Justluckie

Art as a Summons to Awareness

I've been leading a Lent course over the last few weeks using paintings to stimulate reflection. I chose images from the 15th, 17th and 19th centuries (I don't like even numbers, it would seem) and deliberately chose some that would not be immediately 'comprehensible' in a straightforwardly representational or narrative way. I was keen each time for people to notice their immediate reactions and to see how they related to more sustained reflection after getting a bit of background, context and comparison. At the end of the series, there were reflections from the group on how it had been for them and one woman said (I paraphrase) that the benefit for her in the sessions was simple - I put up a picture on the screen and that makes them look at it.

I didn't want to let people stay at the level of 'liking' or 'not liking' a particular painting and that didn't take too much persuasion. Most members of the group were well able to set aside personal aesthetic presence. It didn't matter whether or not they wanted some strange piece of Flemish religious art on their wall at home; what mattered was to look.

The comment from the woman in the group delighted me because she captured so directly what I wanted to achieve. The point was not so much 'understanding' as 'awareness'. We are so used to short-circuiting our looking because we are surrounded by such a familiar range of images all the time. We do not see what is there because we are bludgeoned by the advertisers' images into our default mode of consumption. I look only to 'inform my choice' as a consumer. What kind of choice is that? What kind of freedom?

Thomas Merton made a series of simple 'calligraphies' partly based on his understanding of Japanese calligraphy. He used brush and black ink to make simple, abstract marks which he described as 'summonses to awareness'. These marks were not there to be interpreted but to be seen. He used photography in much the same way.

And I think the same principle can be extended to many forms of art - poetry, jazz, dance. The point is simply to learn how to see, to be awakened, to hear as if for the first time, to learn the simple but demanding art of freedom, to cease our unending inward chatter, our proclivity to comment on everything, to set aside our filters, expectations and prejudices. Art is a school for mindful living.

The Problem With Sin...

One of the many ways in which Christianity is perceived as unhelpful is that it appears to be mostly concerned with people's wrongdoings. If priests are not busy harranguing others for their moral failings, then they are doing all they can to hush up their own. Of course, I think this is a deeply unfair caricature, but it has some basis in truth. Traditionally, the problem Christianity poses is that of sin - human beings need to be saved from their inbuilt tendency to do the wrong thing and from the punishment they deserve as a result. One version of the solution to this problem sees the life, death and resurrection of Jesus solely in these terms. His death is a sort of legal fix to this problem - he takes on the punishment so we don't have to, as long as we assent to this arrangement.

Some traditional Christian liturgies, especially in the West, seem to underline this paradigm with a strong emphasis on the unworthiness of the worshipper and on their dependence on the 'satisfaction' provided by Jesus' sacrifice.

To many modern ears, this whole construct is problematic. First of all, many people don't feel that sinful. They haven't done all that much that is so terribly wrong and don't like to be reminded of the occasions when they do slip up - they have enough conscience to beat themselves up about those without any external reinforcement. Secondly, they are repelled by the kind of moral duplicity that can result from such an emphasis. If the church focuses on sin, then it risks setting itself up as a moral exemplar and we all know the problems that can bring. Thirdly, it can leave people feeling no better about their real predicament, which is how to find peace and wholeness. If they didn't agree with the premise to start with, the solution will offer little solace.

I suspect that this particular angle on Christianity is one of the reasons that Buddhism can seem so attractive: no angry deity to appease, no rule-bound moralising and a very practical approach to overcoming suffering and finding that peace. Buddhism doesn't begin with the premise of our failure but of our suffering and solution is not chastisement but awakening.

I wonder if there is, in fact, a way of tellling the Christian story that comes much closer to this. This morning, the Psalm in our Episcopal office book had this line: 'For innumerable troubles have crowded upon me; my sins have overtaken me, and I cannot see' (Ps 40:13a). This little verse seems to parallel sin and misfortune and this is quite normal in Hebrew - the word for 'evil', as to some extent it is in English, means both calamity and moral failing. Leaving aside the moral aspect for a moment, we could paraphrase the thrust of this verse as 'I am so beset with suffering that I cannot see anything clearly.' This is getting closer to the Buddhist insight that we do see clearly on account of our attachments, which leads to our suffering. We begin to see clearly not by self-rebuke, but by waking up.

