Phillip Adams writing on Kerry Packer in The Australian October last year provides us with an insight into the powerful and wealthy man he became. In his article, Adams shares some of the conflict and difficulties Kerry suffered at the hands of his father and how the need to succeed and to be successful was a burden. Adams finishes the article as follows, and I quote, “ At the beginning of our odd friendship, after the first of our conversations that would go on until two or three in the morning, Kerry would talk about black holes. “That’s what I’ve got inside me. A black hole,” he said.”
Last week some of us watched the apology of the richest and the most powerful sportsman in history who has been humbled by a similar black hole. Tiger Woods said, “"I thought I could get away with whatever I wanted to. I felt that I had worked hard my entire life and deserved to enjoy all the temptations around me. I felt I was entitled. Thanks to money and fame, I didn't have to go far to find them.”
The black hole is merciless and swallows up the rich and the famous as well as the ordinary schoolboy or girl who thinks the rules do not apply to him or her. Despite all the opportunity we have before us, no matter how successful we are, we often find selves bemoaning our place in the world and looking for ways to fill that black hole. It never goes away.
In the 15th Chapter of Genesis we discover one of the most successful, most powerful and most wealthy of men, Abram, having to deal with his own personal black hole, one that if you follow this career never goes away. He never quite got over his fears and his doubts and his life is littered with bad decisions. Here we meet him after he has had a very successful time. In chapter 13 Abram & Lot had divided the land between them, with Lot taking the best parcel, described in ways similar to the Garden of Eden; Abram get’s a somewhat lesser although a quite extensive lot, simply “the land of the Canaanites”.
In chapter 14 Abram rescues Lot, defeats Chedorlaomer, among others with the result that the warlord King of Sodom offers him the riches of his conquest. He takes nothing – he does not use this as the opportunity to secure his future, for him his future can only be secured by “the Lord Most High”.
Very grand and full of faith. Yet…. Here in the beginning of chapter 15 he is anxious, he’s not as happy and relaxed as one who makes the claims he does may be expected to be. God is aware, and says to him, ‘Do not be afraid, I am your protector, you will get your reward’.
Abram seems to be like most of us. We can rise to the big occasions, deal with that extraordinary challenge, find some where in ourselves the necessary resources of wisdom, skill and faith to deal with the big stuff but become unstuck by the little.
For Abram it’s that he and Sarah still have no natural heir. It has been some time since God had promised that, Abram and Sarah have tried a number of stunts to help God get the job done and it hasn’t happened. So Abram is anxious – unsure about whether God can do that thing – he can do big things but can he do that thing?
God shows him the stars and says don’t worry your descendents will be as plentiful as the stars. Abram shrugs his shoulders, he’s not convinced.
How often do we do so in our own lives? We don’t have trouble with God sorting out or helping us through tragedy, difficulties or the unexpected stuff – but what about the day-to-day stuff? Some how we don’t think so, for to allow God to handle the minutiae is for us losing control over the things we think we ought to control.
The rather nonchalant comment that Abram indeed does believe the Lord in verse 6 is a little to simple, a little to easy. We know his track record, he does believe, but we also know that he stills struggles in the midst of his belief.
He sits some where in between, balancing his faith with his doubt, his fears with his assurance, his confidence with his anxiety. A priest I know often asks the question: What is the opposite of faith? (PAUSE & REPEAT) The answer is not doubt it is certainty. Certainty takes faith completely out of the question for we now no longer need to believe for we know.
God seems very comfortable with this perceived duality for it is not a duality at all. Faith and doubt are twins and sit comfortably together. Without one you do not have the other and neither will defeat the other but will simply provide the nourishment to stay with the questions in our life.
Thomas Merton in "Thoughts in Solitude" comments:
“Contradictions have always existed in the soul of man. But it is only when we prefer analysis to silence that they become a constant and insoluble problem. We are not meant to resolve all contradictions but to live with them and rise above them and see them in the light of exterior and objective values which make them trivial by comparison."
In verse 6 God honors that living with the questions in that “the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness”. God understood his desire and accepted his questions as being the right way to live. He said to Abram and he says to us through the life and words of Jesus that he accepts us with all our contradictions as being the people he calls us to be.
Perhaps the challenges is best expressed in the words of Rainer Maria Rilke, in his book “Letters to a Young Poet”: ““Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.”
