"Springing" into Selfhood

As I sat down to pray this morning I was riveted by the singular song of a bird perched near my window. I had only closed my eyes for a moment, and honestly I was hurrying to get into the Word where I anticipated the “main course” of my morning solitude with the Lord. But the beauty and simplicity of that little bird’s song gave me pause to reflect on the glory of Creation and, in particular, the poignant insights of Thomas Merton:

A tree gives glory to God by being a tree.  For in being what God means it to be it is obeying him.  It ‘consents,’ so to speak, to His creative love. . . The tree imitates God by being a tree. The more a tree is like itself, the more it is like Him.[1]

Merton applied this same intuition to flowers and fields, lakes and mountains, clumsy colts and fish of the sea, each one “a holiness consecrated to God by His own creative wisdom which declares the glory of God.”[2] As I sat down to pray this morning I began to realize that the budding signs of Spring rang out with a melodious and surprising invitation - to join the vast diversity of the created world in “being who we really are.”

Merton keenly intuited that trees and animals have no problem being who they are. The plant and animal kingdoms do not have an identity crisis. “God makes them what they are without consulting them, and they are perfectly satisfied,” Merton notes. A tree will be a tree, growing and stretching, bearing fruit and providing shade. A bird will sing and gather, search and soar, and according to Merton, will glorify God by being exactly what it was created to be.

But human beings are another matter altogether.

With us it is different. God leaves us free to be whatever we like. We can be ourselves or not, as we please. We are at liberty to be real, or to be unreal. We may be true or false, the choice is ours.[3]

Human beings have the capacity to strive to be something we were never meant to be. We can spend our time doing things that, “if we only stopped to think about them, are just the opposite of what we were made for.”[4] As we all know, we can wear masks and put on garments and deny the unrepeatable beauty of our unique identity in God’s economy, our “true selves.”

While we have the freedom to do as we please, Merton reminds us, we cannot live with impunity to the consequences.

Causes have effects, and if we lie to ourselves and to others, then we cannot expect to find truth and reality whenever we happen to want them. If we have chosen the way of falsity we must not be surprised that truth eludes us when we finally come to need it![5]

“To be real or to be unreal?” - that is the question of the spiritual life. Let us take our cue from the birds of the air and trees of the forest that give glory to God by being exactly what they were created to be. “Spring” into selfhood and sanctity. God, and somewhere Thomas Merton, is smiling.[6]

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[1] Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (NY: New Directions Publishing, 1962), 29.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Thomas Merton, No Man Is An Island (NY: Harvest, 1955).

[5] Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (NY: New Directions Publishing, 1962), 30.

[6] I hadn’t heard too much about the “true self” before becoming Catholic. Of course, there was this vague and intuitive notion that being genuine was somehow important to the spiritual life but nothing on par with Thomas Merton’s reflections on the matter (ie. “For me to be a saint meant to be myself”). Merton subsequently deduced that “the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and of discovering my true self." Now anyone who knows anything about Merton knows that this is not some sneaky and narcissistic play on secular humanism. Merton was NOT saying, “It’s all about me!” Merton was a Trappist monk who had molded his life around the contemplation of Jesus Christ as the pivotal saving event of human history. What he was saying is that the perennial "Who am I?" question of human existence meets up with the "Who do you say that I am?" question of Jesus Christ in the most fundamental way. Who we are is intimately and inextricably linked with "Whose" we are. Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (NY: New Directions Publishing, 1962), 29.

Defined by the Center

“Young Life has always defined itself by its center and not by its boundaries.” The words registered in my mind but their full impact would continue to unfold for days. “Defined by the center, not the boundaries.” These words came up in a recent conversation I had with a friend and senior Young Life staff member concerning the intricate relationship between Young Life (an interdenominational Christian mission to adolescents) and the Catholic Church.

I’ve encountered some in the Catholic Church that would define Catholicism according to everything that Protestantism is not – Mary, the saints, confession, Mary, the papacy, Eucharistic adoration, Mary (did I mention Mary?) – but this position is hardly tenable. As Thomas Merton once quipped (painting in admittedly broader, interreligious strokes):

If I affirm myself as a Catholic merely by denying all that is Muslim, Jewish, Protestant, Hindu, Buddhist, etc., in the end I will find that there is not much left for me to affirm as a Catholic: and certainly no breath of the Spirit with which to affirm it.[1]

As Thomas Groome reminds us, “the foundation of what makes us Catholic is the shared faith of the whole Body of Christ; it is certainly not unique to Catholicism.”[2] What makes us most Christian (both Protestant and Catholic varieties) is what we share, the overwhelming majority of faith that grounds our common religious heritage:

·      One God, triune in being, united in an eternal relationship of self-gift

·      One Lord, Jesus Christ, who revealed the fullness of God’s love, whose life, death and resurrection offer salvation, truth and life

·      One baptism by which we are initiated into the family of God

·      One universal call to holiness

·      One mission to proclaim the reign of Christ to all

·      One body with which to accomplish that mission

Pope Francis began his recent apostolic exhortation by asserting, “The JOY OF THE GOSPEL fills the hearts and lives of all who encounter Jesus.”[3] Not just Catholics or Protestants but ALL who encounter Christ. The pope goes on to say:

Pastoral ministry in a missionary style is not obsessed with the disjointed transmission of a multitude of doctrines. . . the message has to concentrate on the essentials, on what is most beautiful, most grand, most appealing and at the same time most necessary.[4]

So what is the essential, the most beautiful, most grand, most appealing, most essential? In other words, what is the “center” by which both Young Life and the Catholic Church are defined? I think Cardinal Timothy Dolan says it beautifully:

We are all about a person.

