Educating Boys II

What are some of the keys to educating teenage boys? How do we activate their sense of adventure, risk-taking and questioning in such a way that it leads to wisdom?

I use the word wisdom, not learning, for a specific reason. All education is about the gaining of wisdom and, as Thomas Merton suggests, more happens outside the classroom than in it. Wisdom is the capacity to engage, evaluate and assimilate events, experiences and knowledge so that one lives a life that values and is valued by others.

Teenage boys behave chaotically, dangerously and impulsively yet can be thoughtfully, compassionate and engaged. Yet the capacity to do so requires a different pedagogy than is generally employed in schools. What does that look like?

When I was in Gethsemane Monastery, the home for 27 years forThomas Merton, I pondered how this educational institution took men, barely out of their teens, often with little education and life experience and produced writers, academics, astronomers, civil rights activists and leaders. How did that happen? How did a self-possessed young man such as Merton, who ran away from the world, became the leading Catholic author, activist and interfaith communicator of the 20th century?

As I sat in the chapel and watched the monks say the daily offices beginning at 3.15am, I began to discover the key to their success. The rule of St Benedict sets out the parameters, the monastery practices mirror this ancient rule. What happened in the chapel had not substantially changed since 1848 when the monastery began. What happened in the silence, work, learning and rhythm of Gethsemane hadn't changed substantially over that time either.

The key to working with young teenagers I believe can be found in a daily routine giving energetic young men space and boundaries to discover self and others:

• Silence & Solitude 
• Education
• Repetition
• Work
• Community - Prayer

In subsequent posts I will look at each of these separately and suggest how they may be incorporated in the modern educational offering.

Solitude

Solitude - flying alone, seeing everything for the first time!
(Click on picture to see full size)

Silence, Solitude and Simplicity

Over the school holidays a number of students and teachers joined me for a 3 day silent retreat. The impact on both them and myself was amazing. I never fail to be surprised by the mystery of silence, solitude and simplicity.

Since then I found myself staying home from an event I had been invited to because of Gaye's (my wife) health. Over that weekend I challenged myself to refocus my life, to embrace the 3S's as a philosophy for daily living.

The first question to be answered was: what is essential, or conversely, what is not? What is the one thing I need to do to day that is essential to my life and my hopes? Doing this every day and staying with that one thing until it is completed has been powerful. Exciting things are happening and I will say more about that in another post.

Last weekend because another plan broke down I decided to take Gaye away for 4 days for her birthday. I booked a room at the Bundaleer Retreat at Broken Head, and discovered a place that was the epitome of silence, solitude and simplicity. It is set in a rainforest space and only has 4 cabins and a maximum of 12 people present. Quiet and secluded it allowed us to enjoy the time, place and each other in a way that was special for us both.

We discovered Lennox Head and the beautiful people there. We turned off the TV, actually, didn't turn it on, read a number of books, went for works, had afternoon naps and ate very well.

As members of a consumer society we fall for the art of distraction - more, bigger, popular, loud is always better. It maybe for the economy, but it rarely is for our souls. Our souls crave silence, solitude and simplicity.

A favorite Zen saying of mine is: "Be still, be very, very still; and above all else, don't wobble!"

Or as the Psalmist says in Psalm 46: "Be still and know that I am God."

Slow Food Week

On Monday I took part in a seminar on silence and solitude. As i turned onto the highway near my house I was immediately confronted by two signs put up by council road workers. The first was, "Slow down", followed closely by "Prepare to stop." I recognised the irony of these signs on two accounts, firstly as they were right at the entry of a freeway on which people showed no desire to slow down or stop! The second was that I was going to a seminar on silence an hour or so away and I had to be home to catch a connecting flight to Sydney later that day. So while I sought silence and solitude, I was caught up in the busyness of ordinary life.

One of the sessions at the seminar involved us partaking in a 'slow food" experience. A plate of fruit was passed around and we were invited to notice the colours, textures, aromas and finally the sensation of taste and eating. It was all to be done slowly and with great attention and focus. Comments ranged from how much more pleasurable the experience was, how eating slowly would mean we would eat less, to simply, I enjoyed the time I took to eat the food.

