Encounters with Merton E-Book

Henri J. M. Nouwen

• Herausgeber: WS
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Seitenzahl: 134

Beschreibung

Encounters with Merton brings together two of the 20th century's most important and articulate Christian voices. Henri Nouwen explores themes of solitude, nonviolence, and the encounters between Eastern and Western spirituality as presented by Merton.

Leseprobe

The Crossroad Publishing Company

www.crossroadpublishing.com

Copyright © 1972, 1981, by Henri J. M. Nouwen.

Previously published as Pray to Live (Fides, 1972) and Thomas Merton: Contemplative Critic (Harper & Row, San Francisco, 1981; Liguori/Triumph 1991).

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of The Crossroad Publishing Company.

A full list of acknowledgments appears on p. 135.

Printed in the United States of America

Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress

ISBN 978-0-8245-9911-9

To Richard Alan White

Contents

Publisher’s Note

Preface to the Second Edition, by John Eudes Bamberger, O.C.S.O.

Abbreviations

Introduction

A Short Biography

1.    FROM SARCASM TO CONTEMPLATION

2.    THE WAY TO SILENCE

3.    CONQUERING SOLITUDE

4.    UNMASKING THE ILLUSION

5.    DISCOVERY OF THE EAST

Merton’s Prayer

Acknowledgments

Index of Names

Publisher’s Note

This book, Henri Nouwen’s reflections on the spirituality and life of Thomas Merton, was first written as Bidden om het leven (1970), soon appearing in English as Pray to Live (Fides, 1972; HarperSanFrancisco, 1981) and later as Thomas Merton: Contemplative Critic (Liguori Triumph, 1991). In those earlier editions, the book was divided into two halves — the first composed of Nouwen’s commentary, the second containing sometimes extended excerpts from Merton’s works, many of them hard to find or not yet published.

In preparation of the present edition for the Crossroad Nouwen Library, we integrated the two halves. Since Merton’s works are now readily available, we removed or abridged the lengthier Merton excerpts, as well as those with cultural references requiring detailed explanation. For Nouwen’s reflections, we did minor editing for style, gender inclusive language, and sociological terms, omitting nothing of the original content.

We are honored to have the opportunity to reintroduce this Nouwen classic to readers everywhere. Enjoy!

Preface to the Second Edition

By John Eudes Bamberger, O.C.S.O. Abbot of the Genesee

As the second edition of this book goes to press, some twelve years have passed since the death of Thomas Merton in Bangkok. Many more of his own writings have become available to the public in recent times, and still more has been written about his life and his work. As the years pass, Merton continues to have a broad appeal to all types of men and women in varied life situations.

Recent writings about Merton reveal more sensitivity to his thought, especially to his prayer and monastic experience, than some of the publications that appeared shortly after his death. Yet much remains to be done before an adequate picture can capture the various shades, colors, and nuances of his responses to his times. It will be many more years before anything approaching a more definitive study of Merton can be written. Only a few of the fifteen journals he wrote are as yet published; of the several thousand extant letters that contain some of his most personal thinking, only a very few have been made available. More important than either of these considerations, however, is that our times are still too near to those in which he wrote to evaluate and test the significance of many of his intuitions. A broader perspective is needed to fit into one picture the manifold themes and views that make up his life work and that express with adequate fullness the central realities that motivated and inspired him.

Still, Henri Nouwen has made broad and judicious use of the material available to him, and as a result he has been able to touch the heart of Thomas Merton’s writings. There, in the heart, he has discovered the sources of Merton’s inspiration and laid bare the connections between the various articulations of that vision of life and truth. He has seen that for Merton the way to relevance was the way of prayer and contemplation. Thomas Merton’s social and political critique was based not on public debate and analysis but rather on a contemplative penetration into the heart of God, where he discovered the concrete person living on earth today. Merton himself brought all his own experience, his sins and sufferings, but also his sensitivity for beauty and truth, to this contemplative discovery. He came to feel the plight of all who know suffering, especially suffering inflicted by our fellow beings. And he felt it with passion of profound identification. No one more than Merton showed that the monastic life is not a retreat from reality. On the contrary, his social and political critique was the fruit of a compassion learned through a life of monastic ascesis and contemplation.

