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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 3

A True Monk and a True Christian

A True Monk and a True Christian

In a somewhat peculiar way I connect the books of Thomas Merton with the Mystery of the Visitation.

This Trappist contemplative did not just remain in solitude waiting for Christ to be born inside his soul – no, he went out, or at least his books went out, into the world, knocking at every door, saying: ‘Mourn and rejoice! Your respectability is no use to you any longer. It can’t hide you from God. It never did; you only thought it did. Come out and meet your Lover.’

So, too, with Our Lady, the Mother of the Church and the archetype of Christian love. You would think it would have been enough for her to rest and wait for Our Lord to be born. But instead the Holy Spirit provoked her to an intense calm activity. She travelled along the hill roads of Palestine to meet her cousin Elizabeth; and from that charitable meeting sprang the Magnificat, not a solitary statement, but the communal song of the Church.

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I owe a debt to this scandalous monk, who wrote some twenty books, breaking the Cistercian silence with words of brotherly communication. The first book of his that I read was Seeds of Contemplation – this was before I had been received into the Church, and there was still a fear in my heart that I might be entering some spiritual dungeon where the heart would become narrow and the intellect would have to wear a hundred chains. Thomas Merton took away this delusion.

By his intellectual example, he showed me that the intellect is paradoxically made stronger and freer and more mature by obedience, and that the truth of the Incarnation is a concrete reality that gives our best feelings the soil they need to grow in. I was no longer afraid. Merton tempted me to obedience; and I rejoice to say that I succumbed.

Later on I read other books of his – The Seven-Storey Mountain, The Sign of Jonas, Bread in the Wilderness, The Waters of Silence, Redeeming the Time – and also a book of verse called The Strange Islands.

Merton was a capable poet, but not in any sense a world-beater. Some of his poems I have loved, but more for what they say than the way they say it. There are some lines of his that have always stuck in my mind:

For the seed sleeps
By the sleeping stone;
But the seed has life
While the stone has none. . . .

They express perfectly the distinction between spiritual nullity and the contemplative bareness by means of which the soul becomes a womb ready to conceive God. And they have in them the personal human joy and sadness which Merton mercifully never left behind him.

Perhaps Merton wrote too much; never too much of his own work, but too many guide books to the religious life, written in obedience to his superiors. The race-horse should not be put between the shafts of a cart. He can pull it; but not as well as the draught-horse bred to do that labour.

As with all men approached by the Holy Spirit, there were three roads for Merton to take. He could have obeyed his own will. In that case, I think he would have become a dryish member of the Beat family, turning out small esoteric poems and gaining a hearing among the critics who write for American collegereviews.

Or he could have followed the will of his superiors in the religious life, as he frequently did, no doubt meritoriously; but the intellectual product lacks depth and spontaneity. It reads like the notes of an intelligent Master of Novices.

Or he could – as he most often did – be led by the Holy Spirit to produce what James Joyce once called epiphanies – a crystallisation of intuitive page 40 knowledge, a simultaneous showing forth of the life of God and the life of the human heart.

This third road always feels dangerous to the traveller. He never knows with absolute certainty whether or not he has confused it with the first road where he followed only his blinded self. But his readers know the difference, and cannot lay the book down.

Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander is entirely work of this third category – intuitive, spontaneous, very personal and natural, carrying depths within depths. It is a book of great wisdom. It is deeply Catholic, for it reflects the joyful poverty of the Cistercians and the strength of an intellect moulded by the liturgy. It is also deeply ecumenical, since Merton had reached the point of intellectual development where he no longer needed to fence himself off from his spiritual brothers among Protestants or among followers of the non-Christian religions.

Delicately he interweaves quotations and paraphrases from Buddhist sources (and once at least from a Muslim source) among the leaves of a Christian commentary. He is at home with the so-called ‘natural’ contemplatives; for he knows that the human soul is only ‘natural’ in the textbooks of legalistic theology.