It took me back to the days of my youth when we used to sit around a dining room table as a family and partake in a meal. It wasn't rushed. People didn't have to be any where. We ate slowly and talked a lot. We listened and remembered, spoke and were heard, saw how to respond to others and how they would respond to us, and much more.

In an age of fast food, and even faster lives, there is a need to recover slow food and the intensity of attention it brings into our lives.

It also reminded me, as we begin another Holy Week leading up to Easter, that this week is a slow food week. A time when we stop and digest Jesus the Christ, his life, his death and his resurrection; his intensity of attention to being fully engaged in ordinary life and in his relationship with God.

May we not only "slow down" and not only 'prepare to stop' but actually stop and pay full attention to this pivotal festival of our Christian year.

RedShoes & Thomas Merton

At the recent 11th International Thomas Merton Society Conference in Rochester USA a pair of Red Shoes from Down Under made a lot of noise and played, as all clowns do when they get the chance. And the conference was an ideal place to do that.

When the Red Shoes returned home they are often asked where they went and, when told ‘A conference on Thomas Merton’, the usual response is a blank look and, "Who?"

Red Shoes could say he was an American Trappist Monk who was born in Prades France in 1915 to Owen (a Kiwi artist) and Ruth (an American) Merton, that he entered Gethsemani Abbey in 1941 and died in Bangkok in 1968. I could, but that would be of little use to the reader who would still ask, "so who is he?"

It’s a question I would have asked up until about 7 years ago al. I had just returned from the wilderness of alcoholism and begun working at St Clements Stafford. Somewhere somebody suggested I ought to read Henri Nouwen and Thomas Merton. Coming from an evangelical background I had no idea who either were. I discovered Nouwen first.

I had some difficulty finding something of Mertons, and when I did, the array of titles was so enormous with over 100 publications and some 4,500 letters, probably qualifying him as the noisiest monk in history, I was unsure of where to start. I picked up the first of his journals (7 volumes) 'Run to the Mountain" covering the years 1939-41. And I was hooked. I devoured all seven volumes and the man I encountered was one whose faith and human experience I identified with.

Here was the clown, the Holy Fool I was looking for, someone who embodied in my lifetime the radical revolution who was Christ. This was no safe Gospel, no easy ride, no simple steps to salvation. This was life in the raw, lived and experienced by a man who endured the century into which I was born and lived in for some 13 years of my life. Not only was Merton real to me, he was real to the world in which I lived.

Because Merton lived in my lifetime and people who knew him are still alive, he has been spared the ignominy of being portrayed as asaint. He wasn’t. He was cheeky, cantankerous, compassionate, playful, petulant and so much more. He was human. He could be deeply insightful and sometimes superficial, full of charity towards the human spirit and frustrated by it, obedient to the Trappist and Catholic leadership and angry at it, he could be both optimistic and pessimistic, he could be dogmatic and, almost at the same time, change his mind. Yet he was obviously deeply in touch with Christ and the task of metanoia in both his own life and the life of the word.

His humanity attracted me. His spiritual journey began with him diving enthusiastically (a Merton trait) into the Trappist life, followed by a period in which his own personal awareness deepened through contemplation and solitude. In the 1950's, and continuing until his death, he engaged with the world outside the monastery walls on issues such as social justice, anti-war, ecumenism and interfaith dialogue.

His forays into writing, becoming a cloistered best selling author with his autobiography Seven Storey Mountain, his passion for solitude and contemplation that saw him spend the last 3 years of his life as a hermit, and his dialogue with Eastern and other religions at a time when ecumenism and interfaith dialogue was rare could be seen, and was, as foolishness.

So ‘who was Thomas Merton”? He was and is a Twentieth Century clown, a Holy Fool, someone who steps into the space-in-between and connects the extremes we all experience in life. Like Charlie Chaplin he exposes the absurdity in our sane and reasonable world, making nonsense out of our sense, showing us clearly that what divides us is not real, it is simply an illusion.

Merton challenges us to find the space-in-between where we can inhabit our own absurdity.
‘If there is hope anywhere, it lies somewhere in the middle between the two extremes (which in reality meet). The extremes are closer together than the “middle” which seems to be between them.”

