Thomas Merton - Contemplation in a World of Action

Contemplation in a World of Action

Gethsemani Studies

in Psychological and
Religious Anthropology

Ernest Daniel Carrere, O.C.S.O.

Series Editor

Funded by a generous grant from

Richard C. Colton, Jr.

Thomas Merton

Contemplation in a World of Action

Foreword by Robert Coles, M.D.

University of Notre Dame Press

NOTRE DAME, INDIANA

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, IN 46556

undpress.nd.edu

All Rights Reserved

Copyright 1998 by University of Notre Dame
Published in the United States of America

Designed by Wendy McMillen

Set in 10.5/14 Galliard by The Book Page, Inc.

Cover photograph by John Howard Griffin 1995 by Elizabeth Griffin-Bonazzi

Reprinted in 2001, 2003

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Merton, Thomas, 19151968.

Contemplation in a world of action / Thomas Merton.

p. cm. (Gethsemani studies in psychological and religious anthropology)

ISBN 0-268-00834-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-268-16236-8 (hardback)

1. Monastic and religious life. 2. Spiritual lifeCatholic Church. I. Title. II. Series.

BX2435.M46 1999

248.8'94dc21

98-46482

ISBN 9780268162375

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at .

Contents

by Robert Coles, M.D.

The pages that follow give us a great gift: Thomas Merton, the well-known storyteller who wrote with an engaging, sometimes captivating lyrical intensity, as well as essayist who dared contemplate in the middle years of this past century an America gone awry, both at home and in its actions abroad, now addresses us in quite another way.

This very Thomas Merton, so known to many of us for his lifes moral and spiritual drama, for his courageous, compelling, often special and idiosyncratic voice (his manner of being!) turns his attention (and with it, ours) to the world he called his own for so long, that of the monastery and, beside it, the secular world we take for granted in our daily lives. Ironically, Merton does so with fear of irony. He who took sharp and pointed aim at many secularists and the occasional emptiness and sadness of their lives now reaches out with a telling gratitude and humility to those whose thoughts and theories, whose ways of seeing and understanding, have something (so he feels) to offer the monastic milieu. A whole tradition of psychological introspection and social observation is daringly embraced, welcomed, given close scrutiny for all it can mean to monks who are, after all, fellow human beings of us who live in colleges and universities, in hospitals, law firms, and places of business.

In a sense, it is no surprise that Merton here so vigorously and knowingly turns to Freud and his intellectual descendants. Again and again the word identity or the phrase identity crisis gets summoned, although nowhere mentioned is the name of child psychoanalyst Erik H. Erikson, who first used this language. His immensely important writing and research constantly emphasize the struggle so many of us wage, in adolescence and beyond, as we try to find a personal destiny for ourselves and try also to make commitments to others. We give ourselves over to others, both individuals and institutions and, more broadly, to places where we work and to neighborhoods in which we live, while reserving for ourselves a certain distance: the right, it can be said, to be appreciative and responsive and loyal, with the obligation to find a proper respect for our own personal or private ideas and ideals.

Indeed, as I read through Mertons comments on the monastic life as it has developed and changed over the centuries (and not least here in America), I kept remembering Erik H. Eriksons words as I read them in his various writings and as I was privileged to hear them as a member of a seminar he taught and, eventually, as someone who interviewed him many times, often with the help of a tape recorderin the end, writing his biography.

No wonder, then, I remembered a particular conversation with Erikson when I read a chapter titled The Identity Crisis in Mertons book. In fact, throughout the book, in chapter after chapter, the child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in me was stirred, as was the student of Erikson and of his teacher Anna Freud (she almost single-handedly got her father to pay close heed to young people and their tensions as they tried to find a life for themselves).

Erikson never allowed himself to forget his own situation. He could be a bemused, even worried observer of Americas youth, its young men and women at times lost in their fads, crushes, kicks, but not rarely lost in themselves, in preoccupations, worries, fears that were all too unnerving. Nevertheless, like Merton, he could readily turn his gaze inward and thereby take stock of the profession that meant a lot to him, the people he knew as colleagues, the places they assembled. Thus, in his Harvard Library study during the summer of 1967 amidst the struggles of the civil rights era, many of them instigated and kept going by young people in the midst of adolescence, this response after I had given him some descriptions of my work in the South with those youths: As I listen to you I realize how much they have to say to people like you and me: we have some rules and regulations, some outmoded customs and ideas and principles to examine and outgrow, both! I look at our [psychoanalytic] institutions, and I see plenty of the conformity and smugness some of our rebellious adolescents denounce. Its so easy for us to use our psychological language to put down othersand all the while we fail to notice our own shortcomings, and worse! Thats the big question, once you start being really honest with yourself (never mind honest about what you see in others!)how do you keep your eyes and ears open, and hold on to what youve been given in your profession? I mean, how do you accept what you really do valueand take that acceptance seriously enough so that you see where mistakes have been made, wrong directions pursued?

He had himself stressed fidelity as a proper and salutary outcome of the identity crisisthe way one caught up in such confusion, turmoil, uncertainty, and perplexity can at the same time explore new ideas and new ways of seeing, being, and learn as well what really matters in this or that world, what is worth respecting on the one hand or setting aside, leaving behind on the other. Erik walks a tightrope often with ease and grace, Anna Freud told me in London as she, very much like him, was distinguishing between what of a particular tradition she held close to her heart but also found worthy of criticism, in need of vigorous disagreement, refutation. In her amplifying words: Sometimes we become all too sure of ourselves, all too willing to denounce others, renounce what they saida measure of our passion to control things and, I regret to say, hear only the echoes of our own voices!

I know Thomas Merton would have shared with Miss Freud and with Erik Erikson, were they somehow brought together, the experiences he shares here with us. He would have heard from them, in return, their assents, seen from them nods, widened eyes of interest and of awakened memory and reflection.

Here is a book that very much belongs to any of us who want to consider young people as they seek their vocations, and to older people who need to stop and think not only what they believe and want to see happening in others, but what has happened in themselves, to them and their co-workers, trusted colleagues.