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. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.”

Sunday, January 18, 2015

"Speak, for your servant is listening."

The readings for this weekend reflect imagery of VOCATION, being called to the service of God and humanity. In the first reading Samuel does not recognize the voice of God calling him to service, and in the gospel the disciples of John go to figure out who Jesus is and end up staying with him. If only it were so simple to know where God is calling us! If only following one's vocation were simply a matter of KNOWING what to do, instead of, more often, facing one's fear enough to do what is right.

This long weekend we celebrate the 86th birthday of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. - a great orator, a leader in the fight against injustice, and ultimately a martyr at the hands of people, mostly Christians, who rejected the Gospel call to unity. Despite (or maybe because of) his incredible public significance, it is easy to forget how much danger he faced in his ministry, how strong the opposition to something so straightforwardly immoral (it seems so clear to us!) as desegregation, and how much he struggled with fear and doubt. Even after he had been in a position of leadership for years, his opponents' increasingly brazen tactics demanded new depths of courage. As he told the story, "One night toward the end of January I settled into bed late, after a strenuous day. Coretta had already fallen asleep and just as I was about to doze off the telephone rang. An angry voice said, 'Listen, nigger, we've taken all we want from you; before next week you'll be sorry you ever came to Montgomery.' I hung up, but I couldn't sleep. It seemed that all of my fears had come down on me at once. I had reached the saturation point...I was ready to give up...With my head in my hands, I bowed over the kitchen table and prayed aloud. The words I spoke to God that midnight are still vivid in my memory: 'Lord, I'm down here trying to do what's right. I think I'm right. I am here taking a stand for what I believe is right. But Lord, I must confess that I'm weak now, I'm faltering. I'm losing my courage. Now, I am afraid. And I can't let the people see me like this because if they see me weak and losing my courage, they will begin to get weak. The people are looking to me for leadership, and if I stand before them without strength and courage, they too will falter. I am at the end of my powers. I have nothing left. I've come to the point where I can't face it alone.' It seemed as though I could hear the quiet assurance of an inner voice saying: 'Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth. And lo, I will be with you. Even until the end of the world.'"

He knew what he needed to do, but he struggled with the courage to do it. Three days after that episode, his house was bombed with his wife and infant daughter inside. The fear, the near-despair, the apocalyptic sense that there was no escape as a black man from the racism of the white majority could so easily have turned to desperation and violence - and who could have blamed him for succumbing to the desire to give up, or worse, to join in the calls for retaliatory vengeance? Instead, he understood the call to challenge people to sanity in an insane moment in history - to nonviolence.

As this new semester and new year begin, we too have a choice to pay attention to the needs of the moment, or not: listen to the deep fear and anger and pain that are finally coming to speech in our community after decades of silence and invisibility, or bury ourselves in schoolwork and friend circles and all the usual things we would be doing anywhere. We can all come up with perfectly good reasons why we just don't have time to get involved with the uprooting going on around our city - we are all busy people - but we owe it to one another to strive to hear what has led to such immense racial, ethnic, gendered, and socioeconomic divisions all around us, and to respond in love. Stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth. And know that God is with you until the end.

Patrick Cousins is a member of the Department of Campus Ministry.

Sunday, January 11, 2015

Pray with Imagination this semester!

As our community returns, we celebrate the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord, which is marked as the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry and the end to our season of Christmas.  In the mystery of Christ’s Baptism in the Jordan River, we again encounter and represent the truth of the Lord’s incarnation and His manifestation as the Christ. We find accounts of Jesus’ baptism in all four gospels (Matthew 3:13-17, Mark  1:9-11, Luke 3:21-23, John 1: 29-33).

But in John, the words and the images speak to me and I imagine myself being present:

The next day he saw Jesus coming toward him, and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world!  This is he of whom I said, ‘After me comes a man who ranks before me, for he was before me.’  I myself did not know him; but for this I came baptizing with water, that he might be revealed to Israel.”  And John bore witness, “I saw the Spirit descend as a dove from heaven, and it remained on him.  I myself did not know him; but he who sent me to baptize with water said to me, ‘He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain, this is he who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.’ And I have seen and have borne witness that this is the Son of God.”

These images are a reminder of how Ignatius encouraged us to pray.  We may have heard of lectio divina which is meditative or spiritual reading.  We listen with our heart and then reflect on that experience and then respond to the influence of the Spirit.  But let’s take this prayer a step further.  Can we take the words of the Gospel, put ourselves inside the Gospel, and link that to art?  We combine our spiritual reading with spiritual art or visio divina.  

Let’s take a painting by James Tissot, "The Baptism of Jesus (Baptême de Jésus)" from the Brooklyn Museum.



In small simple steps, you can pray with scripture and with art, as I suggest.

Watch what happens; listen to what is being said; see what is happening in the painting; feel the actions with your body.
Become part of the mystery by becoming one of the persons in the story or one of the people in the painting.  Listen, taste, smell, feel, and watch what happens. Allow yourself to interact with the other persons in the event: enter into conversation with them, listen to what they have to say to you and to each other.
Allow the event to unfold through your imagination.
Respond spontaneously in a conversation with God, with Jesus or with one of the persons within the Gospel story.

As our own semester unfolds, I encourage you to take time in prayer daily.  Perhaps you want to use scripture or art; perhaps you have your own method of prayer.  Whatever may be the case, take some daily time to imagine where God is leading you and enjoy your conversations as I do every day!

Sue Chawszczewski

Director of Campus Ministry