Just a quick recap from the previous post on our man, Merton. So, he’s about and about amongst the people one day when he gets zapped by the living God and realizes that all the decidedly ordinary folks around him have the light of the Spirit shining out from them like the sun. This experience left him profoundly changed. But as we will soon discover, not immune from the struggles of being an innately imperfect human—Spoiler alert. His flaws and rule breaking are what I love about him most.
Merton, like most of us, had a truckload of inner struggles, and more than a few blaring contractions in his makeup. He was a man who in the first instance got drawn to a life devoted to God by a mystical experience he had on a visit to Rome, while studying literature as a young man in Cambridge. Eventually, this led him to convert to Catholicism and embrace the monastic life. But he was never, if there is such a thing, your average run-of-the-mill monk, far from it.
A famed spiritual author, he wrestled with the essential requirement of every monk to abandon worldly desires entirely and seek absolute humility. This, in a nutshell, is the main game for a monk. Seeking humility at depth is the central blank of a monk’s job description. Humility of heart is their holy grail and has been ever since the Desert Mothers and Fathers kick started the whole Christian monastic tradition thing a couple of centuries after the crucifixion of the Christ.
But it’s damn hard to aim for humility when a bunch of people around the globe are lauding you as a literary hermit superstar. Now the glaring contraction between the roles of a mystic recluse and a world-famous writer is easy to grasp and would probably bring most of us seriously undone. I mean, we’re talking chalk and cheese here, where never the twain shall meet. But oddly, in our intrepid hermit, the chalk and cheese meet and get fussed together in a brilliant but trouble prone marriage. The result was wonderful spiritual writing for the ongoing benefit of many people throughout the world. However, for Merton troubles a plenty.
The problem seems to have been his ongoing battle with the darker side of his nature. Something that eventually we all must grapple with. The unseen but deadly, ever active ego-self that longs for more accolades, even greater worldly recognition. One of his psychoanalysts reportedly told him: “What you desire is a hermitage in Times Square with a large sign over it saying ‘Thomas the hermit’…” There is nothing quite like a serious brush with fame to ignite the ego’s insatiable desire for more of the same.
Plenty of sources also identify the apparent contradiction between his advocacy for a radically inclusive world, on one hand, and the fact that he opposed the 1960s root-and-branch changes that occurred within the Catholic church. In fairness to Merton, this may well have been less about a resistance to a more inclusive church, and more about the mystic in him lamenting the loss of much of the poetic beauty, mystery, and mystical underpinning of the old Latin Mass. For many Catholics of his generation, this felt very much like the proverbial mystic baby being thrown out with the bathwater.
Our radical mystic monk had a few other—let’s just call them foibles—that one would not normally associate with the active life of a fully fledged Trappist monk. He was, for example, a bit of a booze hound. The man absolutely loved a beer. And as if ale were the very nectar of the god’s, he was a fella who liked to imbibe a belly full of booze whenever he got the chance. Now I know that, throughout the ages, monks have done more than their fair share of fermenting the barley and hops for the merriment of men. However, I’m pretty sure they were not supposed to sculling down big jugs of the stuff themselves. But if the occasional bender was not enough to raise the ire of his Abbot superior, then his romantic shenanigans with a much younger woman most certainly were. Trouble was most definitely brewing for our audacious monk. More about that in my next post…
– Cormac Stagg, author of The Quest for a Humble Heart
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