Thomas Merton (Part 1)
I am not happy about criticising adversely any other person who is (like myself, I hope?) in the vineyard doing the work s/he sees God to have given her to do. There are plenty of books which do this, and that is enough said about them.
I have read Thomas Merton various times in various of his writings; and I respect his dedication to his work and to God. Even sometimes, not uncommonly, I have been struck by an observation of his in which I have felt the pressure of truth and even revelation and such remarks as these I have been able to carry home.
I have no doubt that Thomas Merton was genuine and in places insightful and so helpful to readers such as myself looking to him for understanding and clarification for one’s own spiritual life. And maybe I expect, have expected, too much from a man like Thomas Merton – his reviewers have certainly lavished praise and admiration on his writings – yet Thomas Merton like you and me is/was human, and thus even so writes ‘with all our imperfections on our heads’.
I think I wan to be clear that had Thomas Merton taken a little more care and examined more critically some of the thoughts and ideas he put to press on paper, he would have been even more useful to readers like you and me; had he revised more; or else maybe had he, as Alexander Pope was said to have done, put his finished manuscripts in a drawer, looking again at them only after a period of five or so years, and so with a fresh and more experienced critical eye, then Thomas Merton might have become a classic writer in the genre of devotional and instructive meditational works.
Of course there’s a certain ‘heat’ about the style of his writings which might have cooled a little more after a survey made by him of them at a time some years after their composition; and this loss of ‘heat’ may well be considered by some of his readers to represent for them a debit from the writings’ quality and/or value. There’s a fluency in his writings, which is a fluency of their style and tempo rather more than a fluency of the thoughts he expresses; which indeed although they do flow they are thoughts which I believe are often running too fast in his head, for him to be able to by measured and so extract to the full the juices from their stores of nectar and refreshment.
I would not call this pace and style, its uptempo, a ‘haste’ on Thomas Merton’s part; but rather I think it was perhaps the way he found he was able to work; how he was able to get his trains of thought down on paper; and maybe he was such a fertile and avid mind that he had too many thoughts at once for him to have captured the full materials of their composition in his manuscript?
Possibly a dictaphone or an amanuensis might have aided him were these drawbacks to have been the case for him?
Possibly he was happy to have captured half or a third of the full impacts of his thoughts; and to have consider these, like as The Wife of Bath had considered her husbands unjustified in carping about her promiscuity, because , as she says, they all received from her ‘God’s plenty’ and to spare.
Whatever the reasons or the psychology behind Thomas Merton and his writings, and these may be utterly different to what I have put forward hereabove as speculative suggestions, his work I believe is marred too often by the practical outcomes of such a psychology and set of reasons.
Myself, perhaps from having grown old, perhaps from having been lucky enough to have retired from employment, and so my having now the time and space to slow down, to slow myself down, I find I am able to read more deeply and extensively, I find a I am able to absorb and take note of inferences, nuances, and a whole parcel of fellow-travelling baggage which are somewhat the ‘clutter’ which many books carry; and with these ‘extras’ I can see that they are bearing import and so provide better understanding to me of the tenor of the authors of the items I read.
The price, if it is a price, I have paid for this self-imposed slowdown of pace in my life, has been that I have become less able to tolerate everyday life in a Western urban environment; an everyday life which carries on headlong and going it knows not where at a rate of knots and having everyone on board. I have always suffered a plethora of ‘information’ getting through my psychic ‘filters’ and into my consciousness, all my life more or less; and it has gotten rather like a madhouse going on inside my mind sometimes; I having to seek solitude and quiet for some time in order to rally and to recover equilibrium.
Yet I am not the natural vocational monkish-type as seems to have been Thomas Merton; I enjoy having around me a certain level of activity; and I would feel deprived were I to be situated as was Thomas Merton in a secluded and single small area all my days.
I want to show you one or two examples of Thomas Merton trying just that little bit too hard to be enigmatically epigrammatic; him trying to get down on paper in a nutshell the kernel of his meditation and without him wanting to unpack what he is actually writing. His is often a case of words being the master and the pen leading the writer, a case and phenomenon which is able to grab any of us and which we should always be on the lookout for and so try to avoid it happening to us.
