Great Books
Class XI: Thomas
Merton: Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander
So, we reach the end of our path – the last class. Or is it simply another beginning?
Exactly.
We sat together, New York’s air now having grown cold and
dry with the change of seasons, the encroaching evening – it would be pitch dark by the time we reentered
the world – already present at 2:00 in the afternoon. The longest day of the year hulked just over
the middle of the week, a couple days away.
Thomas Merton wrote in the 1950s and 60s, yet his words
could have been penned yesterday. Such
is the vision of the prophet and, unlike most of those we read, he lived in our
same culture, spoke our language and grew up somewhere in the American middle
class. His ideas on engagement,
activism, politics, the vast emptiness of the public mind, the use of language
as violence, the supine sloth that lurks in each of us, the struggle with how,
exactly, to engage with a world that seems to be spinning ever-more
hysterically into insanity, our death wish in how we deal with the
environment, international relations, our neighbor – all seem so prescient and present.
Merton was only the second of our mytics who dealt
directly with our social compact: our need, as
humans, to engage with the
world. Of course, Merton more than our
other social mystic (Marcus Aurelius), struggled with how best to engage. His push/pull with social obligation brought
a saying by one of his favorite thinkers, Chuang Tzu, to mind:
Great
truths do not take hold of the hearts of the masses. And now, as all the world
is in error, how shall I, though I know the true path, how shall I guide? If I
know that I cannot succeed and yet try to force success, this would be but
another source of error. Better then to desist and strive no more. But if I do
not strive, who will?
But in his struggle to understand his own path, and his
assurance that all humans are inconsistent, inconstant and struggling (just
like us!), his writing made it feel “O.K.” to be human. Even the best among us have guilt and failure
larded through our lives. And at the
core, all of us need some portion of public approval, even if we sacrifice
Truth to get it from the surrounding people in our lives and society in
general. It is part and parcel of our
struggle, and our inevitable failure to be perfect human beings.
We talked of Merton himself – his personal failures and
inconsistencies. Merton, depressive and
socially insecure, had a love affair with a much younger woman, cut it off and
then died under dubious circumstances, which might have indicated suicide
(after having taken a first-class flight!) in Thailand:
He fell in love (at 53) with 19-year-old Margie Smith. It was a
situation which was obviously provoking an acute inner crisis in Merton who was
perceived to be in a mid-life fling with a young woman. On Saturday, June 11th,
1966 Merton, by now back at Gethsemani, arranged to “borrow” the Louisville
office of his psychologist, Dr James Wygal, to meet Margie, where they drank a
bottle of champagne and became intimate.
None are immune from
imperfection – but at what point do these most human “foibles” become
disqualifying? Look too deeply into the
private lives of any of our heroes – be they mystical, political, athletes etc.
– and we are sure to grow disappointed, and often disgusted.
|
Mystic with a Trench Coat |
Merton struggled with
happiness. If one grows happy, does this
simply mean they have “given in,” supine accomplices to a world rife with
injustice, hatred and pride? Is happiness, in and of itself, an admission of guilt? And if we are not to be happy, then what
struggle is “worth” it? What kind of war
should we be fighting, and with what armaments?
Merton spoke convincingly of
retaining one's sense of self, one's own thoughts and points of view. Too many struggles – whether for good or ill,
as activists or nativists – simply efface the individual in a program of
slogans, propaganda and other people’s desires.
Sometimes, true struggle takes place on the human plane – as amongst a
few people gathered quietly in a room in the Lower East Side, struggling toward
some Truth, while the world itself careens by outside the darkening
windows. After all, Merton noted:
Genuine dissent must always keep a human measure. It must be
free and spontaneous. The slighter gestures are often the more
significant,
because they are unpremeditated and they cannot
be doctored beforehand by the
propagandist.
It is best not to join a program
or a movement. The messages concerning
the “correct” path resides within, and must be plumbed and respected. And even then, these messages can appear
confusing, contradictory and unclear.
Such is our life.
Echoing the Baghavad Gita, we
are to act without becoming lost in the group or action. Act for ourselves, inspired by personal
need and experience. Armies, politics,
the church – these create systems which overwhelm, snuffing out the
individual. This kind of uncritical
following represents the antithesis of mystical yearning.
But still. How to apply these ideas to our banal lives,
the day-to-day, the myriad of confusing interactions which come at us
everyday? What, exactly, is Merton
asking us to do? One participant noted
that he seemed more like a mystical cartographer (a beautiful image!), mapping
what the spiritual world looks like, with all its peaks and valleys, rivers and
oceans, yet not providing a clue as to how to manage our way through the
terrain.
Given our current political
travails, we talked of how Merton’s ideas apply to our struggle with
“otherness” and “sameness,” “us” and “them.”
How do we obliterate (within ourself) the sense of people being “different,” even
categorically so? For myself, I have
always thought of my embedded racist thoughts and feelings as similar to
alcoholism: I have to be ever-vigilant of my own prejudices, and even then,
must be aware of how easily I can slip back into the illness. We are conditioned to see “otherness” – it is
human nature. Overcoming this is a
lifelong struggle, at least for me.
Merton assures that if the goal
is to realize what unifies us, talking will not get us there. The minute we open our mouths, after all, we
are little more than hippocrites and liars!
The experience of “sameness” is an internal experience, beyond words,
and expressed through gentle action.
Merton talked of acceptance – a
concept we have often run across in our mystical travels – but with a
twist. Not that we should accept
ourselves as we are – certainly not that!
But the world, and especially a world that just doesn’t make sense
sometimes. And the aspect of ourselves that mirrors the incomprehensibility that we see through our little eyes, especially when we
don’t make sense or are inconsistent.
Can we accept the senselessness? Or must everything – both about ourselves and
in the world – fit into our preconceived vision we hold in our consciousness?
Merton is a social mystic.
So we spoke (yet again) of his view of the
world, and how we fit into it.
He
assures that “history” is nothing more than attempting to stop the moving
picture of history and examine one single frame, and from there separate what
is “important” from the rest.
However,
we are embedded in the moving picture – we move with it across time.
Our sense of history is little more than a
fantasy, colored by the politics of the winners.
You cannot be a “good” person in
some ways, yet “bad” in others. There is
no scorecard where a 51% tally marks you as "good." "Good" is a verb; it is found through action,
and though no one will never be perfect,
the individual must define this “goodness” for themselves and then yearn toward
it. And be honest. Part and parcel of this search is the ideal
of equanimity: to not care what others say about you, either good or bad. To be “respectable” is to be lost. To respect yourself and your actions is to begin to become found.
We spoke of so much more, of
course. In our meandering path from something
that happened to one of us an hour ago to the timeless wisdom of Merton, his
love of Chuang Tzu, his tortured personal story, his exhortations and
admissions, his honesty. Though like all
of us, his honesty was only to a point.
And then it was over. Eleven sessions in a small room in New York’s
Lower East Side. Scrabbling with our
fingernails into the hard crust of Truth, like children in a back yard with
tiny shovels, digging a hole to China . . .