Thomas Merton, who knew Buddhism fairly well, came close to this emphasis. I have been struck by the number of times his later journal entries speak, above all, of finding 'clarity'. What he needs is not a proper sense of his badness (and there were many who would have gladly helped him achieve that!) but clear sight. His sufferings as a result of the tangle he found himself in after falling in love with a young nurse underlined the need for clarity above all things. It was simplicity found in solitude and meditation that would help him through the tangle towards the wholeness he sought for himself and others.

The life and teaching of Jesus can also be read as being directed towards the gift of clear sight. John's Gospel is full of examples of this metaphor but the synoptic parables can also be read in this way (wise virgins keeping awake at the wedding feast, the lamp set on a hill, the householder keeping alert in case a thief should come, the eye is the lamp of the body, seeing a bush in a mere seed etc). And I think the death and resurrection can also be seen in this light. Instead of a judicial process, this is a moment of supreme enlightenment - suffering and death are overcome not by punishment but by self-giving, by letting go of all notions of revenge, by complete and unreserved compassion, by the kind of relinquishing that appears first like abandonment ('why have you forsaken me?') and then like wholeness ('it is completed'). The resurrection is a life thus renewed and lived in the light. It is the dawning of the light in the place where darkness appeared to have won its final victory.

To shift the emphasis away from our sin-pardon towards suffering-awakening is not to deny the human capacity for wrongdoing. In fact, it lets us see more clearly why it is that we continue to act wrongly - because we are not ourselves, we do not see clearly. As the Desert Father Abba Bessarion said, 'We should be as the cherubim and seraphim: all eye.'

This is a very cursory exploration of a complex issue, but I think this change in emphasis is consistent with the gospel and lets us present the Christian way in a manner that makes sense in a society where we appear always to be giving the answer to a question no one is asking.

Apostolate of Friendship

For a monk who became a hermit, rarely allowed to travel far from the monastery, Thomas Merton developed and maintained many significant friendships. Some of these were with people he knew from before the time he enetered the monastery, others were people he never met, but corresponded with over a number of years. The biennial conference of the UK Thomas Merton Society has just finished in Oakham School in Rutland, where Merton was educated. Its focus was on a section of his correspondence with friends, much of it found in one of the five volumes of his published letters, The Road to Joy. Merton's friendships were often formed on the basis of deep kinship over matters of the spirit. He wrote, often out of the blue, to other writers, activists and thinkers and also responded to many unsolicited letters from people seeking his wisdom and insight.

In the first category, we see such significant figures as Boris Pasternak, Dorothy Day and the Zen scholar D.T. Suzuki. He kept a photograph of Suzuki in his hermitage as a further symbol of the esteem and affection in which he held him. His friendship with Suzuki is one that was, indeed, expressed in face to face meeting in New York in June 1964 when Suzukiu was 94. In his journal, he wrote; 'There really is a deep understanding between myself and this extraordinary and simple man whom I have been reading for about ten years with great attention. A sense of being "situated" in this world.' Merton expressed a deep feeling of being 'with family' when in the presence of Suzuki and his secretary, Mihoko.

 

In the second category, one speaker at the conference introduced a deeply thoughtful reflection on one letter that Merton wrote in July 1963 in response to a young man - 'John' - who had had a signficant experience while taking LSD and wanted to exploring the meaning of this experience. Merton's response is thoughtful, informal, caring and interested. He appreciates the young man's desire for understanding, but urges him not to 'tussle' with Merton's reflection but just to 'sit with it' in the hope that some kind of 'breakthrough' moment might occur. The issue is that our 'knowledge' of God is not on the level of 'communication that takes place by words' but of 'communion effected by love'. Merton described this young man as a friend and hoped that this level of friendship might allow some of the good that might lie in Merton's apprehension of this matter to be communicated to him - he was offering to do some of the 'seeing' on his behalf!

