Jonathan Montaldo’s Formal Remarks:

Merton Colloquium in Rome (Friday, May 6, 2005)

As a mere boy I took up reading Thomas Merton and I still have breath to name the good his word has worked in me. Merton’s writing is always medicinal for my soul’s pathologies. It opens my heart's inner ear. It unlocks my mind. It underscores my unfinishedness. He discomforts and goads me onward. He always counsels me to light whatever oil I can and to catch up with the company of those who are staying awake.

Merton’s literary voice has a different pitch for each reader who brings unique life experiences to the act of appropriating his text. My reading of Merton cannot precisely match yours. So my reflections on Merton this morning bear only the existential authority of someone who, perhaps like you, has wrestled with a messenger who has maimed him. I am in that large genre of his readers for whom explicating Merton’s text is never merely an academic exercise.

I confess to having burnt bundles of incense in my time to the romantic concept of monastic life Merton formed in me, but I never lit a candle to the person behind Merton’s “literary mask.” I never envied friends who made their ways to Gethsemani and had fifteen minutes in his presence. I never thought it might be great to shake his hand or look into his eyes, even in the beginning of my adolescent encounter with his books, and for certain, now in my fifties, I wouldn’t travel far to touch his souvenirs. I have only loved Merton’s text as it held a mirror to my own life’s text, as his personal struggles helped me identify the good and bad angels that contend for my own heart. Merton’s text is my life’s “elder”. I am always consulting it with the questions “Give me a word for my salvation” and “What is it I should do?”

In my reading of his text, particularly in his personal journals, Merton makes no appearance as a “spiritual master.” For me, his literature of “confession and witness” to his weaknesses belies a sense of “mastery.” Like many a writer before him and since, he did produce epiphanies of beauty and he certainly, in W.H. Auden’s words, “lit an affirming flame” for his contemporaries. But his private journals confess him always being in the dark, always on the road, and co-dependant on God’s mercy to him in all things. I find in Merton’s journals everywhere the traces of his “compassionate transparency.” He wrote journals after The Seven Storey Mountain to undermine his guru status and expose for his readers the self-deceits that inhabited his heart’s darker cellar rooms.

The Merton Room at Bellarmine College opened for business in 1963. Merton himself helped establish this official archive where researchers can examine every jot and title of his last remains. If Merton left behind enough confessions in his journals for 1966 alone, so that no one reading them could clothe him unambiguously in the saffron robes of a “spiritual master,” I remind us that Merton himself supervised the demolition of his public image. Here is the Merton who matters most to me now, the monk who made transparent for himself and any future reader his anguished struggles with competing, conflicted desires. Merton’s personal integrity and transparency in his later journals is evangelical and missionary. “I am thrown into contradiction,” he wrote in his journal for 1966. “I am thrown into contradiction: to realize it is mercy, to accept it is love, to help others do the same is compassion.”[i] Merton might have us appreciate him in the same way that Merton’s friend, the medieval scholar Eleanor Shipley Duckett appreciated the Irish wandering monks—all males—in the Middle Ages. Duckett offers us a solid approach to Merton when she writes of her approach to studying monks who went into exile to find their place to await the Lord’s resurrection:

“[W]e are not concerned at the moment with miracles done by

holy men through beast or bird or elements of Nature. Rather,

with the aid of modern scholarship, we shall look here at our

saints in their lives as human beings, in their failures and their

success, in their struggles, their disappointments, their problems;

at saints not yet canonized, saints in the making seen, as far as

possible, in the light of their own words and against the history of

their times; men angry, worried, homesick, men happy and full of

hope, always moving forward.”[ii]

Merton’s tears saved him. The ruin of his holiness project[iii] was his fortune. On the vigil of his fiftieth birthday he wrote that what he had found most in his whole life was illusion: he had wanted to be something—a monk, and then a hermit—of which he had formed a concept. Read one way, his life is a gradual exorcism from these idealized self-concepts and hallucinatory abstractions as to who he truly was. By learning through hard experience to accept his “unaccepted self,”[iv] Merton was always chiseling through to the person who he more deeply was: his “true self,” that poor and fragile human being hidden under a beautiful white cowl. Walking the rocky, curved road of his monastic life, he struggled toward a more authentic place where he could finally kneel and wait for a mercy that he knew he could never bequeath to himself.

Merton’s heart was pilgrim. He loved an unexplored road. He relished turning his book of journals to its next blank page so as to record another new line of his next moment’s yearning to be born again. New paragraph after new paragraph, page after page, he exalted to make another raid on his unspeakable joy to hope that his ascended Lord Jesus would descend and be born again for him and within him through the lines of his life’s next chapter.

