The time of the end is the time of no room...is the time of a new creation...and room for all nass cannon

This paper reflects upon the paradox in Thomas Merton’s essay “The Time of the End is the Time of No Room” which is in reality the time of the beginning of a new creation with room for all. The inn which had no room for the birth of Christ symbolizes the end time, the time of the final events in humankind’s covenant relationship with God. For Merton, this time is also a final beginning as he observes: “For eschatology is not finis and punishment, the winding up of accounts and the closing of books: it is the final beginning, the definitive birth into a new creation.” His view stems from The Book of Revelation: “Now I am making the whole of creation new…It is already done.” With Merton as guide, this paper will consider Christ’s transforming presence in the world as the source, the guide, and destination of the new man and new creation. The time of the end is the time of no room… is the time of a new creation… and room for all because it is for Merton “…above all the time of The Great Joy” …and for us, through the merits of Christ, the time of our union with God.

 The Time of the End

“…the end’ does not necessarily mean only ‘the violent, sudden, bad end”.

 The inn symbolizes a gathering up of the kingdoms opposed to the Son of God and therefore a place situated in the time of the end. Merton distinguishes this end of Biblical eschatology from the “vague and anxious eschatology of human foreboding… of secular anxieties and hopes” which through fear may be a death wish for a violent end. The time of the end is one of both revealed fulfillment because of the Incarnation and finality because it is the time when all of the forces arrayed against God concentrate their efforts to thwart His plan of salvation by the birth of Christ. In its historical dimension, those to be numbered gather at the inn because of the mandate by Imperial Rome for a census numbering the people “to be identified with the structure of imperial power” In its eschatological dimension, the inn symbolizes all those forces described in the Book of Revelation who oppose the reign of God…“the demon spirits that work wonders go out to the kings all over the world to muster them for battle on the great Day of God Almighty ” (Revelations 16:14) This for Merton is the time of the end…” the time of … ‘wars and rumors of wars’, of huge crowds moving this way and that, of men withering away for fear, of flaming cities and sinking fleets, of smoking lands laid waste….” However this end may not be a finite point in time. Merton views eschatology as processual and realized in the moment. He says, "I am coming to see clearly the great importance of the concept of realized eschatology-- the transformation of life and of human relations by Christ now rather than eschatology focused on future cosmic and religious events.” Merton interprets realized eschatology as a time of finality and fulfillment. It is the time of finality because the coming of the Messiah marks the end of mankind’s banishment from paradise and numbers the days of the kingdoms of this world. It is the time of fulfillment because God's presence is among us and intimates the glory of the Kingdom of God. Merton notes, “…because my faith is eschatological it is also contemplative, for I am even now in the Kingdom and I can even now ‘see’ something of the glory of the Kingdom and praise Him who is King. I would be foolish, then, if I lived blindly, putting all 'seeing’ off until some imagined fulfillment (for my present seeing is the beginning of a real and unimaginable fulfillment!)” Is the Time of No Room "As the end approaches, there is no room for nature. The cities crowd it off the face of the earth. As the end approaches, there is no room for quiet. There is no room for solitude. There is no room for thought. There is no room for attention, for the awareness of our state. In the time of the ultimate end, there is no room for man.” In its eschatological context, there is no room for the birth of Christ because the inn, symbolic of an unredeemed world, is crowded with man as ruled by demons and opposing the reign of God. “The time of the end is the time of the Crowd” , a crowd spawn from the deceit of a serpent in the Garden. Those occupants of the inn from Cain to Hitler and all those who have soaked the earth with the blood of their neighbors blindly serve the power of this world building up a kingdom of slavery, oppression, and death through their armies, bombs, slaughter and ever crescendoing violence even to the edge of nuclear holocaust. The sinful seed planted in creation from the fall of Adam erupts into a massive kingdom characterized by death and destruction through mankind’s chaotic pursuit of power. Merton explains that "...original sin would be a perversion of man's active instincts, a turning of man's creativity away from God so he produces and creates not the society and the temple which God's own creation demands as its fulfillment, but a temple of man's own power. The world is then exploited for the glory of man, not for the glory of God. Man's power becomes an end in itself. Things are not merely used, they are wasted, destroyed. Men are no longer workers and ‘creators’ but tools of production, instruments for profit. The ultimate extreme of this process of degeneration is reached when all man's powers are directed to spoilage, rapine and destruction, and when his society is geared not only against God, but against the most fundamental natural interests of man himself." Christ could not be born in such an inn because although He emptied himself to become man He “… did not empty Himself to the point of becoming mass man, faceless man.” He is not part of the crowd who occupy the inn and serve the world which Merton perceives as"... the body of those who hate, because they are prisoners of their own narrow illusions and petty desires." In this industrial and technological age, the crowd serves the world of the "isms"- materialism, consumerism, capitalism, communism etc. in which abstract ideologies are transformed into absolutes treated as idols. Merton identifies this phenomena as part of humankind’s falsity in which we objectify our lies and treat them as ultimate truth. "The mother of all lies is the lie we persist in telling ourselves about ourselves. And since we are not brazen enough liars to make ourselves believe our own lie individually, we pool all lies together and believe them because they become the big lie uttered by the vox populi, and this kind of lie we accept as ultimate truth." As a consequence of the crowd’s acceptance of these ultimate truths, there is no room for individual self-understanding and the solitude to obtain wisdom. There is only room for a mass culture that pillages the earth. For Ross Labrie, "The focus of the unspeakable in Raids is the materialism that Merton, as in "The Time of the End is the Time of No room," associated with modern culture....To Merton the materialism that had overtaken modern culture removed from view the latent possibilities of human existence. In particular it overlooked the crucial solitude that was needed for the self to emerge in the face of intense, collective socialization. What compounded this attenuation of human beings was the exclusion of nature as anything but a tool to produce the goods that purported to assuage people's emotional needs...While aware that much of the world was anything but affluent, Merton was also presciently conscious that the affluence of the West was what the rest of the world struggled to acquire. With his attention on what he thought of as the mesmerizing effect of consumer culture, Merton indicated that this particular dehumanization occurred not at the hands of tyrants but rather inside the appetites and emotional urgings of the majority, a mass culture that Merton wryly described in the preface to Raids as one that made 'tsars our of mice.'" The world is a kingdom in which there is no room for man because of the “demons who occupy the heart (pretending to be gods) so that man himself finds no room for himself in himself.” Since the fall, Satan dopes the hearts of men, spewing every expression of concupiscence, violence and war. Demons rule the world through ruling men's hearts and such men create a society of those “who hate” others as well as themselves. The crowd’s hate fuels genocide, the holocaust, the use of weapons of mass destruction, world wars. The source of this hate emanates from our individual false selves seeking meaningfulness where there is none. Merton observes “By way of social myths the false self is projected into the communal lie of the world, understood in the negative sense as that place which fosters our own deepest lie about ourselves”: \ In addition to society’s encouragement of our collective lies about ourselves, Merton believes that there is no room for man because we do not make time for understanding ourselves. We are living in “The time when everyone is obsessed with lack of time, lack of space, with saving time, conquering space, projecting into time and space the anguish produced within them by the technological furies of size volume, quantity, speed, number, price, power and acceleration.” Victor Kramer observes Merton’s“…‘view of the modern world was one where many men seemed to be losing any ability to distinguish the true: appreciation of truth was apparently being lost because of increasingly greedy, cruel, and lustful pressures common to a society which encourages man to ignore the truth and to be primarily concerned with fitting in, or with his own satisfaction.” The time of the end is the time of no room for silence, no room for solitude, no room for independent thought, and no room for man to be himself because he is estranged from his true self, made in the image and likeness of God. Estranged from himself, he is estranged from God. He belongs only to the crowd who are like fans at a recent super bowl mesmerized by a gyrating Madonna, numbed by the noise, titillated by the allure of the senses, and made zombies by the grind of being a unit of production. The crowd is mass man, a worker ant, a drone guided by others and capable of destruction. For Merton, sin creates the crowd because it alienates man from himself, from others and from God. Merton views sin as a radical "refusal to be what we are, a rejection of our mysterious, contingent, spiritual reality hidden in the very mystery of God. Sin is our refusal to be what we were created to be-sons of God, images of God." To be truly ourselves, we must have a connection with our Origin; we must be in contact and nourished by the very Source of our being. To be made in the image and the likeness means to be in communion with the Word through which all came to be. “Christ is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature. For in Him were created all things in the heavens and on the earth...all things have been created through and unto Him and in Him all things hold together.” As the image of God within us, Christ must be realized in each of us for us to recover our true self. The self that God knows is our unique personhood reflecting our union with the Son of God who dwells within us. We are Christ the monk, Christ the carpenter, Christ the factory worker, Christ the nuclear engineer, Christ the spouse, or Christ the innkeeper. The time of the end is the time of opportunity for us to encounter Christ, recover our true selves, and find our room in the Kingdom of God. is the time of…a new creation With the birth of Christ, time itself experiences its fulfillment… “Not only is Christ the term and fulfillment of creation, but He is also its source and its beginning. The far ends of time meet in His hands.” A new creation emerges with the birth of the God-Child in a damp cave as the Kingdom of God enters time. The reign of God radiates from child to mother and father, to shepherds, to wise men, and later to those of the temple destined to know him. As he grew in wisdom and grace, it spreads to those he met and touched as He walked the earth in silent communion with them. When his time had come, and even before at the wedding feast, it bursts into public awareness. To John who baptized him, the apostles whose hearts followed what their minds could not grasp, and even those bound by that other kingdom who in sickness and suffering sought his cure, He gave a King and Kingdom. The dead rose, the lame walked, the blind saw, all of which provoked that other kingdom into the brutal violence of the cross. However death evaporates through the resurrection and with the outpouring of the Holy Spirit sins are forgiven, and man becomes a new creation. To become a new creation, we must recover our true selves. As a consequence of the fall disorder enters creation as Adam is not only alienated from God but also from himself. Merton notes, “The inner, basic, metaphysical defilement of fallen man is his profound and illusory conviction that he is a god and that the universe is centered upon him… a lasting deformity impressed in our nature by original sin…” Sons and daughter of Adam, we too are alienated as consequence of this original rejection of God. As a consequence, our lives are lived from this false center in which “I wind experiences around myself and cover myself with pleasures and glory like bandages in order to make myself perceptible to myself and to the world, as if I were an invisible body that could only become visible when something visible covered its surface.” Our false self is the lie of “… one who wants to exist outside the reach of God’s will and God’s love-outside of reality and outside of life. And such a self cannot help but be an illusion.” Sin causes us to worship our false selves as an idol and estranges us from our true selves. Sin also effects the very depths of our personality. It “… destroys the one reality on which our true character, identity, and happiness depend; our fundamental orientation to God” To recover our true selves, we have to acknowledge this lie of our false self fermented by pride. “For pride is a stubborn insistence on being what we are not and never were intended to be. Pride is a deep, insatiable need for unreality, an exorbitant demand that other believe the lie that we have made of ourselves. ...It has, as a secondary effect, what theologians call concupiscence: the convergence of all passion and all senses upon the self.” We are assisted in this recovery by the experience of dread. Merton observes”…The experience of ‘dread’, ‘nothingness’: and ‘night’ in the heart of man is then the awareness of infidelity to the truth of our life…it is an awareness of infidelity as unrepented and without grace as unrepentable. It is the deep, confused, metaphysical awareness of a basic antagonism between the self and God due to estrangement from him by perverse attachment to a ‘self’ which is mysterious and illusory.” Dread provides the opportunity for repentance and an opening to grace. We recover our true self by the grace of- choosing growth and integration over division and death, by choosing to love rather than to hate, by choosing to create rather than destroy. We recover our true self by following the promptings of the Holy Spirit, our source of grace, our guide and our destination. Merton believes the Holy Spirit acts in Baptism and the Eucharist to provide grace for our recovery. Through baptism we become a new creation and through the Eucharist we encounter God. He thinks Baptism answers the “…most fundamental question raised… man's true identity.” He states that, “Just as Christ is the New Adam, so Baptism is a new Creation” by giving us a spiritual nature for " the man who has become pneumatikos--spiritual--is indeed a ‘new creature’.... who “ is able to love God for His own sake” and …”lives by the Spirit of Christ.” Baptism also prepares us to be in communion with God and others as it“…opens the way to existential communion.” The Eucharist is an expression of this communion which Merton views as the “Sacrament of charity--that charity by which we dedicate our freedom to God and to one another.” He perceives it to be a source of sanctifying grace which “…not only brings with it the bland, mild diffuse light which spreads over the whole purified atmosphere of the soul's summit, but at the precise peak of the spirit, the apex of man's inmost intellect and will, there now burns the white-hot point of mystical receptivity, that insatiable little diamond of spiritual awareness which is the most precious thing in the spirit of man”.. Contemplative prayer, too, is important in our recovery as we learn to dialogue with God and grow in union with Him. For Merton, “Prayer then means yearning for the simple presence of God, for a personal understanding of his word, for knowledge of his will and for a capacity to hear and obey him.” He advises us “… to listen in silence to …God …(in contemplation) which is to bring man into a conscious communion with God in Christ.” But prayer is more than a dialogue “...it is the communion of our freedom with his ultimate freedom, his infinite spirit.” A fruition of contemplative prayer for Merton is the realization of Christ living in me. “Contemplation...is a vivid realization of the fact that life and being in us proceed from an invisible, transcendent and infinitely abundant Source. Contemplation is, above all, awareness of the reality of that Source… reaches out to the knowledge and even to the experience of the transcendent and inexpressible God... is a religious and transcendent