Abram did and so can we. AMEN
Genesis 15:1-6
Showing posts with label space-in-between. Show all posts
Showing posts with label space-in-between. Show all posts
Saturday, 27 February 2010
Sunday, 31 January 2010
Life Balance.
Living on the surface is an art form modern humanity has appeared to have mastered. Even those of us who strive for depth and integrity have, if we are honest with ourselves, to admit to not being the person we publicly seem to be. While we can appear to master this art for many years, the mask will slip and we will appear to others as we really are at some point.
The danger is we can hide behind the fallibility of others and fail to firstly recognise and then deal with the imperfections in our own lives. Modern media with its moral outrage aids us in this project and we can go through life either comfortable with our own dark secrets or, at least able to live with them, albeit in some degree of tension. Often those of us who are the most strident in our criticisms of others are living fragile lives on the edge of imploding if our real self is exposed.
In many ways this need for duplicity in living sits at the centre of mental health issues and addictions. Unable to be honest and open about who we are forces us to live balancing on the high-wire of public and private expectations and at some point the high-wire snaps.
How do we get to the point of honesty and acceptance, firstly of our own hidden struggles and then of those very same struggles we witness in others? How do we get to understand that those struggles do not disqualify us as both valued and valuable human beings. In fact they actually verify us as human so we are able to celebrate our ordinariness and cease to strive for perfection, being able to live in that space-in-between where all fall short.
If we look closely at all the great people past and present we will find personal failings, faults and, sometimes, seemingly incongruous contradictions and passions. Yet those very same people were and are able to rise above or live in tension with their inner shadow in such a way as to make their mark on the world. Sadly we do not want our heroes to be too ordinary, it would ruin the illusion firstly, but it would also ask us to make something of our ordinariness as well.
Two people have made an impact on my life: Thomas Merton and Rainer Maria Rilke. Both were recognised as poets with Rilke possibly one the greatest European poets of the 20th Century. Both inspired others to great heights of spirituality, one within the traditional Christian setting for most of his life, and the other outside the traditional realm but always within the world.
Yet the tale of both men point to great incongruity within their lives. Both experienced a challenge to their inner being through love. For Merton this was a passionate love affair as well as with his engagement with controversial issues, and for Rilke many such love affairs and strange behaviours. Yet their desire to pursue pure art and spirituality never wavered and, one could argue, was in fact enriched by their seemingly outrageous actions.
It is for these very reasons that I and many others embrace their work. For it is in this space-in-between perfection and ordinariness, desire and reality, hope and despair, questions and answers that one finds the still place of not being that saves us. When we start on this journey and begin to jettison the unnecessary cultural and societal collateral we have gathered around ourselves we begin the journey (which is no journey) into the place (which is no place) and find that we no longer are. It is not that we no longer exist but that we no longer are who we were or who we thought we had to be. As we begin to drop the veil of illusions we come face to face with our hidden self and find ourselves in a fight for our soul.
Like a snake who slithers out of the old skin into the new, and does so every year, we shed our illusions one after another, and continue to do so while we still have breath, seeking always the very place we began, innocent as a new born child who's imagination welcomes the world into theirs.
This unnerving journey of hidden beauty is the mysterious reason for our being and can never be accomplished while we inhabit the surface. Go into the deep seeking not to breathe the everywhere air but to breathe under water.
The danger is we can hide behind the fallibility of others and fail to firstly recognise and then deal with the imperfections in our own lives. Modern media with its moral outrage aids us in this project and we can go through life either comfortable with our own dark secrets or, at least able to live with them, albeit in some degree of tension. Often those of us who are the most strident in our criticisms of others are living fragile lives on the edge of imploding if our real self is exposed.
In many ways this need for duplicity in living sits at the centre of mental health issues and addictions. Unable to be honest and open about who we are forces us to live balancing on the high-wire of public and private expectations and at some point the high-wire snaps.
How do we get to the point of honesty and acceptance, firstly of our own hidden struggles and then of those very same struggles we witness in others? How do we get to understand that those struggles do not disqualify us as both valued and valuable human beings. In fact they actually verify us as human so we are able to celebrate our ordinariness and cease to strive for perfection, being able to live in that space-in-between where all fall short.
If we look closely at all the great people past and present we will find personal failings, faults and, sometimes, seemingly incongruous contradictions and passions. Yet those very same people were and are able to rise above or live in tension with their inner shadow in such a way as to make their mark on the world. Sadly we do not want our heroes to be too ordinary, it would ruin the illusion firstly, but it would also ask us to make something of our ordinariness as well.