God, who created man and who sustains him in being, has never allowed Himself to be excluded from participation in the spiritual development of His creatures. Merton knew this. And the knowledge was the source of his ecumenism and a large part of his religious prose poetry.

One has the impression that one is dealing with a man in the grip of a charism. More and more, in his successive books, Merton assumed the role of a compassionate Jeremiah crying out against the nullity and blindness and complacency of contemporary civilisation.

His God is the wild God of the prophets, the One who breaks mountains under His feet, not the tame God who can be caught in a net of legalistic hairs. I must say that I sympathise with him.

The danger for the charismatic is that he may become merely irritable and eccentric, and end by rejecting lawful authority both religious and secular for the sake of ‘what I feel’ – but Merton showed no signs of falling into this trap.

It is impossible to quote from his new book, for living metaphors and social insights leap off every page and find their destination, like barbed arrows, in the mind of the reader.

But two matters can perhaps be brought to the attention of potential readers of Merton (‘Read Merton!’ I feel like saying; ‘he has a grasp on truth; and we need the truth to set us free’) – one being his view of racism and the other his view of a theology founded on the acquisition of personal merit.

Merton thought the Negroes were in the right. He thought that God had given them a grace of election, which they could individually lose by emulating the violence of white America, but which was nevertheless theirs page 41 and theirs alone. He would hold that the early identification of Negro slaves with the Israelites and of slave-owners with the Pharaoh was no mere metaphor but a true religious insight. I cannot do justice to his argument; but it deserves consideration.

Merton also thinks that many Catholics travel along a self-constructed road, imagining that God is fully satisfied with them if they avoid obvious evil and keep the Ten Commandments in a superficial way. Against this he sets a theology of re-birth in Christ, drawing as frequently from Protestant as from Catholic sources. Again, his argument deserves our earnest consideration.

After all, this writer is no slouch. He is the nearest thing to a ‘prophet’ that the Church has been able to breed in an age of liberal bureaucrats. He was a true monk and a true Christian. If we want to be Christian revolutionaries, this revolutionary writer may be of help to us.

Merton worried quite often about being simultaneously a monk and a writer. One can see the problem. If a monk is to write and not lose his vocation, the fruits of the vocation must be distinguishable in the writing. Where are the fruits of Cistercian spirituality in Merton’s books?

A Cistercian is called to imitate the poverty of Christ. It is a Cistercian poverty that gives Merton’s thoughts their admirable simplicity and bareness. It is almost like a clean fresh smell that rises from the page.

A Cistercian must imitate the chastity of Christ. It is Cistercian chastity that gives Merton his pure and tranquil poetry, the song of birds chirping before dawn, who ask the Father permission to ‘be’ – and as the sun who is also Christ rises, the Father answers ‘Yes’.

A Cistercian must imitate the obedience of Christ. This is perhaps Merton’s greatest strength – the Cistercian obedience that gives bone and muscle to all his writing. Certainly it is what first drew me to his work. We Catholics know that where obedience is greatest, there also is the greatest freedom and originality.

A Cistercian must also take a vow of stability. Unless his superiors command otherwise, he remains in the same monastery till he dies. Perhaps this special Cistercian promise to God accounts for the special personal candour and richness of Merton’s work. Living and working in the same abbey for twenty years, he saw the pattern of human life and the pattern of the seasons interwoven,

He sensed the hidden communications of God to nature and nature to God, he was that rare thing in the modern world, a man living in his own place.

Who can avoid both loving and envying the Cistercians? God has been kind to them. He has allowed them to rest – a strange rest of shrinking stomachs, cold feet and sore muscles – right at His feet, right alongside Him. If He seems to forget them, this is because they are so near He has only to reach out and touch them. Where would we be without these children of page 42 Bernard who support our souls by their penance and poverty? We might already be dead or mad.

I hope I love all men; but I love the Cistercians as I love my fellow-alcoholics who sit on the edge of the gutter and wait for God to deliver them. As He does; as He does. It was Merton most of all who taught me to love them. He showed me the poverty of Christ; and then my feet were caught in the endless snare of love.

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