Henri Nouwen met Merton but once, yet by a sympathy of feeling and perception he has understood the central motivation force of Merton’s life: meditation and prayer. He has seen this more truly and profoundly than some who, while claiming to be intimate friends of Merton, have altogether missed the point of his work and life through lack of feeling for his vision of God, humanity, and the cosmos. There is nothing surprising in this fact. True understanding depends not only on intelligence and proximity but above all on the heart.

Some of us had the chance to know Thomas Merton at Gethsemani for a long time, day by day, as monks know one another: simply, immediately, and unpretentiously. Some of us knew him too as a disciple knows a master, as a student knows a teacher, as a doctor knows a patient. We knew him in good days and bad, at his best and at his worst. We loved him as a brother, for he was a most lovable man in his unfailing and unpretentious accessibility. But above all we valued him as a man of God, with an unfailing and boundless enthusiasm for the monastic life and for the practices that were most central to contemplation, especially silence and solitude. We came to see that when he spoke with compassion for the oppressed of the earth, he spoke out of an awareness bought with his own anguish of heart and won by contemplative effort and insight. We saw that he was compassionate because he knew himself as having received the compassion of God. And, finally, we saw that it was not so much his brilliant intelligence that gave him ready insight into sociological and political problems but rather his compassion.

Whatever may be said about Merton, if it will be said truly it must present his vision and his work as the fruit of the knowledge of God bought with a faith come alive through contemplation. Restoration of right order and peace in the world was for Merton the fruit of the vision of God arrived at through deep prayer. Henri Nouwen has seen Merton in this perspective, and this book clearly reveals some of the concrete, practical consequences of this way of experiencing life. In reading this book one can meet, for a brief moment, the living spirit of Merton. It is a refreshing encounter.

Abbreviations

Argument:

My Argument with the Gestapo

Conjectures:

Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

Contemplation:

Contemplation in a World of Action

Faith:

Faith and Violence

Gandhi:

Gandhi on Non-Violence

Journal:

The Secular Journal

Mountain:

The Seven Storey Mountain

Seeds:

Seeds of Destruction

Sign:

The Sign of Jonas

Thoughts:

Thoughts in Solitude

Way:

The Way of Chuang Tzu

Zen:

Zen and the Birds of Appetite

Introduction

This book is an introduction to the life and thought of Thomas Merton. I met him only once, at the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky. Yet thereafter, his person and work had such an impact on me that his sudden death stirred me as if it had been the death of one of my closest friends. It therefore seems natural for me to write for others about the man who has inspired me most in recent years.

I have tried here to uncover a few main trends in Merton’s richly diverse and very productive life, in order to help people better understand his commitment to a contemplative critique of himself and his world. I hope that these short chapters will lead to an attentive meditation on Merton’s own writings and to a continuing search for a contemplative foundation of our fragmented, restless lives. . . .

I am very grateful to David Schlaver, Joe Freeman, Steve Thomas, and Barbara Henry for their generous help in the preparation of the manuscript, and to Inday Day for her competent secretarial assistance.

Special thanks I owe to John Eudes Bamberger, abbot of the Genesee, who for many years shared Merton’s life as a monk at Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky and knew him well not only as his personal friend but also as his physician. His willingness to annotate the text made me overcome my hesitation to publish this book.

I have dedicated this book to Richard Alan White. His strong friendship and penetrating criticisms of my ideas and lifestyle gave me a deeper appreciation of Merton’s intuition, that contemplation and revolution are two forms of radicalism that never should be separated.

A Short Biography

Thomas Merton was born on January 31, 1915, in Prades, France. His father was a painter, a New Zealander by birth; his mother, who also painted, originally came from Ohio. He was the older of two boys. (John Paul, born in 1918, was killed in 1943 during an air battle over the English Channel.) Although Thomas’s father seldom or never visited a church, and his mother only now and then went to Quaker meetings, he was still baptized. This apparently had little impact on his upbringing.

In 1916 the Merton family moved to the United States and went to live on Long Island, New York. When Thomas was six his mother died, and he and his brother went to live with their grandparents, while his father, as before, continued to make trips to exhibit his canvases. In 1925 the elder Merton took his son with him to France and sent him to study in the lyceum in Montauban. In his fourteenth year Thomas went with his father to England and there entered high school in Oakham (Rutland). Already during this period he was developing a great interest in English literature; William Blake, D. H. Lawrence, and James Joyce were his favorite authors.

