At the Corner of Fourth and Walnut

It’s a famous address.  Do you recognize it?  It was that place that a young Catholic monk named Thomas Merton realized that he and the world were not strangers but part of the same family, the same body.  In the middle of a busy shopping district in downtown Louisville, Merton had a mystical insight which changed the rest of his life:

I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers.[1]

In so many ways, the story of Thomas Merton is a classic tale of conversion – not just one conversion but many.  He was converted as a brilliant yet rebellious young man who lost his scholarship at Cambridge due to an intemperate combination of bad grades, drinking and general carousing.  Later as a graduate student at Columbia he was converted when he discovered a curious yet unrelenting attraction to Catholicism.  He was converted when he realized his “true self” was found as a Trappist monk, living out the rest of his life in the relative obscurity of a Kentucky monastery.  And finally, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, Thomas Merton was converted by the penetrating insight that he and the whole of humanity were truly one.

Yet late in his life, Thomas Merton experienced a consummate conversion when he realized his distinct vocation to unity.  His life was to be about fulfilling the prayer of Jesus recounted in John 17.  “We are already one,” Merton said.  “But we imagine that we are not.  And what we have to recover is our original unity.  What we have to be is what we are.”[2] 

During a moment in our country’s history when all of us are trying to understand the unimaginable cruelty unleashed in a sleepy town in southwest Connecticut, Merton’s insights may be particularly poignant.  For Merton, the importance of unity was not just a sublime platitude but a matter of life and death.  In a 1961 letter written to his dear friend Dorothy Day, Merton wrestled, “I don’t feel that I can in conscience, at a time like this, go on writing just about things like meditation. I think I have to face the big issues, the life-and-death issues.”[3]

The violence of Newtown is situated in a much larger arc of human division that started with Cain and Able.  While the creation narratives of Genesis make it clear that God created humanity as one family, the primordial presence of sin is always there to tear at the fabric of God’s handiwork.  Deception leads to division leads to violence.  Yet Merton reminds us that the madness of violence begins with an illusion which prompts the human tendency to divide:

Violence rests on the assumption that the enemy and I are entirely different: the enemy is evil and I am good.  The enemy must be destroyed but I must be saved.  But love sees things differently.  It sees that even the enemy suffers from the same sorrows and limitations that I do.  That we both have the same hopes, the same needs, the same aspiration for a peaceful and harmless human life. . . There must be a new force, the power of love, the power of understanding and human compassion, the strength of selflessness and cooperation, and the creative dynamism of the will to live and to build, and the will to forgive.  The will for reconciliation.[4]

The road to peace is peace.  The journey of reconciliation begins with the same epiphany that stopped Merton in his tracks on the corner of Fourth and Walnut – that we are all united, we are one body, willed by God from the beginning of time for a fraternity of love.  “The kingdom of God is within you,” Jesus said.  It is only a matter of becoming who we really are.  

Let us not give into the temptation of division in this time of trial.  We stand at a crossroad.  In a certain sense, all of us find ourselves at the corner of Fourth and Walnut.  Let us choose unity and let us choose life.

Life is on our side.

The silence and the Cross of which we know

are forces that cannot be defeated.

In silence and suffering,

in the heartbreaking effort to be honest

in the midst of dishonesty (most of all our own dishonesty),

in all these is victory.

It is Christ in us who drives us through darkness

to a light of which we have no conception

and which can only be found

by passing through apparent despair.

Everything has to be tested.

All relationships have to be tried.

All loyalties have to pass through the fire.

Much has to be lost.

Much in us has to be killed,

Even much that is best in us.

But Victory is certain.

The Resurrection is the only light,

and with that light there is no error.[5]

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[1]             Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, NY: Doubleday, 1966.

[2]             Thomas Merton, The Asian Journey, 308.

[3]             Thomas Merton, “Letter to Dorothy Day, August 23, 1961,” The Hidden Ground of Love: The Letters of Thomas Merton on Religious Experience and Social Concerns, ed. William H. Shannon, NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1985, 140.

[4]             Thomas Merton, “Preface to the Vietnamese edition of No Man Is an Island” taken from “Honorable Reader”: Reflections on My Work, ed. Robert E. Daggy, NY: Crossroad, 1989, 124.

[5]             Thomas Merton, “Letter to Czeslaw Milosz, February 28, 1959,” The Courage for Truth: Letters to Writers, ed. Christine M. Bochen, NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1993, 57-58.