Time Out to Tune Up!

When Jesus Realised that they were about to come and take him by force and make him king, he with drew again to the mountain by himself – John 6:15

Sometime ago somebody said to me, ‘The good things you do can stop you from doing the best thing you should be doing.” At the time I smiled and thought little about it. Over the years though, the truth of that statement has begun to become clearer for me.

The danger in our lives is that we can get so involved in the stuff of life, the stuff we enjoy doing and the stuff we think we have to do that we lose sight of the thing we ought to be doing. We are busy, fully engaged with others, providing solutions, achieving stuff, finishing our studies, getting married, raising kids and so forth, that we forget what we set out to do in life. Like the old adage ‘ we are so busy fighting off the crocodiles we forgot all we went out to do was drain the pool!

The even bigger danger is that we become so engrossed in what’s coming at us from all sides, we have little or no space to reflect on any of this and after a while don’t even bother to bother about making the space to look at our lives from a different angle. We give up and spend the rest of our life distracted from our original purpose and only realise it when it is almost too late.

Jesus faced this dilemma every day. Every where he went people were coming at him, people who needed help, people for healing, people who wanted answers; religious leaders and politicians who were asking the hard questions and those slow learning disciples who had to be taught the basics about the spiritual life. If he went to get a drink at the village well people asked hard questions, if he went to a wedding he was put in charge of the wine, if he went to dinner the more eccentric guests did things like anoint his feet with oil and more. Just going across the lake gathered a large and needy crowd.

And it wasn’t that people came to him, he Jesus the incarnated Christ felt for them. He had compassion – a deep desire to do something for them – and he often acted on that compassion. He healed people, drove out demons, challenged social injustices and simply was available 24/7 to others out of this sense of identification, of being human just like those who came to him. Something had to be done, and often, he did something.

Yet he knew that his humanness, his humanity, was not all there was to his identity. He was the Christ, the Messiah, and there was more to his life than solving people’s material need for healing, belonging and security. He knew that innately to some degree, to what degree we do not know exactly, but we do know he spent much time exploring and defining his place in the world and his Fathers kingdom.

The first part of John 6:15 “When Jesus realised that they were about to come and take him by force and make him king’, speaks of that human pressure to do what is expected of you by others. To be responsible and step up to the mark that those around you deem important. Jesus faces here again the type of temptation he did in the desert after his baptism. The temptation to be seen as the king of the world, the one who is being lauded as the saviour of others, if he goes with them now he will grab his 15 minutes of fame and become a popular icon. But is that the best thing?

Each of us struggles daily with this temptation at some level. We are manipulated by how it feels when we find a sense of belonging in a group or in a family, by the kind words others say about us, the way others come to us to unburden their problems and seek our counsel, or simply by success at work, school or play. We can suddenly find ourselves caught up and off on the wrong track doing the good stuff but not the best.

At the same time we can be rocked off our feet by the negative that comes and takes us away from the best. In the last week we have seen the death of a 14 year old girl, the 4th in one Victorian high school, who has committed suicide because of bullying, the negative input from those around her. This extreme example of how easy and devastating it is to soak in how the world sees us and to allow that to define our identity highlights the importance of maintaining space to reaffirm our place in this world.

Jesus sees the crowd coming or perhaps, not so much sees them coming but discerns the mood, the intention, the desire of the crowd and withdraws. The last 8 words of John 6:15, ‘He withdrew again to the mountains by himself’ provide us with some clues.

He withdrew so he could draw breath, to breathe in the truth about his identity and breathe out the overwhelming temptation to be a superstar, leading the people to victory as their king. Jesus, the man, found space to reflect on Christ the messiah, the Son of God, and redefine for himself his whole reason for being.

And this was not a knee jerk reaction to this situation, it was his discipline, for there are over 16 references in the four Gospels to Jesus taking time out.

It was his delight – he delighted in this time alone for quiet reflection and fought to have it even if, on many occasions as this passage attests to, it was fleeting and interrupted by others.