In 1931, Thomas’s father died in London from a brain tumor. Thomas, then sixteen, finished his studies in Oakham and received a scholarship for Clare College at Cambridge University, where he stayed until 1934. His summers he spent with his grandparents in the United States or traveling through Europe. During his trips in Italy and Germany, he gathered the impressions that he used in his first novel. In February 1935, at the age of twenty, he went to Columbia University and studied Spanish, German, geology, constitutional law, and French literature. There he joined the communist youth movement and became art editor for the student publication Jester.

Through the book The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy by Etienne Gilson, Thomas Merton became interested in scholasticism. He followed the courses on St. Thomas and Duns Scotus given by Daniel Walsh, who later became a friend of his. In these years he also developed a close friendship with Bramachari, a Buddhist monk who pointed him toward the great riches of Christendom. In 1938 he undertook religion lessons with Father Moore, who received him into the Catholic Church on November 16 of that year.

At twenty-four, upon receiving his master’s degree in English literature at Columbia, he became an English teacher at Columbia University Extension, New York, and a book reviewer for the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune. Through many conversations with his friend Bob Lax and by studying St. John of the Cross, he began to feel a desire to become a priest.

At first he wanted to become a Franciscan, but when it was made clear to him in a discourteous manner that he didn’t have a vocation, he dropped this plan.

From 1939 to 1941 he taught English at St. Bonaventure’s College in Olean, New York. During his two years there, Thomas Merton led an almost monastic life, wrote a diary and three novels — none of which was accepted for publication — and went on retreat at the Trappist monastery in Gethsemani, Kentucky. In 1941 Merton left St. Bonaventure’s and went to work in the African American ghetto of Harlem under the direction of Baroness Catherine de Hueck.

After a second visit to the Trappists of Gethsemani, he decided to join them. He gave his clothes to the African Americans in Harlem and his books to the Franciscans and a friend. He tore up two of his novels and sent the rest of his work — his poetry, a manuscript of the novel Journal of My Escape from the Nazis, and his diary — to his friend Mark Van Doren.

Completely alone, with a small duffel bag in his hand, twenty-six-year-old Thomas Merton arrived at Gethsemani on December 10, 1942. There he lived as a member of the community until 1968, the last three years in a hermitage. The publication of his autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, in 1948 suddenly made Merton an internationally known author, whose many books and articles deepened the spiritual life of many Christians and non-Christians throughout the world. In the twenty-six years of his Trappist life he left the cloister on only a few occasions. When he was fifty-three, in 1968, he received permission to make an orientation trip to the Far East. In attending this conference of abbots from Christian contemplative monasteries in Asia, he had hoped to become more intimate with Eastern spirituality. He visited many Buddhist monasteries, spoke on various occasions with the Dalai Lama, led discussions, and gave a lecture for the monks and nuns who had gathered for the conference.

On December 10, 1968, shortly after his lecture, he was found dead in his room. Contact with a defectively wired fan had electrocuted him. His body was brought back to his monastery, and on December 17 he was buried at Gethsemani.

Chapter One

From Sarcasm to Contemplation

Today we know Thomas Merton as one of the most impressive contemplatives of our time. Yet in his youth, we find him more a sardonic and witty spectator, in whom the seeds of contemplation only gradually come to fruition. Even more than his detailed autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, which Thomas Merton wrote in Gethsemani, his diary The Secular Journal unveils for us the life of the young Merton. In this diary, written long before it was published, we find the direct, spontaneous reactions of a young intellectual who does not yet know whether the world is to be loved or ridiculed.

The short, fragmentary diary lets us see Thomas Merton as an intelligent, well-read, and well-traveled “graduate,” who with poignant sarcasm perceives his surroundings and gives his commentary on them. Most noticeable in the Journal, perhaps, is the somewhat brutal nonchalance with which he criticizes the “stage” of the world. Nevertheless, by reading it we quickly recognize its writer to be an exceptionally sensitive young man, one who, parentless since his sixteenth year, was constantly searching, through travel and books, for something or someone to whom he could give his full dedication.

Distant Perception

When Merton, almost twenty years after writing this diary, prepared the foreword for its publication, he said: