Merton Thomas - Dancing in the water of life: seeking peace in the hermitage

Thomas Merton copied this Lear limerick into a 1964 Reading Notebook during the period when he was writing this volume of his private journals, dated August 1963End 1965. Written regularly (but not day by day) and without major interruption, the journal covers a period when Merton had been in the monastery of Our Lady of Gethsemani for more than twenty years, in which he passed his fiftieth birthday, and in which he began a new style of life and monasticism in what he called the hermitage. Merton is one of the most noted spiritual writers and masters of our time. While the journal offers abundant insights into and queries about the spiritual life, Merton lets us see that it is no easy task to find spiritual, or even physical, peace. His own struggle to accomplish the task is a consistent Merton theme and it provides the framework for this journal.

Charles Lears limerick encapsulates in a fanciful, yet serious, way Mertons mood during these two and a half years. Merton, while undoubtedly amused by the limerick, probably copied it because he identified himself with the old man of Whitehaven. We can imagine, first of all, that Whitehaven in Mertons mind is a play on New Haven, a small town just over the knobs from Gethsemani. Next, Merton began in this period to think of himself as an old man, stemming in part no doubt from his turning fifty but also from what he knew was diminishing physical well-being and energy. He was growing old, he thought, and yet resolution of the circumstances and activities of his life had reached only uneasy and uncertain solution. As he bobbed up and down the knob called Mount Olivet on his way from the monastery to the hermitage and back, Merton was, in the jargon of todays youth, having a dance in his own head. Like the old man of Whitehaven, Merton found himself in a kind of cerebral quadrille, whirling around seemingly without purpose or direction.

The raven has historically been a bird of ambivalent imagesometimes helpful, sometimes ominous, sometimes deadly. Ravens fed the prophet Elijah when he hid from wicked Queen Jezebel in the wilderness. Frequently depicted as a companion of St. Benedict, the raven acts as a protector of all who follow Benedicts monastic Rule (which Merton as a Cistercian of the Strict Observance did). On the other hand, the raven is also a bird of prey, one of the birds of appetite of Buddhist lore, a scavenger, a carrion eater, and often a precursor of doom. Certainly not graceful on the ground, the raven symbolizes the ambivalence and awkwardness that persist in Merton as he dances with specters of his own creationthe specters of anger, angst, agitation, and alienation that he cannot seem to exorcise from within himself. As he dances, he himself ravens (in another sense of the word), seeking and attempting to seize gratification as monk, solitary, and writer. He rapaciously indulges his own will through what he sees but cannot seem to stop as indecision, procrastination, drift, and vacillation.

Merton saw much in his life and in the world around him that was absurd. The word absurd, in fact, recurs with frequency in this journal. In the limerick, theythat inevitable they who, we may assume, are the arbiters of what is proper and normalthink the raven is the problem and that the dancers encouraging the bird is absurd. Yet, for Merton, the monk must encourage dancing with the raven in order to reconcile the absurdity in himself. They want to stop the quadrille, and they try to end it, not by doing anything to the raven, but by smashing the old man of Whitehaven, he who encourages the protective yet rapacious bird to dance. There is no doubt that Merton continually felt smashed in this period, especially by his efforts to deal with the specters indicating that his writing, his vocation, his solitude were self-indulgent rather than genuine. Forces from outside the monastery continually smashed him: publishing business, visitors, peace movements, and ecumenical conferences. Merton may have perceived Dom James Fox, abbot of Gethsemani, as the chief smasher within the monastery, but disgruntlement with the monastic complex was almost equally as smashing. The continuing tension between dancing and smashingbetween contentment and curtailmenthelps to account for the highs and the lows, the joy and the despair, the enthusiasm and the carping that come through in this volume. Smashed Merton may have been at times, but the quadrille went on in his head and he could not seem to stop dancing with the raven. He could not stop the absurdity.