Merton in his journals revealed himself as someone who always prepared himself to depart. By personal temperament and by grace, Merton was unwilling to arrive and take up house with only partial answers to his heart’s largest questions. He resisted the hardening of arteries that results from a too facile acceptance of corporate “wisdom”. Against all dogmatism, Merton deployed a protest of active, questioning engagement. He had an existential necessity to admire holy fools and vagabonds like Saint Benedict Joseph Labre.[v] His artist father Owen gave him the genes to be peripatetic. His life’s true hero was the pilgrim poet in exile on the island of Patmos, his best friend Robert Lax. Merton admired and loved these examples of the untidily disestablished. They modeled for him what it meant to live on the margins of corporate cultures that are endemically narrow and non-inclusive. Merton always sought out less secure interior landscapes so as to become, like his heroes, a more thoroughly catholic human being. “The country which is nowhere,” he confided to journals on May 30, 1968, “is the real home.”[vi]

Merton’s journal writing appropriated his monk’s task of keeping vigil and “staying awake.” Writing journals helped him remove, over and over again, anything that focused his attention from keeping his mind’s eye on the horizon of the next moment. The very next moment might reveal in light or in shadow the presence of the Beloved. He wrote journals to open his ears for the unexpected epiphany of God’s voice. To write journals for Merton was to “bless the continuing stutter of the Word being made into flesh” (a phrase I’m borrowing from Canadian poet Leonard Cohen).[vii] What “word stuttering to be made flesh” might not sound in him and find its way to his next page? What new word might not arrive to his heart and bid him, “Come out to the new land that I will show you?”

Merton’s needed to journey forward to an unknown landscape that could become a new home has echoes of T.S. Eliot, who in “Little Gidding” surmised that “And the end of all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started/ And know the place for the first time.”[viii] But Merton’s notion of “going home” was not a going back to the past or to an enlightened rediscovery of origins. Going home for Merton meant going forward from and out of his past experiences. Going home meant emptying his heart of any hardened concepts of who he thought he was. While going home for Merton did indeed mean accepting gratefully all that he had been and all the persons life had given him, his road to Grace’s House would always mean transcending everything that was past by offering everything in eucharist to the “One Who Is Coming and Who makes all things new.”

Merton’s progress toward home was always about taking the next uncertain step. He never knew where he was going but he could not rest from following the scent of the Truth that ran ahead of him. He expressed this deepest destiny to be pilgrim and journey forward toward God in his journals for March 1961:

One thing very clear after Mass: the “return to the Father.”

The nonentity and insufficiency of all other concerns.

A going clear out of the midst of all that is transitory and inconclusive. The return to the Immense, the Primordial, the Unknown, to Him Who Loves, to the Silent, to the Holy, to the Merciful, to Him Who is All.

The misdirectedness, the folly, the inanity of all that seeks anything but this great return, the whole meaning and heart of all existence.

The absurdity of movements, of the goals that are not ultimate, the purposes that are ‘ends of the line’ and therefore do not even begin.

To return is not to “go back” in time, but is a going forward, a going beyond: to retrace one’s steps is nothing on top of nothing, vanity of vanities, a renewal of the same absurdity twice over, in reverse.

To go beyond everything, to leave everything and press forward to the End and to the Beginning, to the ever new Beginning that is without End.[ix]

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[i] Thomas Merton. Learning to Love. Journals Volume 6. Edited by Christine M. Bochen (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998): 355.

[ii] Eleanor Duckett. The Wandering Saints of the Early Middle Ages (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1964 edition of original 1959 edition): 17.

[iii] My proximate source for the phrase “holiness project” is from Douglas Burton-Christie. The Word in the Desert: Scripture and the Quest for Holiness in Early Christian Monasticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

[iv] Thomas Merton. A Search for Solitude. Journals Volume 3. Edited by Lawrence S. Cunningham (San Francisco, HarperSanFrancisco, 1966): 220-221. Merton writes: “[I]t is the unaccepted self that stands in my way—and will continue to do so as long as it is not accepted.”

[v]Thomas Merton. Entering the Silence. Journals Volume 2. Edited by Jonathan Montaldo. (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco): 275. Merton writes: “There is something in my nature that makes me dream of being a tramp…”

[vi] Thomas Merton. The Other Side of the Mountain. Journals Volume 7. Edited by Brother Patrick Hart (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998): 110.

[vii] Leonard Cohen. “The Window.” Recent Songs (CBS Records, Inc. CK 36264, 1979): Track 3.

[viii] T.S. Eliot. “The Four Quartets.” The Collected Poems and Plays: 1909-1950 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1952): 145.

[ix] Thomas Merton. Turning Toward The World. Journals Volume 4. Edited by Victor A. Kramer (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1966): 101.