It was dialogue with himself and with his father and it allowed him to define and redefine who he really was. It was prayer and contemplation which reinforced his fidelity to the mission of God. This includes those moments when we find him wrestling and arguing with God in the last two times his prayer is recorded, in the Garden before his betrayal and on the Cross before his death.

It was this discipline of dialogue with himself, working through what he thought and believed, what he desired and needed and how he saw himself at his centre which allows him to stay the course, even when the option to avoid the messy outcome is available to him, it is his decision, he remains faithful to his and his fathers mission.

It was his discipline of dialoguing with his father, working through the relational dimension with the kingdom in the midst of the world, which allowed him to say no to what may very well have been good things so that he could focus on God’s plan, the best thing.

Jesus discipline gave him the freedom to cut through the good stuff he did, and could have spent the rest of his life in to old age doing, to do the best thing even though that best thing cost him his life.

The challenge for us as his brothers and sisters, God’s Children and co-heirs of the kingdom, is to find that discipline for ourselves and in dialogue with God and ourselves to discern the best from the good and stay with it, regardless of the cost.

Thomas Merton - Who Was He?

As some of you know I just returned from the 11th International Thomas Merton Society Conference in Rochester USA and the usual response when I say this is a blank look translated as "Who?"

I could say that he was an American Trappist Monk who was born in Prades France in 1915 to Owen (a Kiwi artist) and Ruth (an American) Merton, that he entered Gethsemani Abbey in 1941 and died in Bangkok in 1968. I could, but that would be of little use to the reader who would still ask "so, who is he?"

It’s a question I would have asked up until about 7 years ago, before I was introduced to him. I had just returned from the wilderness of alcoholism and began working at St Clements Anglican Church Stafford in Brisbane Australia. Somewhere in a conversation somebody suggested I might be interested in reading Henri Nouwen and Thomas Merton. Coming from an evangelical background I had no idea who either were. I found Nouwen first and found him easy to read and very accessible.

I had some difficulty finding something on Thomas Merton, and when I did, the array of titles was so enormous as there are over 100 publications and some 4,500 letters, which probably qualifies him as the noisiest monk in history, I was unsure of where to start.

I picked up the first of his journals (there are 7 volumes) 'Run to the Mountain" covering the years 1939-41. And I was hooked. I devoured all seven volumes and the man I found in there was one whose faith and human experience I identified with.

Here was the clown, the Holy Fool I was looking for, someone who embodied in my lifetime the radical revolution who was Christ. This was no safe Gospel, no easy ride, no simple steps to salvation. This was real life in the raw, lived and experienced by a man who endured the century in which I was born and lived in for some 45 years of my life. Not only was Merton real to me, he was real to the world in which I lived.

Because Merton lived in my lifetime and people who knew him are still alive (met several at the conference who were previously just names in Merton’s books), he has been spared the ignominy of being written as a perfect saint. He wasn’t. He was cheeky, cantankerous, compassionate, playful, petulant and so much more. He was human. He could be deeply insightful and sometimes superficial, full of charity towards the human spirit and frustrated by it, obedient to the Trappist and Catholic leadership and angry with it, he could be both optimistic and pessimistic, he could be dogmatic and, almost at the same time, change his mind. He was very human yet obviously deeply in touch with Christ and the task of metanoia in both his own life and the life of the word.

It is his humanity and his spiritual journey that appealed to me. His spiritual journey began with him diving enthusiastically (a Merton trait it seems) into the Trappist life, which was followed by a period of a deepening of his own personal awareness through contemplation and solitude and then, beginning in the 1950's and continuing until his death, a period of engagement with the world outside the monastery walls including social justice, anti-war, ecumenism, interfaith dialogue and his enthusiasm for Zen (much of his letter writing occurred in this period and included his dialogue with leaders and influential writers across a range of causes, religions and spiritualities).