We are all about a relationship of faith, hope and love with a person,

Who happens to be the greatest person who ever lived,

Who also happens to be my best friend,

Who knows me and calls me by name,

Who looks me in the eyes and invites me to spend eternity with him,

and that person is JESUS![5]

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[1] Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (NY: DoubleDay, 1965/66), 141.

[2] Thomas Groome, What Makes Us Catholic (NY: HarperCollins, 2002), 31.

[3] Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, 1.

[4] Ibid, 35.

[5] Cardinal Timothy Dolan, taken from an address given at the Evangelical Catholic Institute, Madison, WI, 2006.

Let Your Life Speak

Let your life speak. It’s an old Quaker saying and the title of Parker Palmer’s 1999 book that I’ve probably read five times and given away many more times over. Palmer begins with a poem and a penetrating statement, “Ask me whether what I have done is my life.” It begs the question, “Is the life I’m living the one that I want to live?”

This question has all the trappings of a New Year’s resolution. Do I really want to be a couch potato or would I rather be fit? Do I really want to watch all this mindless TV or should I read more books?  In the end, these are all very easy questions to answer. Of course we’d like to exercise more, eat less, read more, complain less, spend more time with family and less time on Facebook.

But this is not what Palmer is getting at. The central thrust of Palmer’s book has less to do with what you’d like your life to be and more to do with what your life wants you to be. It is not about becoming more disciplined and stalwart so as to procure the life that you’ve always wanted, even if that life is a very religious one. A true life worth living is not primarily a product of self-determination and hard work (two values which are highly prized in our culture).

Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent.[1]

Palmer reminds us that life has a voice of its own and this voice commonly eludes even our loftiest ideals and heroes. Sure, we have the best intentions. Many of our resolutions are inspired by the witness of great figures like Pope Francis, Mother Teresa or Martin Luther King Jr. In this light, we commonly mistake the idea of “letting your life speak” with gathering all the most laudable values and traits of these people and setting our minds to imitating them.

These intentions are no doubt "good," but they, like many of our New Year’s resolutions, seldom work. “The results were rarely admirable,” Palmer says, “often laughable, and sometimes grotesque. But always they were unreal, a distortion of my true self – as must be the case when one lives from the outside in, not the inside out.”[2] My true self, living inside out, the Real.

What Palmer is getting at is something that he learned from Thomas Merton - Trappist monk, Catholic thinker and one of Palmer’s favorite authors.[3] Underneath the deafening cacophony of our own plans and visions, beyond the proud confines of our self-made identity, aside from all the distractions and confusions of postmodern life, there is a “hidden wholeness” that calls out to us.[4] It is the voice of Wisdom, the Logos, the Christ, and it is begging for an audience.

If we could let go of our own obsession with what we think is the meaning of it all, we might be able to hear His call and follow Him in His mysterious, cosmic dance. We do not have to go very far to catch echoes of that dancing.[5]

In this New Year, I pray that you and I might quiet ourselves just long enough to hear the faint echoes of this eternal dance, to allow our hearts and our limbs to be animated not by the drumbeats of power, popularity and prestige (or maybe our own "good" intentions), but by the rhythms of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. “Since we live by the Spirit,” Paul says,  “let us keep in step with the Spirit.”[6] I don’t want to spend 2014 “marching to my own drummer,” but following the sacred song of our Savior and dancing in step to the glorious symphony of God’s kingdom.  

Our lives are speaking. The real question is: Are you listening?

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[1] Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2000), 3.

[2] Ibid.

[3] I’ll never forget the experience of Parker Palmer reading Thomas Merton aloud to me during a private visit to his home in Madison, WI. His eyes were ablaze as his deep and gentle voice floated melodious Mertonian insights across his study. I seriously had to ask myself, “Is this really happening right now?!!!”

[4] Thomas Merton, “Hagia Sophia,” in Thomas P. McDonnell, ed., A Thomas Merton Reader (New York: Doubleday, 1974, 1989), 506.

[5] Thomas Merton, “The General Dance,” in Thomas P. McDonnel, ed., A Thomas Merton Reader (New York: Doubleday, 1974, 1989), 504.

[6] Galatians 5:25.

