Rockville, MD: Now
You Know Media, 2012
13 Lectures on 5 CD
Set/$35.95
Reviewed by Nass
Cannon
A spiritual gadfly, Thomas Merton buzzes and sometimes
stings as he hovers over themes concerning his views on the religious vocation
for the Sisters of Loretto in the 5 CD set on Prayer and Growth in Christian Life. The talks center on 13 topics.
Although Merton certainly touches these topics don’t expect a well-organized
lecture dedicated to each. Instead, expect the creative mind of Merton
meandering through these themes as though in a meadow of wild flowers
pollinating some while occasionally stinging the religious gardeners of
institutional life. The editorial labeling comes later.
In these 1967 recordings, Merton raises difficult questions
and speaks with a prophetic voice. He challenges us to move beyond our
complacent and tired view of the world and to obtain our religious and human
freedom as true sons and daughters of God. Similarly, he challenges the Church,
which he thinks is at risk of being an ally of the political order and an
instrument of the state. Because he
believes that the religious establishment is embedded within a society of
power, might and wealth, which is under the judgment of God, he thinks religious
and particularly cloistered religious must become free and prophetic witnesses opposed
to it. In so doing, they would identify with Jesus chasing out the
moneychangers, or the saints like St. Joan who was tried and killed with the
complicity of the Church establishment. From his perspective, too many view
religious life as being synonymous with institutional life and are trapped, (a word
used by Merton throughout the CD’s) into overwork and meaningless routine. Their
lives may be beaten down and shaped into the image and likeness of an
institutional norm rather than the image and likeness of God. By contrast, Merton thinks the real purpose
of religious life is to provide space and solitude for nurturing the spiritual
and human growth of the individual, to allow the individual to follow the
guidance of the Holy Spirit to become a creative and unique son or daughter of
God. He thinks such a religious should not
only be outside society but also in some measure a prophet and rebel.
Disk 1
Merton touches on the
topics of “Balance and Grace, “Religious Virginity and Communal Love”, and “The
Institutionalized Church”. For the theme of “Balance and Grace”, he circles
about the life of prayer. For him,
prayer is a relationship with God through which we are most ourselves. He is
concerned about the complexity we make of prayer where prayer is something we
do apart from our everyday existence. He
suggests we often think that prayer is a role we play rather than being
something as simple as breathing, a natural state of living. He suggests prayer comes from the very ground
of life itself, at the very core of our existence and not something apart from
it. Through prayer we come to the
realization that we belong to God and live as children of God in consciousness
of this belonging. We also come to understand ourselves not in an obsessive way
preoccupied with our faults but as someone who is liberated to have free speech
with God, as son to Father without fear. Prayer lessens our ambiguity and frees
us from being double-hearted. Prayer
brings us to acceptance of ourselves as we are and even to accept our
ambiguity. Prayer is a response to a
personal call from God resulting in an inner awakening of our God intended self
to recover our sight and freedom. Through prayer we become open to God and
thereby become open to everything else. He thinks that the life of prayer is an
end in itself.
Merton responds to the following questions
from the sisters: the role of emotions in prayer; the issue of evil and hell;
consecrated virginity; and the institutionalized church. Since Merton views prayer as core to our
everyday life, emotions are natural during prayer. He does recognize that they
may not be accepted by the community at public prayer but recommends some
solitary moments to give them expression.
Evil he sees as a potentiality in us, which with satanic help may be
expressed in the horrors witnessed during the Vietnam War. However he agrees with
Julia of Norwich that God is absolutely free and all may be well even in regard
to the notion of hell even though we may not understand it. In regard to consecrated virginity, Merton
emphasizes the relationship rather than the absence of sex. He points out that
in marriage the relationship of two loving persons is what is important. In
religious community that personal relationship is with God. Those in religious communities should not
look for identity or love from others but rather in their spousal relationship
with Christ. He agrees that the
institutionalized church is the sign of Christ’s presence in the world but we
may have too limited a view of what this means. In the institutional church,
too much emphasis may have been given to hierarchy and rules for example. A
consequence of this may be that one interprets love of neighbor in community
life as being focused on correcting one another’s faults. In a less
institutionalized church, the responsibility to love falls back on the
shoulders of the individual who will have to take responsibility for one
another.