Two people have made an impact on my life: Thomas Merton and Rainer Maria Rilke. Both were recognised as poets with Rilke possibly one the greatest European poets of the 20th Century. Both inspired others to great heights of spirituality, one within the traditional Christian setting for most of his life, and the other outside the traditional realm but always within the world.
Yet the tale of both men point to great incongruity within their lives. Both experienced a challenge to their inner being through love. For Merton this was a passionate love affair as well as with his engagement with controversial issues, and for Rilke many such love affairs and strange behaviours. Yet their desire to pursue pure art and spirituality never wavered and, one could argue, was in fact enriched by their seemingly outrageous actions.
It is for these very reasons that I and many others embrace their work. For it is in this space-in-between perfection and ordinariness, desire and reality, hope and despair, questions and answers that one finds the still place of not being that saves us. When we start on this journey and begin to jettison the unnecessary cultural and societal collateral we have gathered around ourselves we begin the journey (which is no journey) into the place (which is no place) and find that we no longer are. It is not that we no longer exist but that we no longer are who we were or who we thought we had to be. As we begin to drop the veil of illusions we come face to face with our hidden self and find ourselves in a fight for our soul.
Like a snake who slithers out of the old skin into the new, and does so every year, we shed our illusions one after another, and continue to do so while we still have breath, seeking always the very place we began, innocent as a new born child who's imagination welcomes the world into theirs.
This unnerving journey of hidden beauty is the mysterious reason for our being and can never be accomplished while we inhabit the surface. Go into the deep seeking not to breathe the everywhere air but to breathe under water.
Thursday, 19 November 2009
St Judes Randwick
Jude 1-3, 17-25 – Sunday 25th October 2009 St Jude’s Randwick – Gods Space
Today is our patronal festival – St Jude’s Day. Actually St Jude’s day is the 28th but I’m sure he isn’t quibbling abut us being a couple of days early, after many years of being the ‘Forgotten Saint’, I am sure he is just happy to be remembered.
It must have been a difficult time for Jude Thaddeus, what with having the same name as Judas Iscariot and all. People got confused about whether he was the same person or not so didn‘t venerate him for many centuries. It was only if you were really desperate did you actually pray in his name. It was like; when all else fails go to St Jude. He was the Saint of last resort – the last chance saint.
In his letter St Jude implores Christians to hang on in the face of apostasy, heretical teachings and immoral practices. While he had wanted to write about salvation, he in fact was forced, by the prevailing attitude of some believers, to write about the breakdown of belief as he saw it and its impact on believers. It was desperate times. If Christians were to maintain their faith they were going to face great opposition. It was desperate times and often looked like a lost cause. Hence St Jude being called the ‘Saint of Lost or Hopeless Causes.”
Hopeless causes, hopeless cases. How easy it is to use the label hopeless, perhaps for your self, for some situation in your life; perhaps about someone else, perhaps about some situation. What does it feel like to feel hopeless, to be perceived as hopeless, to live in that dark space of recognition where you are only seen for not being seen and forgotten?
In the late 1920’s St Jude was seen as the Saint of choice for second-generation immigrant women in America. They had come to the land of opportunity with their parents, received an education and looked out on what appeared as an endless feast of opportunities. Yet they were caught between the possibilities education and economic freedom had brought them and the strict cultural and patriarchal traditions of their aging immigrant parents. Many were trapped in the space-in-between, just like many women of that era here in Australia were. St Jude, via a shrine to him in Chicago, allowed them to come together through letter writing and newsletters to share their sense of hopelessness and to help redefine their future. The saint of lost causes was their gathering point as they sought to create a better future for women.
While hopelessness is not a description of something but a space or a place in which we live and have our being, so is hope. Either one can become the space which contains us, while at the very same time, we contain it within us. It is what it signifies.
In a sense it says something about this church of St Jude here in Randwick Sydney. This church began its worship only 60 short years after the first free settlers came to our shores. Australia was a hostile environment populated by people with great courage and hope but also with, a similar level of trepidation. Building a church, any church would have been daunting but to build this church with its symbolic and metaphorical implications could have been deemed a hopeless cause, yet one full of hope.