At the conference, it was clear that the extraordinary web of friendships that Merton nurtured through his extensive letter writing has something of an ongoing life. Those who gather to discuss his work and learn from him feel the same kind of affinity and kinship that he expressed to his correspondents. This 'apostolate of friendship' is concerned with nothing less than the nurturing of our humanity and our faith, which is much the same thing. People grow through such communication that transcends communication and becomes communion.

 

Reticence About Prayer

Some readers of Thomas Merton find it frustrating that he was so unspecific about methods or practicalities in prayer. Unlike other spiritual writers like his younger contemporary William Johnston, he gave no teaching about the 'how to' aspects of contemplative prayer. This was for a very good reason. He recognised the danger of focussing on technique when prayer is primarily a matter of faith and love. Technique might become an end in itself or become dissociated from the fundamental theological insights with which prayer belongs. Merton would have been aware of the risk of offering a 'Merton technique' that others might copy slavishly without recognising that prayer is one soul's response to the One who calls us in love. There is a further reason for his reticence, and it is to do with the insight that prayer is something precious and hidden, not for public parading or for peddling as a feel-good commodity.

He did, however, once give a picture of the character of his contemplative prayer, not exactly a practical guide, but more of an insight into his practice than he gave in his many books on the spiritual life. This insight comes in a letter to one of his many correspondents, Abdul Aziz. Merton never met Aziz, but conducted a long correspondence with him over a number of years from 1960-68, the year of Merton's untimely death. Aziz was a Pakistani government official with a keen interest in Sufism and he had been given Merton's contact details by a mutual friend, the orientalist Louis Massignon. In one of his later letters, Merton described his typical day, including this lovely description of his meditative practice, written with Sufi sensibilities in mind. It is worth quoting at length:

Now you ask me about my method of meditation. Strictly speaking I have a very simple way of prayer. It is centred entirely on attention to the presence of God and to His will and His love. That is to say that it is centred on faith by which alone we can know the presence of God. One might say this gives my meditation the character described by the Prophet as "being before God as if you saw Him." Yet it does not mean imagining anything or conceiving a precise image of God, for to my mind this would be a kind of idolatry. On the contrary, it is a matter of adoring Him as invisible and infinitely beyond our comprehension, and realizing Him as all. My prayer tends very much towards what you call fana. There is in my heart this great thirst to recognise totally the nothigness of all that is not God. My prayer is then a kind of praise rising up out of the center of Nothing and Silence. If I am present "myself" this I recognise as an obstacle about which I can do nothing unless He Himself removes the obstacle. If He wills then He can make the Nothingness into a total clarity. If He does not will, then the nothingess seems to itself to be an object and remains an obstacle. Such is my ordinary way of prayer, or meditation. It is not "thinking about" anything but a direct seeking of the Face of the Invisible, which cannot be found unless we become lost in Him who is Invisible. I do not ordinarily write about such things and I ask you therefore to be discreet about it. But I write this as a testimony of confidence and friendship. [Letter of January 2 1966, The Hidden Ground of Love p.62]

Making such hidden things public is done only in the hope that it inspires others to make their own loving adventure into that Silence and Nothingness.

Peacemaking is a way of life, not a quick fix

Yesterday's Gospel reading at mass was the section of Jesus' teaching in the Sermon on the Mount on non-retaliation and love for the enemy. I preached on this text using some of Gandhi's insights on nonviolence along with Thomas Merton's reflections on Gandhi. My principal concern was to say that Jesus makes it clear that love for enemy is key - 'The only real liberation is that which liberates both the oppressor and the oppressed at the same time from the same tyrannical automatism of the violent process which contains in itself the curse of irreversibility' (Merton, Gandhi on Non-Violence p.14, emphasis original).  We share a common problem with our enemy, who is also our neighbour and one like us. For Gandhi, nonviolence is not a political tactic but a way of life, a religious commitment and the fruit of a mature spirituality.

Inevitably, one or two people challenged me afterwards with the 'hard cases' of threatened genocide and with references to current conflicts in Syria and Ukraine. The problem behind these objections to the commitment to nonviolence is the assumption that nonviolent approaches 'don't work' and that the use of force does. I think this is a highly contestable view and I think there are very many examples of situations where the use of force has made as many problems as it appears to have solved. But this is not really the point. In Jesus teaching - and Gandhi followed him in this - the issue is not whether or not love for enemy produces a satisfactory outcome. We love our enemy not to get one over on him, but because we have recognised him as a child of God, a fellow human being. Nonviolence is the refusal to justify the means by the end. It is a commitment to live life free of the impulse for revenge because to do otherwise would be a dehumanising enslavement.