gift... Contemplation is the awareness and realization, even in some sense experience, of what each Christian obscurely believes: "It is now no longer I that live but Christ lives in me." Hence, man's search for God through a sacramental life and prayer “...lies essentially in his becoming aware of himself as a person possessed by God the Holy Spirit, totally submissive to the grace of Christ.” Through the birth, death, and resurrection of Christ, the outpouring of the Holy Spirit connects us to our true self and restores our relationship with God. We discover that “The uncreated Image, buried and concealed by sin in the depths of our souls, rises from death when, sending forth His Spirit into our spirit, He manifests His presence within us and becomes for us the source of a new life, a new identity and a new mode of action.” But even more, we become transformed into the likeness of Christ and become divinely human. “Each one of us, in some sense, is able to be completely transformed into the likeness of Christ, to become, as he is, divinely human, and thus to share His spiritual authority and charismatic power in the world.” Transformed into the likeness of Christ, we participate in the time of a new creation. Merton saw Adam as a priest of creation who through his contemplative union with God creation itself participated in worship. It was in the mystical union of Adam's soul with God that the whole world was offered and consecrated to God in sacrifice. Merton notes that “…it was in the sounding solitude of Adam's understanding that things without reason became able to adore their creator, in the flaming silence of Adam's wisdom all that existed and breathed and grew and ran and multiplied upon the earth was united with God in worship and in communion.” Restored in the image and likeness of God we become a new Adam through the merits of Christ and we too offer and consecrate the whole world to God. As members of the mystical body of Christ, we live in the Messianic Kingdom: “Just as Adam is the one chosen by God to reside over the first creation, Christ is sent by Him to institute and govern an entirely new spiritual Creation. For with the death and resurrection of Christ we are in a new world, a new age. The fullness of time has come. The history of the world has achieved an entirely new orientation. We are living in the Messianic Kingdom.” The time of a new creation then is the fullness of time, the time of the Messianic Kingdom which is the time of man’s union with his true self, man’s union with God, and man’s union with others-the time of his union with the mystical body of Christ which has room for all. And room for all In the solitude of his hermitage Merton writes about his experience of this Kingdom, “How men fear freedom! And how I have learned to fear it myself! I know that in fact, without faith, this would be a different matter, this living alone. But with faith it becomes an eschatological gift. I have never before really seen what it means to live in the new creation and in the Kingdom. Impossible to explain it. If I tried, I would be unfaithful to the grace of it- for I would be setting limits to it. It is limitless, without determination, without definition. It is what you make of it each day, in response to the Holy Spirit!” Within the boundaries of time, realization of the Messianic Kingdom evolves as The far ends of time meet in His hands.” In Merton’s view, “The whole life of the Kingdom of God consists then in the gradual extension of the spiritual effects of the death and resurrection of Jesus to one soul after another until Christ lives perfectly in all whom He has called to Himself”. The work of building up the Kingdom belongs to us all for we are not only a new creation and new man but a New Adam. “So it is that we ourselves are the ‘Second Adam’ because we ourselves are Christ. In us, the image of God, which is complete and entire in each individual soul, is also, in all of us the image of God." Merton believes “The New Adam creates himself, not only by the work and suffering and triumph of the Head, Jesus Christ, but also by the labors and sufferings and cooperation of each one of the members. ...Each one of us has his part in this labor, for we, in fact, are all the New Adam”. Because each of us is charged in building the new creation, Merton teaches: “The presence of God in His world as its Creator depends on no one but Him. His presence in the world as Man depends, in some measure, upon men.” In our contribution to the gradual building up of his Kingdom, we hope that there will be room for all because of God’s presence in all things. Similar to Julian of Norwich exhortation that all matters of things will be well, Merton invites us to see that "We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent, and God is shining through it all the time… And this is something we are not able to see. But if we abandon ourselves to Him and forget ourselves we see it sometimes…that God manifests himself everywhere, in everything -- in people and in things and in nature and in events … So that it becomes very obvious that He is everywhere, He is in everything, and we cannot be without Him. You cannot be without God. It's impossible, it's just simply impossible. The only thing is that we don't see it. ." So in our journey let us ask God to help us see it. As we walk the earth during our brief passage, as we cast our eyes upon the gathering technological furies, as we witness to the division among men and their acts of unspeakable horror, may God help us to see it-a world transparent with His Manifestation. May He shine his light upon us and recreate us in His image and likeness that we may radiate His glory. May He restore us to our true selves that we m ay dwell in His new creation beyond the time of the end into that time everlasting where through His Merits there will be room for all.