THOMAS MERTON — free as the sky

Thomas Merton rescued me. By now, you can see that I am a huge fan of Merton. During arguably my darkest nights of desperation, his writings gave words to my soul that I didn’t know existed. The first Merton book I picked up was New Seeds of Contemplation. I still vividly remember uncontrollably weeping when reading the book, in a café in K-town, Los Angeles. My wife looked at me, like, “what’s going on with you?” While I would not say I am a “Merton expert," I can say his writings profoundly impacted me more than anybody in the last 7 years. Merton’s writings greatly influenced contemporary contemplative authors like Richard Rohr and Parker Palmer (among countless others) both of whom I have followed fairly religiously.

Probably the way Merton has impacted me the most has to do with accepting myself (the contradiction that I am a saint and a sinner at the same time) as who I am and what God “had in mind” when I was created. Merton captured poignantly, “For me to be a saint means to be myself. Therefore the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and of discovering my true self.” Merton gave me permission to pursue and discover who I am and provided a roadmap toward sanctity and salvation as to what my remaining life’s pursuit ought to look like.

This week’s blog, though, is not about the above topic. Rather, I would like to share a couple of snippets of Merton’s “obscure” and expansive insight as well as his comical human side. The first extensive quotation comes from Merton’s The Way of Chuang Tzu (1965), toward the end of his life. He was criticized by some to have turned into a heretic, because he dove deeply into Zen traditions and other Asian mystical religions. Merton clearly respected the writings and thoughts of Chuang Tzu, but he also delineated Chuang Tzu’s teachings from Apostle Paul’s. Merton writes, “Once this is clear, one can reasonably see a certain analogy between Chuang Tzu and St. Paul. The analogy must certainly not be pushed too far. Chuang Tzu lacks the profoundly theological mysticism of St. Paul. But his teaching about the spiritual liberty of wu wei and the relation of virtue to the indwelling Tao is analogous to Paul’s teaching on faith and grace, contrasted with the “works of the Old Law.” The relation of the Chuang Tzu book to the Analects of Confucius is not unlike that of the Epistles to the Galatians and Romans to the Torah.” What I've come to appreciate in Merton in this case is his generous and broad-mindedness about what truths are. The proverbial “all truth is God’s truth” certainly is at work here. To borrow Richard Rohr’s language, “everything belongs.”

Specifically, Merton shares one wisdom story from Chuang Tzu. Merton distills the story into a nugget of gold in the last sentence.

“One of the most famous of all Chuang Tzu’s “principles” is that called “three in the morning,” from the story of the monkeys whose keeper planned to give them three measures of chestnuts in the morning and four in the evening but, when they complained, changed his plan and gave them four in the morning and three in the evening. What does this story mean? Simply that the monkeys were foolish and that the keeper cynically outsmarted them? Quite the contrary. The point is rather that the keeper had enough sense to recognize that the monkeys had irrational reasons of their own for wanting four measures of chestnuts in the morning, and did not stubbornly insist on his original arrangement. He was not totally indifferent, and yet he saw that an accidental difference did not affect the substance of his arrangement. Nor did he waste time demanding that the monkeys try to be “more reasonable” about it when monkeys are not expected to be reasonable in the first place. It is when we insist most firmly on everyone else being “reasonable” that we become ourselves, unreasonable. (P. 32, The Way of Chuang Tzu)”

In another story, Merton shares a wild and comical side of his humanity. I could not help but to chuckle because I could totally see myself in Merton’s experience. This one is from Merton’s The Sign of Jonas.

“Yesterday Father Cellarer lent me the jeep. I did not ask for it, he just lent it to me out of the goodness of his heart, so that I would be able to go out to the woods on the other side of the knobs. I had never driven a car before. Once or twice at Saint Bonaventure’s I took lessons. Father Roman tried to teach me to drive a little broken-down Chevvie he had there. Yesterday I took the jeep and started off gaily all by myself to the woods. It had been raining heavily. All the roads were deep in mud. It took me some time to discover the front-wheel drive. I skidded into ditches and got out again, I went through creeks, I got stuck in the mud, I bumped into trees and once, when I was on the main road, I stalled trying to get out of the front-wheel drive and ended up sideways in the middle of the road with a car coming down the hill straight at me. Thank heaven I am still alive. At the moment I didn’t seem to care if I lived or died. I drove the jeep madly into the forest in a rosy fog of confusion and delight. We romped over trestles and and I sang “O Mary I love you,” went splashing through puddles a foot deep, rushed madly into the underbrush and backed out again.

Finally I got the thing back to the monastery covered with mud from stem to stern. I stood in choir at Vespers, dizzy with the thought: “I have been driving a jeep.”

Father Cellarer just made me a sign that I must never, never, under any circumstances, take the jeep out again (P. 258-259, The Sign of Jonas).”

Thanks for letting me share. . .

My question to all of us today is. . . How is your unique journey of discovering your true self unfolding?