Merton summarises Gandhi's teaching like this:

'The evils we suffer cannot be eliminated by a violent attack in which one sector of humanity flies at another in destructive fury. Our evils are common and our solution of them can only be common. But we are not ready to undertake this common task because we are not ourselves. Consequently, the first duty of every man is to return to his own 'right mind' in order that society itself might be sane.' (ibid p.16)

Christianity does not have political solutions of its own to offer a violent world, but it does have spiritual responses. Penitence, self-control, love for enemy, love of God, recognition of the unity of all things and a steady commitment to truth-telling are daily disciplines that make transformation possible.

Merton and Cardenal

Ernesto Cardenal is perhaps best known to theologians of my generation as the priest, poet and liberation theologian behind the community at Solentiname in Lake Nicaragua. This radical experiment in Christian life produced a remarkable series of communal bible readings published in the mid 1970s as The Gospel in Solentiname. In these readings, the members of the community, along with campesinos from the islands, give insightful and contextual readings which have a luminous simplicity, a profound spirituality and an immediate connection to the world around them. For me, Solentiname shows how closely spirituality, art and engagement with the wider world belong together.

What I did not know until very recently is that Cardenal originally asked Thomas Merton if he could come to act as the community's spiritual father, living near them as a hermit. Cardenal had been a novice under Merton at Gethsemani and the two kept up a lively correspondence over the years after Cardenal left the Abbey. In the autumn of 1965, when he was setting up his community at Solentiname, Cardenal met with Merton to discuss how he might come to live with them in this way. Of course, there were all sorts of reasons why this proved difficult and it is hard to know how serious Merton was about taking up the offer. In his journals, Merton expresses a conviction that this call seemed to be from God, but that he would find the move disruptive after just beginning his long wished-for life as a hermit in the woods around the Abbey.

Nothing came of the plan but it is tempting to wonder what would have happened both to Merton and to the community if it had come to fruition. One thing it shows me is how significant the contemplative dimension was to Cardenal when he set out of his journey (not that this should surprise anyone who understands the proximity of art and contemplation!). On the other side, if Merton had found a place in this community, we can only wonder at how the radical and engaged dimension of his Christian commitment would have developed.

Merton has long since departed this life, but Cardenal is still with us and there is still an artistic community in Solentiname. And there remains, for those of us who care about a living faith, both and encouragement and a challenge to see life and faith as holistically as these two men did.

Why Merton Still Matters

45 years ago today, Thomas Merton died in an accident in the room where he was staying in Bangkok. He had just delivered a paper to an interfaith conference of monks entitled 'Marxism and Monastic Perspectives'. He was on a journey to Far East in fulfillment of a long-standing dream to encounter first hand the Eastern religions with which he had a lifelong dialogue. He had met with monks from Buddhist traditions, including the Dalai Lama, and many other religious figures from India, Thailand and Sri Lanka. As was his custom, he kept a journal during the visit and he chronicled the many significant encounters and insights of his travels. Here are some of the words he wrote in the earlier part of that journal, in the entry for November 7 1968, the day after his second meeting with the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala:

The contemplative life must provide an area, a space of liberty, of silence, in which possibilities are allowed to surface and new choices - beyond routine choice - become manifest. It should create a new experience of time, not as stopgap, stillness, but as "temps vierge" - not a blank to be filled or an untouched space to be conquered and violated, but a space which can enjoy its own potentialities and hopes - and its own presence to itself. One's own time. But not dominated by one's own ego and its demands. Hence open to others - compassionate time, rooted in the sense of common illusion and in criticism of it.

This brief paragraph and its context give three of the reasons why I think Thomas Merton still matters as a religious thinker in our contemporary world. First, this is a reflection that is offered in the context of an interfaith encounter and founded on the mature reflection by a Christian monk on his own tradition. Merton knew the Christian way of contemplative prayer from a theoretical and historical perspective, but above all from an experiential one. His dialogue with other faiths was focussed on inner experience and conducted with a deep understanding and respect that are only possible when one is secure in one's own tradition.