I am going to cite Karl Popper (again) the 20th century philosopher of science who said:
“There is nothing I can say which will not be misunderstood”
Karl Popper appreciated that language as we are able to use it, even at our best, it remains an approximate tool, one which all to easily is liable to lead our minds and our writings astray, and at times even unconsciously so,- so that when we suffer this to happen we may never know that we have done so, unless we are lucky enough to be told or have it pointed to in some way.
Like those Virgins in the parable who remember to bring with them sufficient oil for their lamps, so that they are present with lamps lit when the Bridegroom arrives at midnight, we too should try hard to remain vigilant and to make preparations for ourselves and so take all care in what we say and write down.
Let’s begin with this passage I have taken from Thomas Merton’s book titled “No Man an Island”:
“The man who fears to be alone will never be anything but lonely, no matter how much he may surround himself with people. But the man who learns, in solitude and recollection, to be at peace with his own loneliness, and to prefer its reality to the illusion of merely natural companionship, comes to know the invisible companionship of God. Such a one is alone with God in all places, and he alone truly enjoys the companionship of other men, because he loves them in God in Whom their presence is not tiresome, and because of Whom his own love for them can never know satiety.”
The assumption in the first clause is that a person who fears to be alone, fears to be alone because that person being alone will feel lonely. There is, in this statement, and at this point in the argument, no consideration from Thomas Merton that persons may not wish to be alone for other reasons than because of their feeling lonely when alone? There is a sense in which a person might feel that s/he has too much company when being alone.
For instance it is not loneliness per se a person may fear, but instead those recollections and thoughts which spring to mind when s/he is alone. Yet loneliness in itself does not have to include a person having a host of memories and thoughts which s/he would rather not have pursue her/him.
Loneliness at bottom is maybe merely a wish and desire to have company at a time when one has none.
Thus to be ‘at peace with one’s own loneliness’ might be the same thing as being content in one’s own company? Thomas Merton implies that such a person who is contented in her/his own company has successfully fought off and found resolutions to bad memories and haunted thoughts. But as I have said, this does not necessarily have to be so.
This fact of one’s own loneliness which is said to be ‘reality’ by Thomas Merton, is set opposite, and is set there for what looks like contrast, to one having the company of others which is, he says, an ‘illusion’.
This is said to be the case even though we are assured by Thomas Merton that with us having the ‘companionship of God’ we might be able to enjoy the company of others, so that this companionship which he has termed just now an ‘illusion’, we might enjoy it ‘truly’. Thus we enjoy and illusion truly; which is an odd thought?
By the same token he goes onto say that one is able to be ‘alone with God in all places’ but yet also at the same time one ‘truly enjoys the companionship of others’. If one is ‘alone with God’ then one is not in fact alone; if one is in the company of others one is not ‘alone with God’. The word ‘alone’ has been used in two separate ways by Thomas Merton here, but the claims by him as writer seem rhetorically to want to say that the word ‘alone’ has been used uniformly here. For him to have used this word ‘alone’ consistently in this passage, he should have had to accept the plain fact that when one is alone one is not in the company of other persons. Even though there is in the English language an acceptable usage for the word ‘alone’ which says that ‘I was alone with another person’; that is, without anyone else but the one person. But this is a different usage to one saying plainly and absolutely ‘I was alone’.
Further, when a person ‘loves in God’ ‘other men’ and when these other men are loved by oneself when one is ‘in God’s presence’, these ‘other men’ seem to become ‘not tiresome’ to oneself; as if Thomas Merton is implying here that when ‘other men’ (persons) are in one’s company when one is NOT in God’s presence, then these other men become tiresome to oneself. This seems to be a rhetorical implication which perhaps Thomas Merton did not want to use and maybe was a little unaware of its ramifications?
Thomas Merton goes onto say that God’s love allows us to love others in a way which ‘can never know satiety’; yet surely any experience or appetite which ‘can never know satiety’ is a frustrated incomplete experience, a frustrated appetite? I think Thomas Merton has chosen the wrong word in his choice of the word ‘satiety’ in use here?
To be continued...
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