Disk 2
Merton reflects on the themes of “Our Dedication to God”, “Escaping
Entrapment”, “Ecstatic Life in the Spirit”, and “Education, Learning and
Success”. He states Christ came to bring us a more abundant life and that our
vocation is to live this life fully. He
contrasts secular life to a dedicated life.
He thinks secular life may be a trap in which man is defined by society
and has the freedom only to make money.
A unit of production, a person is rewarded for being a nonperson. One must play the role society defines which
forces the person to being untrue to oneself. Merton believes individuals often attempt to
flee this trap with false escapes. He mentions hypochondria, the abuse of
medications, and alcoholism as examples. The purpose of the dedicated life
should make false escapes unnecessary. He points out that a dedicated life is not
synonymous with institutional life. He cautions that institutional life may
become a trap as well if it attempts to remove a person from life, if it
eliminates spontaneity and limits expressions of love, or if it defines one’s
life by the rules of the institution. Merton emphasizes that the freedom of the
religious life arises from continuous conversion, which enables a free
spontaneous self –donation, rather than one imposed by the institution. A
religious order should be open to human possibilities allowing space and time
for the Holy Spirit to heal and to allow the individual to express their
creative possibilities. This would
include attention to the physical life as well. For example, more attention
must be paid to healthy physical activities such as tennis or swimming, and
time should be allocated for them. The religious life should be the place,
which nurtures a self-definition of the person in freedom with openness to the
Spirit. The religious life is for the liberation of the deep things of the Spirit.
It is for ecstasy, an inebriation of love, joy, jubilation, and creativity. Merton notes that the function of both the
monastery and the university are places where we learn to live. The purpose of
education is for a person to define himself in relationship to the world. The
world is more real as the people are free to choose their own lives and save
their souls by arriving at a mature identity, discovering their radical self
after discarding their masks. Learning to be one self is to rise from the dead.
This inmost self is stripped naked, where life and death are equal. Free from the ego, this true self is a spark, which
is the Absolute recognizing itself in us. The purpose of all education and indeed all of
life is to find that spark.
Disk 3
The themes of Disk 3 are “Christian Non Violence”, “The Privilege and
Obligation of Religious”, “Camus: The Status Quo”, and “Religious Freedom”. Merton believes we find our identity in
addressing the critical issues of mankind such as poverty, world peace, and civil
rights. Merton thinks these fundamental issues of mankind should occupy more of
the institutional church’s time rather than what he considers secondary issues
such as clerical celibacy or the expansion of parochial halls. He fears religious have chosen privilege, security
and respect to live comfortably in a society, which is under the judgment of
God. Renewal of the religious life may require prophetic witness and entail
serious dissent, which will not be popular. Religious have been apologist for
society instead of prophetic witnesses and may have an obligation to be outcast
and lose their privileged place in society. As an example, he points to the accusation of
Camus in his book “The Stranger” that the Church through the prison chaplain
ops for society over the individual by using the coercion of the death penalty as
an argument to force the prisoner’s conversion rather than confronting the societal
injustice of the death penalty. The Church
thereby uses religion to justify man’s subordination to society, which for Merton,
is a form of idolatry. He cites Joan of Arc condemned in the name of God as
another example in which justice was sacrificed to politics. In such instances, the Church becomes deeply
involved in the hypocrisy of the state by insisting that the activities of the
state are in the name of God. Instead, Merton thinks we have to grope for prophetic
solutions that stand for life and justice and for man made in the image and
likeness of God. This will require religious communities to allow for the inner
freedom of the religious, to be open to the Holy Spirit, and to be open to the
whole world.
