Life seemed to be unraveling everywhere that year. The date was May 6, 1968. Vietnam was in full swing, and King had been assassinated just one month earlier. Ever increasing frenzy, tension, explosiveness of this country, he wrote in his journal.
Thomas Merton was perhaps the most important Christian mystic of the twentieth century. For the past twenty-six years, he had lived as a Trappist monk at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, and for the past three he had lived in a cinder-block hermitage in the woods. I am accused of living in the woods like Thoreau instead of in the desert like St. John the Baptist, he wrote to a friend. Whatever else can be said about Merton, and much has been said, one thing is certain: he was a monk who loved trees. One might say I had decided to marry the silence of the forest, he wrote. The sweet dark warmth of the whole world will have to be my wife. Out of the heart of that dark warmth comes the secret that is heard only in silence … Perhaps I have an obligation to preserve the stillness, the silence, the poverty, the virginal point of pure nothingness which is at the center of all other loves.
He had been searching for that center his whole life.
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So many of us are looking for escape routes these days: from depressing news cycles, from yet another school shooting, from climate change. Most days, though, my escapist fantasies are avoidance strategies for those mundane responsibilities of adult life. Still, I wonder: In our imaginative flights from reality, is there some original impulse that is worthy and true? Can we redeem the desire to run from and turn it into a desire to run toward? If so, toward what? I pick up my copy of Merton’s essay “From Pilgrimage to Crusade” and read the opening paragraph:
- On the Road with Thomas Merton
Thomas Merton was perhaps the most important Christian mystic of the twentieth century. For the past twenty-six years, he had lived as a Trappist monk at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, and for the past three he had lived in a cinder-block hermitage in the woods. I am accused of living in the woods like Thoreau instead of in the desert like St. John the Baptist, he wrote to a friend. Whatever else can be said about Merton, and much has been said, one thing is certain: he was a monk who loved trees. One might say I had decided to marry the silence of the forest, he wrote. The sweet dark warmth of the whole world will have to be my wife. Out of the heart of that dark warmth comes the secret that is heard only in silence … Perhaps I have an obligation to preserve the stillness, the silence, the poverty, the virginal point of pure nothingness which is at the center of all other loves.
He had been searching for that center his whole life.
[---]
So many of us are looking for escape routes these days: from depressing news cycles, from yet another school shooting, from climate change. Most days, though, my escapist fantasies are avoidance strategies for those mundane responsibilities of adult life. Still, I wonder: In our imaginative flights from reality, is there some original impulse that is worthy and true? Can we redeem the desire to run from and turn it into a desire to run toward? If so, toward what? I pick up my copy of Merton’s essay “From Pilgrimage to Crusade” and read the opening paragraph:
Man instinctively regards himself as a wanderer and wayfarer, and it is second nature for him to go on pilgrimage in search of a privileged and holy place, a center and source of indefectible life. This hope is built into his psychology, and whether he acts it out or simply dreams it, his heart seeks to return to a mythical source, a place of “origin,” the “home” where the ancestors came from, the mountain where the ancient fathers were in direct communication with heaven, the place of the creation of the world, paradise itself, with its sacred tree of life.Merton’s essay describes two forking paths in the spiritual life, the choice between pilgrimage and its warped image, the crusade. But on another level we can see Merton working out his own restless desire for pilgrimage, why he felt unsettled at Gethsemani Abbey, why he needed to go in search of his own “center and source of indefectible life.” Did he really need to leave the monastery to find that center? Or was he, too, a victim of the geographical cure? Who were his models to help him discern the difference?
- On the Road with Thomas Merton
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