William H Shannon, in his excellent publication An Introduction – Thomas Merton, recognises the qualities I discovered (and it seems many others do everyday as his popularity in both secular and religious bookshops, reading lists and universities has not decreased) and denotes them as ‘Merton’s themes’. While they are overt themes Merton dealt with in his writing they also identify the underlying quality of Thomas the person reflected in his writing, focus and appeal. Those themes are: his humanness, his ability to articulate the human condition, reverence for people, bursting the bonds of cultural limitation and spiritual director for the masses

For me these themes are the marks of the clown, the essence of the Holy Fool in Christian tradition and Merton, in all that he did and said, is situated within that tradition. The simple act of leaving a promising writing and academic career and the ‘good life’ (Conjectures of the Guilty Bystander 279) to disappear into the desert of the Monastic life follows in the steps of the Desert Fathers, the Russian yurodive and other Christian mystics who’s foolishness challenged the society they left behind.

His forays into writing and becoming a cloistered best selling author with his autobiography Seven Storey Mountain, his passion for solitude and contemplation that see him spend the last 3 years of his life as a hermit, and his dialogue with other religions at a time when ecumenism was not even a word of currency could be seen, and was by some at the time, as foolishness. His dialogue with Eastern and other religions and spiritualities was completely unconventional, particularly for a Trappist monk and hermit, and his involvement in the civil rights, peace and anti-war movements and his passion for non-violence set him apart. He reports that "I am told by a higher superior: 'It is not your place to write about nuclear war:that is for the bishops'". (Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander 296)

So how do we answer the question, ‘Who is Thomas Merton”? He is a Twentieth Century clown, a Holy Fool, someone who steps into the space-in-between and connects the extremes we all experience in life. Like Charlie Chaplin he exposes the absurdity in our sane and reasonable world, making nonsense out of our sense and showing us clearly that what divides us is not real, it is simply an illusion we have inhabited to fit in.

Merton never fitted in and challenges us to find the space-in-between where we can inhabit our own absurdity.

‘If there is hope anywhere, it lies somewhere in the middle between the two extremes (which in reality meet). The extremes are closer together than the “middle” which seems to be between them.” Thomas Merton (Echoing Silence 183)

Day 2 Rochester

Today started quietly enough.  A quiet breakfast in Chatwell’s Café and then back to register for the conference and pay my fees etc.  Got the conference kit and sorted some stuff before lunch.  Shared lunch with some staff at the College before going back for an afternoon nap for an hour.

Then was joined by new roomie from Canada, Father Al who has been to all but one of these conferences, that is, he has being doing this for over 20 years.  Amazing guy – knows everyone and has taken me under his wing and introduced me to key players and helped me work out my program.

Have met key Merton scholars such as Jonathan Montaldo, Paul Pearson, Christine Bochen, Don Greystone, Kathleen Deigan (had dinner with her – amazing lady) and more.

In discussion with Paul Pearson from the Merton Centre will look at ways to reinvigorate interest in Merton and the ITMS in Sydney etc.  Very exciting.

For me this is simply mind boggling, just being here is something I never dreamed possible, but to be in the same room as all these amazing people and have them treat you as an equal and to value your ideas and thoughts, is so unusual for me.  It confirms that I am not, as I feel at home in Australia, a second rate person who will never be treated as an equal by the church (no final ordination) or by the academic community who institute a class structure based on degrees.  Here I am deemed to have something to say and my knowledge is valuable. 

Lots of interest in my clown spirituality and work with young men, several have asked if I am doing a paper on this here.  Perhaps that’s for Chicago in 2011.  Regardless already this time has reinvigorated my desire to offer Merton retreats and seminars as well as on clown spirituality and to do something constructive for ITMS in Australia.

I can’t wait for Thursday.

 

Off to the USA

Just a short note to let those who do not know yet that I am going Stateside June the 8th for a Conference in Rochester, New York.

The conference is the '11th International Thomas Merton Society' conference and will involve, pigs permitting, people from all around the world who share a passion for Thomas Merton, like I do.  Often we spend much time with figures of a bygone era in the form of saints from another age, but Thomas Merton was a man of the 2oth century who influenced his contemporaries via his teachings on solitude and meditation, peace, non-violence, human rights and dialogue with thinkers of all the major religions. 

His understanding of man and his world and the relationship with God and Jesus Christ is as relevant today as it was when he was alive (born 1915, died 1968).

While away I will update this blog and provide information on the conference for those interested.

For more information visit this website:  www.merton.org