Disk 4
This disk focuses on “Monasteries and Contemplation”. For
Merton, the ideal monastic vocation allows sufficient freedom for the
individual to follow a personal path to union with God like the early desert
fathers who worked out their relationship with God after an initial period of
training. For him, this charismatic freedom,
which is learned through contemplation, is an essential component of monastic
life. It is bought by the renunciation of other freedoms such as desire for
worldly pleasures and thereby bound up with restrictions but monastic law
cannot dominate monastic life. Instead, this freedom is more like the
declarations of St John that the truth shall make you free and of St. Paul referring
to the freedom of the sons of God. Monastic renewal cannot be effective without
this freedom, which is expressed by Mary sitting at the foot of the Lord. Merton acknowledges that there is tension
between the Martha and Mary types in the monastery. However more importantly,
he emphasizes that this conflict exists within contemplatives themselves who
are called to make an act of preference for the apparent unproductiveness and
uselessness of sitting at the foot of Jesus and listening. This preference is in defiance of those in
the world and some in the monastery who think this is worthless. He thinks remaining quietly in the presence
of God and listening to Him requires grace and is the highest ascetic
discipline. He refers to St. John of the
Cross comments about the soul in solitude striving to attain perfection and
union with the Word by allowing the Spirit to move her will freely and fill her
memories with divine knowledge. He
reminds all of us that there are many mansions in the Father’s house and many
ways to union with God. Jesus alone is necessary. To live in Him takes care of everything,
answers everything and to see Jesus is to see the Father. If we are living in
Christ, we are face to face to face with the Father but we do not understand or
see this. Through abiding in Christ’s love, we will experience that Jesus in us
does the will of the Father. Christ in
us doing the will of the father brings the community with its diverse talents
and activities into oneness. Christ is the unifying principle, which makes not
only monastic and Christian communities but also all of mankind one.
Disk 5
The final disk addresses, “The Contemplative Life So Called”
in which Merton suggests love is sufficient unto itself and a deeper experience
of God through loving attentiveness to Him is part and parcel of love. The emphasis is on the contemplative’s relationship
with God and one’s dependency on Him in which everything is received as gift.
It is a life of faith above works. A
contemplative life is a life of freedom and therefore must be a life of
penance. By penance, Merton does not
mean the arbitrary rules he encountered at Gethsemane like walking with eyes
down, or sleeping in his habit. He
suggests real penance gets at the deep roots of pride, which is to die on the
cross and rise with Christ. This is not simply the penance of ascetic routines but
instead the penance of transformation by the Spirit. From this transformation
flows the freedom the contemplative seeks which is the freedom to follow the
Spirit, to follow Christ, and to listen to His personal message to them. With this freedom comes peace. The root of this
peace is faith in Christ, faith in the contemplative vocation, and faith in the
promises of Christ including the admonition that Mary has chosen the better
part. Renewal in the contemplative life requires zeal in the contemplative’s
prayer for faith, which gives one the vision to see their path and come to a
deeper dependence on Christ. Merton concludes these tapes with a voice filled
with charismatic enthusiasm by stating that the most fundamental issue for
contemplatives is to pray for faith and entrust themselves completely to a Love
who is God.
Listening to these CD’s would be beneficial to anyone in the
religious life that desire Merton’s perspective on their vocation. However they
would also appeal to anyone who wishes a clearer grasp of the contemplative way
or more broadly anyone who wishes an audio taste of Merton to sample his
clarity of thought, wisdom, wit, and prophesy. Merton’s thinking expressed on
these CD’s also has a contemporary relevance as a harbinger of Pope Francis’s
vision of the Church for modern times.
Pope Francis’s “The
Joy of the Gospel” guides the institutional church to be more involved in those
issues of passionate concern to Merton such as the free market economy, income
inequality, spreading unemployment, the environment, and war and peace. Merton, prophet and gadfly, raised these issues throughout his
monastic life. Through Pope Francis, one
senses that the Spirit is leading the institutional church in a
direction foreshadowed by a prophetic Thomas Merton. A Church described by Pope Francis as“…bruised, hurting and dirty
because it has been out on the streets, rather than a Church which is unhealthy
from being confined and from clinging to its own security".
No comments:
Post a Comment