Second, it encapsulates Merton's experience of contemplation. This experience was forged in inner struggle and constant exploration of the depths of solitude. It speaks of the dangers of an illusory sense of identity and of the place where our true identity is found through grace. Merton brought the possibility of a contemplative way to 'ordinary' people of faith and not just to those called to a monastic life.

Third, it links contemplation with compassion. True meditation is not a flight from reality or a narcissistic self-absorption, but a discovery of one's true place in the universe, a place among all creatures as one of them. Merton's writing was directed both to the inner life and to the world of violence. His was a prophetic voice, longing for peace and humanity in the face of inhuman violence.

Merton was a poet, an artist, a constant letter-writer, a thinker, teacher and contemplative. Anyone who reads his journals will see his flawed humanity in its full colour and it is this candid, and often humourous humility that makes his writing so engaging. His message is as urgent today as it was then. Diaolgue; Contemplation; Peace - these are the marks of his life and teaching and they must be the marks of the church today.

 

On the Secrecy of Prayer

When I first started to read Thomas Merton some 25 years ago, I found myself frustrated by what I took to be his almost complete reticence about his own prayer life. How did he go about encountering God in silence, and why was he so coy about telling us?! More recently, I have come to value this reticence enormously for a number of reasons.

The first is that prayer is a mystery and a gift, not a technique, and although it helps to have some pratical advice when starting out on this adventure, it is far more important to have a wise guide who sees things more widely and deeply. If a teacher like Merton focuses on techniques and methods, there is a risk that those who are inspired by his teaching will make some kind of idol out of his 'method'.

The second is that prayer is not a matter for broadcasting about the place - it is the intimate encounter we have with God. We know how much it cheapens a human relationship to speak of it too freely with strangers. Intimacy needs secrecy.

Merton posed an interesting question in his New Seeds of Contemplation. He asked;

I wonder if there are twenty people alive in the world now who see things as they really are. That would mean there were twenty people who were free, who were not dominated or even influenced by any attachment to any created thing or to their own selves or to any gift of God, even to the highest, the most supernaturally pure of all his graces. I don't believe that there are twenty such people alive in the world. But there must be one or two. They are the ones who are holding everything together and keeping the universe from falling apart.

I have always found this a challenging and haunting thought. I'm not sure if agree with Merton on the numbers, and I would shy away from the danger of elitism in this thought, but it does seem to me that his basic instinct is right - the world is not held together by those who exercise their power for all to see, but by those who find freedom by seeking God in silent intimacy. We do not know who they are and that is as it should be. Heaven and earth are joined every time the Liturgy is celebrated and every time a human heart is turned towards God in humble, silent, secret, loving attention. If this did not happen, I do indeed believe that the world might collapse.

And yet, the vocation to seek such secret stillness is not the vocation of the lone hero setting out to save the world, but of the humble soul who cannot but respond to this gentle call to true freedom. The secret prayer of anyone who makes space for stillness, wherever they are, does change the world. It seems to me that the world is not saved by famous heroes but by anonymous contemplatives.

 

Would Thomas Merton Have Been a Blogger?

For a man who wrote so much, Merton was constantly, and sometimes irritatingly, ambivalent about his calling as a writer. He frequently vowed to give up writing, or at least to give up writing things that he didn't think were that good, though he did say that the last thing he would give up writing would be his journals. Merton's output was astonishing. As well as his well-known books and journals, he wrote poetry, articles, lectures for his novices and a great many letters. It seems that he simply couldn't stop writing, even if he claims to have resented the time his writing commitments stole from his times in contemplative prayer.

He was writing at a time when people accessed more forms of printed material, so it is reasonable to wonder whether such a proportion of such a vast output would today have found its way onto the internet instead of the pages of a periodical, journal, pamphlet or newsletter. I also find myself wondering how contemporary readers value writings in different media compared with their predecessors of 50 or 60 years ago. Would someone reading an article by Merton in the Catholic Worker magazine have given more weight to his words than the reader of a blog by a siginficant religious writer today? [As I write these words, I also find myself wondering who the significant religious wrtiers of today are and how many of them measure up to the stature of a spiritual writer like Lewis, Merton or Nouwen, but that is probably just a sign of my ageing...]

