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,
[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.