Over the last few weeks, as I have contemplated my time here at St Jude’s, I have spent time sitting outside and inside the church building, walking the grounds, wandering the graveyard. In doing so I have thought a lot about the importance of space and place in medieval spirituality, the actual birth place of this building and its design.
19th century Victorian Gothic church architecture had its roots in, and mimicked, medieval church design, particularly that of the 13th century onwards.
Instead of the previous dark and dim churches, we begin to see churches rising high above the ground incorporating great space and inviting light in through spacious windows, often full of stain glass which provided a kaleidoscope of colours across the floors and walls of the building. It seemed to defy the experience of events such as the Black Plague and a desire to fill the space between hell and heaven, which was, in medieval cosmology, the space between what was beneath and what was above, with light and hope.
The medieval church building signified the transcendent presence of a God who contained the world and, at the same time, the church contained or confined that very same God within its walls. The building towered across the skyline speaking of the nature and presence of God in its boldness, its strength and its audacity. It was visible and heard. Bells spoke out of the presence of God amongst them and there was no doubt where he was. He was in the Church.
Across the road from here is boxing gym to which I go 2 or 3 times a week. Inside people punch and kick bags, sometimes they punch and kick each other. The lady who is one of the owners tho, can’t wait for Tuesday nights. Why? Because amongst the mayhem of her gym she listens to the bells being played here, at St Jude’s. It signifies for her the presence of God in Randwick and reminds her of who she is and who he is.
Within the walls of that medieval church you could encounter the transcendent God for he was immanent, present therein. The space inside formed by the high roofs, exposed beams and the progression of west to east spoke of the space that was the cosmos outside, a space which could overwhelm you with its sheer dimensions and mystery. Within the walls of the Church the design spoke of that same distance and closeness of God, that he is both contained by and contains us. That space became the place and the place, the space in which God dwelt.
It seems to me that as I have met in worship here, watched people who have lived in the shade of this church come after many years of absence for a funeral or a baptism, who have walked across the precinct or through the graveyard, that St Jude’s is God’s habitation in Randwick.
I regularly watch a middle aged couple push the lady’s elderly mother past this church, sometimes, if the church is open, they come in; other times they just sit outside as she looks at the church or touches the sandstone walls. For her this is a place of healing and hope, a place where God says I will be with you always and she takes that feeling with her as she faces another week relying on the care of others.
May I suggest, for each of us, that St Jude’s is the place that gathers God and we his people, bringing us into alignment and awareness of each other, and is the place where each holds the other in their soul.
We may look around from where we stand and wish many more of those who live in the vicinity were worshipping with us each day, yet there is a sense that they do. St Jude’s is the signifier of God, the representational space for those who walk past or live near, and in that sense becomes the place of faith for them. It is not just a heritage building or precinct or graveyard; it is not just a traditional worship space or liturgical practice, it’s not just an Anglican church; it is much more than that.
It is the presence of God within our lives, all our lives, even when those lives may seem hopeless or outside our walls. May it always be so and in the words of St Jude himself:
24Now to him who is able to keep you from falling, and to make you stand without blemish in the presence of his glory with rejoicing, 25to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, power, and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen.
Today is our patronal festival – St Jude’s Day. Actually St Jude’s day is the 28th but I’m sure he isn’t quibbling abut us being a couple of days early, after many years of being the ‘Forgotten Saint’, I am sure he is just happy to be remembered.
It must have been a difficult time for Jude Thaddeus, what with having the same name as Judas Iscariot and all. People got confused about whether he was the same person or not so didn‘t venerate him for many centuries. It was only if you were really desperate did you actually pray in his name. It was like; when all else fails go to St Jude. He was the Saint of last resort – the last chance saint.
In his letter St Jude implores Christians to hang on in the face of apostasy, heretical teachings and immoral practices. While he had wanted to write about salvation, he in fact was forced, by the prevailing attitude of some believers, to write about the breakdown of belief as he saw it and its impact on believers. It was desperate times. If Christians were to maintain their faith they were going to face great opposition. It was desperate times and often looked like a lost cause. Hence St Jude being called the ‘Saint of Lost or Hopeless Causes.”
Hopeless causes, hopeless cases. How easy it is to use the label hopeless, perhaps for your self, for some situation in your life; perhaps about someone else, perhaps about some situation. What does it feel like to feel hopeless, to be perceived as hopeless, to live in that dark space of recognition where you are only seen for not being seen and forgotten?