Behind my question lies an assumption: some readers still regard writing that appears solely on electronic media as being more ephemeral than writing that appears in print. If I'm honest, I think I am one of those readers! Having said that, I think there must have been some kind of 'hierarchy' of printed media in Merton's time too; did journals, articles and books carry the same weight? And if Merton had access to a blog, would he have used that platform for some of the writing that appeared in articles or journals?

Another interesting issue arises for a Catholic writer of his time, and that is the role of the Church censors, who had to approve any book that Merton published. And though he may have had more of a free reign in his journals (he didn't pull his punches when writing about his superiors!!) and articles, he was still aware of the authority of his monastic superiors whenever he put material into the public domain, not that this stopped him from saying what he thought. Nonetheless, I like to think that a writer like Merton, with his significant volume of output, his desire to foster dialogue with public figures and other writers (at least later in his life) and his prophetic voice would have jumped at the opportunity to write for online publication. He would, I am sure, have seen the opportunity to offer a distinctive spiritual persepective on a society in a time of turmoil, threat and rapid change. If I was a devotee of the hashtag, at this point I might say #greatblogsthatneverhappened...

Christian Nonviolence - a forgotten imperative?

To follow up on my thoughts yesterday, I reread some of Thomas Merton's thoughts on nonviolence. He was profoundly influenced by Gandhi's thinking and practice in this area, and Gandhi in turn had recognised his own debt to the Christian Gospels in his own thinking. Merton's essay, Blessed are the Meek, explores how the Christian approach to the nonviolent resistance of evil is founded on evangelical principles of justice, humility, love of neighbour, eschatalogical hope and love for the enemy. The refusal to employ violence in response to violence is based on the commitment to truth and to the wellbeing of all rather than the advancement of any partisan cause. Nonviolent methods used in the service of such partisan causes is mere manipulation.

Strikingly, Merton underlines the importance of acknowledging that we have something to learn from our enemy as a basis for commitment to nonviolence. I remember hearing the late Christopher Hitchens spitting with rage (literally) at the 'evil' Christian notion that we should love our enemy. He saw the world in rather binary terms and such a worldview inevitably leads to a constant and struggle in which no one ultimately triumphs. Christianity, on the other hand, acknowledges that our enemy may have something against us (Mt 5:23 - if your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift at the altar...). The humility to acknowledge this is the first step towards an outcome that benefits all and benefits the truth. Furthermore, if our enemy is 'one like us', do we not diminish humanity itself in seeking to destroy him or her? Merton's view is based on a more positive view of humanity than many so-called 'humanists' allow, but he is not unrealistic about the nature and depth of human sinfulness. There would be no need for nonviolent resistance in a world that was basically OK!

Merton also stresses the eschatalogical patience needed to act nonviolently. He draws on the 'Kingdom' parables that speak of seeds growing silently to show that our small actions in resisting evil nonviolently begin to make real what is already promised in the inaugurated Kingdom [interestingly, Merton was a fan of C.H. Dodd - this could explain his take on these parables!]. He describes our lust for instant results as a fetish.

Nonviolence is the ultimate recognition that means must be consistent with ends. If we use violence to overcome violence, we have already submitted to its 'logic'. As I said yesterday, the Cross has already offered us another way, and it is a costly way. Nonviolence demands commitment, faith and courage. 

It seems to me that the Christian insights into nonviolent resistance that were developed in the wake of Gandhi's leadership of his people and during the civil rights movement and the Vietnam war have receded from the churches' consciousness, at least in the Northern hemisphere. Have we turned our backs on the violence in the world? Have we bought into a secularist myth that we are so much nicer than we used to be? Have we become so wedded to the power interests of rich elites that we no longer know how to speak prophetically? Or have we withdrawn into a cosy spirituality that has become disconnected from the suffering world? I don't know, but it does seem to me that we would do well to recover a deeper commitment to nonviolent resistance of the violence that still surrounds us.