Merton on the Mass

It isn’t very difficult to see that Merton has something quite pointed to say in this story (see my last post on The Art of Missing the Forest for the Trees).  On the surface, it would seem that the primary issue is racial equality and integration (keep in mind Merton told this story in the full tumult of the 1960s).  Yet Merton chose to direct his commentary toward the true lightening rod of the narrative: the Eucharist.  The churchgoers were so incensed by the priest’s sermon that they left prior to receiving the Eucharist, the body of Christ, the “source and summit of the Christian life.”[1]  Thus we have the consternated words of warning hurled at the priest as the offended parishioner stormed out, “If I miss Mass today it’s your fault!”

There is an implication of guilt and punishment here.  The parting parishioner assumes that there will be a penalty to pay because he was not able to partake in the Eucharistic meal.  For those Catholic readers, the guilt of moral obligation will already be ringing in your ears.  Yet in a beautiful turn of parody, Merton uses this very idea of judgment in his response:

 Not only do we see in these men a flat refusal to listen to the plain meaning of the word of God. . . there is also a complete moral and spiritual insensitivity to the meaning of the Mass as the Christian Agape, the union of brothers in Christ, a union from which no believer is to be excluded.  To exclude a brother in Christ from this union is to fail to “judge the Body of Christ” and hence to “eat and drink judgment to oneself.” (1 Corinthians)[2]

The proverbial forest missed in Merton’s provocative story is nothing short of Christ and the kingdom of shalom which Christ so insistently preached, a kingdom which, projected into the 1960s, envisioned “little black boys and girls holding hands with little white boys and girls,” to quote Martin Luther King, Jr.  Eucharist is not a private ritual for personal sanctification.  It is the real presence of God with the power to mobilize the people of God to build a civilization of love.  That civilization is marked by reconciliation, right relationship, wholeness and justice. “The ritual action of Eucharist is powerful when it is allowed to penetrate the life and action of the people, and transform them into an effective embodiment of the love that is God, a sacrament of his presence.”[3]   There is an essential relationship between ritual, especially sacramental ritual as momentous as the Eucharist, and the lived realities of human beings which serve as primary witnesses to Christ’s presence among us.

I’ll let Merton get the last word, but I pray that we, the whole body of Christ, will take this universal meaning into our own lives and religious practice.

Is not their attendance at Mass a legal formality?  Formalities, abstractions, are not enough.  Gestures of conformity do not make a man a Christian, and when one’s actual conduct obviously belies the whole meaning of the gesture, it is an objective statement that one’s Christianity has lost it’s meaning.[4]

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[1]             Lumen Gentium (The Dogmatic Constitution on the Church), 11.

[2]             Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, NY: DoubleDay, 1966, 105.

[3]             Mary Peter McGinty, The Sacrament of Christian Life, Chicago, IL: The Thomas More Press, 1992, 50.

[4]             Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, NY: DoubleDay, 1966, 105-106.

The Art of Missing the Forest For the Trees

Thomas Merton, one of my favorite spiritual figures, once told a true story:

A young priest was sent to preach one Sunday in a “white” Catholic parish in New Orleans.  He based his sermon on the Gospel of the Sunday, in which Christ spoke of the twofold commandment, love of God and love of one’s brother, which is the essence of Christian morality.

The priest, in his sermon, took occasion to point out that this commandment applied to the problem of racial segregation, and that white people and black people ought certainly to love one another to the extent of accepting one another in an integrated society.

He was halfway through the sermon, and the gist of his remarks was becoming abundantly clear, when a man stood up in the middle of the congregation and shouted angrily: “I didn’t come here to listen to this kind of junk, I came to hear Mass.”

The priest stopped and waited.  This exasperated the man even more, and he demanded that the sermon be brought to an end at once, otherwise he would leave.

The priest continued to wait in silence, and another man in the congregation, amid the murmuring support of many voices, got up and protested against this doctrine to which he saw fit to refer to as “crap.”

As the priest still said nothing, the two men left the church followed by about fifty other solid Christians in the congregation.  As he went out, the first of them shouted over his shoulder at the priest: “If I miss Mass today it’s your fault.”[1]

Merton, at the conclusion of this story, said plainly, “Incidents like this have a meaning.”

Instead of completing  “the rest of the story,” instead of allowing Merton the space to tell us “the answer,” I want to leave the rest to my readers.  Whether you are Catholic or Protestant, this story has a meaning.  Whether you live in the South in the 60’s or Europe in modern times, this story has a meaning.  This story bears meaning for the churchgoer and secularist alike.  Your context, your experience, your hopes and aspirations, your fears and anxieties – all of these will shape and inform the meaning that you bring to story.  Yet I believe this story has powerful and universal meaning for us.

The question that I want to ask you, the question that I encourage you to comment on here is, “What does this story mean to you?  Where does this meaning manifest in your world today?” 

“I do not have clear answers to current questions.  
I do have questions, and, as a matter of fact, 
I think a man is known better by his 
questions than by his answers.”

Thomas Merton

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[1]             Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, NY: DoubleDay, 1966, 104-105.

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.