In the late 1920’s St Jude was seen as the Saint of choice for second-generation immigrant women in America. They had come to the land of opportunity with their parents, received an education and looked out on what appeared as an endless feast of opportunities. Yet they were caught between the possibilities education and economic freedom had brought them and the strict cultural and patriarchal traditions of their aging immigrant parents. Many were trapped in the space-in-between, just like many women of that era here in Australia were. St Jude, via a shrine to him in Chicago, allowed them to come together through letter writing and newsletters to share their sense of hopelessness and to help redefine their future. The saint of lost causes was their gathering point as they sought to create a better future for women.
While hopelessness is not a description of something but a space or a place in which we live and have our being, so is hope. Either one can become the space which contains us, while at the very same time, we contain it within us. It is what it signifies.
In a sense it says something about this church of St Jude here in Randwick Sydney. This church began its worship only 60 short years after the first free settlers came to our shores. Australia was a hostile environment populated by people with great courage and hope but also with, a similar level of trepidation. Building a church, any church would have been daunting but to build this church with its symbolic and metaphorical implications could have been deemed a hopeless cause, yet one full of hope.
Over the last few weeks, as I have contemplated my time here at St Jude’s, I have spent time sitting outside and inside the church building, walking the grounds, wandering the graveyard. In doing so I have thought a lot about the importance of space and place in medieval spirituality, the actual birth place of this building and its design.
19th century Victorian Gothic church architecture had its roots in, and mimicked, medieval church design, particularly that of the 13th century onwards.
Instead of the previous dark and dim churches, we begin to see churches rising high above the ground incorporating great space and inviting light in through spacious windows, often full of stain glass which provided a kaleidoscope of colours across the floors and walls of the building. It seemed to defy the experience of events such as the Black Plague and a desire to fill the space between hell and heaven, which was, in medieval cosmology, the space between what was beneath and what was above, with light and hope.
The medieval church building signified the transcendent presence of a God who contained the world and, at the same time, the church contained or confined that very same God within its walls. The building towered across the skyline speaking of the nature and presence of God in its boldness, its strength and its audacity. It was visible and heard. Bells spoke out of the presence of God amongst them and there was no doubt where he was. He was in the Church.
Across the road from here is boxing gym to which I go 2 or 3 times a week. Inside people punch and kick bags, sometimes they punch and kick each other. The lady who is one of the owners tho, can’t wait for Tuesday nights. Why? Because amongst the mayhem of her gym she listens to the bells being played here, at St Jude’s. It signifies for her the presence of God in Randwick and reminds her of who she is and who he is.
Within the walls of that medieval church you could encounter the transcendent God for he was immanent, present therein. The space inside formed by the high roofs, exposed beams and the progression of west to east spoke of the space that was the cosmos outside, a space which could overwhelm you with its sheer dimensions and mystery. Within the walls of the Church the design spoke of that same distance and closeness of God, that he is both contained by and contains us. That space became the place and the place, the space in which God dwelt.
It seems to me that as I have met in worship here, watched people who have lived in the shade of this church come after many years of absence for a funeral or a baptism, who have walked across the precinct or through the graveyard, that St Jude’s is God’s habitation in Randwick.
I regularly watch a middle aged couple push the lady’s elderly mother past this church, sometimes, if the church is open, they come in; other times they just sit outside as she looks at the church or touches the sandstone walls. For her this is a place of healing and hope, a place where God says I will be with you always and she takes that feeling with her as she faces another week relying on the care of others.
May I suggest, for each of us, that St Jude’s is the place that gathers God and we his people, bringing us into alignment and awareness of each other, and is the place where each holds the other in their soul.
We may look around from where we stand and wish many more of those who live in the vicinity were worshipping with us each day, yet there is a sense that they do. St Jude’s is the signifier of God, the representational space for those who walk past or live near, and in that sense becomes the place of faith for them. It is not just a heritage building or precinct or graveyard; it is not just a traditional worship space or liturgical practice, it’s not just an Anglican church; it is much more than that.
It is the presence of God within our lives, all our lives, even when those lives may seem hopeless or outside our walls. May it always be so and in the words of St Jude himself:
24Now to him who is able to keep you from falling, and to make you stand without blemish in the presence of his glory with rejoicing, 25to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, power, and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen.
Wednesday, 29 July 2009
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.”
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.”
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