John 14:15-21
May 25, 2014
When
I graduated from college my campus minister gave me a book: “New Seeds of Contemplation,” by Thomas
Merton. I didn’t really read it for
years. In part, I was confused by the
gift. I picked it up shortly after
graduating and it appeared to have nothing to do with what I had learned about
Christianity and faith during my time at college.
College,
in large part thanks to my campus minister, was a time when my social
consciousness exploded. I spent a lot of
time talking about and thinking about my faith in light of the pain, suffering,
and injustice in the world. I came to
know Jesus as a radical activist. I was
involved in protesting the US involvement in El Salvador, the Israeli
occupation of Palestine, the economic policies of our country – really anything
that gave me the chance to hold a sign and march in the streets.
New
Seeds of Contemplation begins this way: “Contemplation
is the highest expression of man’s intellectual and spiritual life. It is that life itself, fully awake, fully
aware that it is alive. It is spiritual
wonder.” Contemplation and spiritual
wonder were simply not in my vocabulary; I searched the book quickly for the
words justice or protest, and finding neither I decided that my campus minister
had made a mistake and given me a book he never read.
This
Trappist monk, Thomas Merton – or Father Louis as he was known in his monastery
in Gethsemani, Kentucky – was a contemplative.
He lived in the monastery for 27 years, the last few alone in a
hermitage, praying, worshipping, reading, and writing. And while it was not always easy, he fully
embraced this life and believed in his vocation until the day he died.
But,
as I came to learn, he also struggled over the years with the relationship of
the contemplative life to the human struggles and sufferings going on outside
the walls of the monastery. As he grew
as a monk and in his faith, he evolved into a person who knew deeply this
connection – and that evolution, he would say, was entirely due to the God he
came to knew through his life of contemplation.
Merton
was born in France, but he moved often.
He lost his mother at 6 years old, and his father was variously around
and not, until he died when Merton was 16, living at a boarding school. They never had much money, and they were not
a religious family to speak of.
Merton
described his childhood as one of pain and extreme loneliness. He writes that he was, after his father died,
“without a home, without a country, without a father, apparently without any
friends, without any interior peace or confidence or light or understanding.” In other words, he was a lost soul looking
for salvation.
After
his father died, while in undergraduate and grad school, he read extensively
and he also began the slow path to becoming a Roman Catholic – where he would
indeed find himself again.
In
1941 Merton started volunteering at a non-profit in Harlem, and at one point he
considered staying there permanently as a lay Christian in a life of poverty
and service. But during this time someone urged him to go on retreat at the
Abby of Gethsemani. After that retreat
he wrote, “This is the center of America…This is the only real city in America
– in a desert.” (later he would be
embarrassed about how melodramatic this was!).
But,
he entered the monastery as a postulant on December 10, 1941. At this point in life, Merton was plagued
with guilt about things he had done as a child and young man, and was convinced
of the evils and temptations of the world.
He believed the only faithful choice was to withdraw from the world and
its evils and enter a life of contemplation.
Contemplation
for Merton was not too different from what is described in our gospel passage
this morning. The author of John talks
about abiding in the spirit, loving God, Jesus being in us and we being in
Jesus. These are phrases about connection,
about relationship with God and each other.
For
Merton, contemplation was the awakening to God and God’s spirit, in us and in
the creation. It was steeping yourself
in the love of God, and listening for how to live God’s commandments. A number of times the language Merton uses
when describing the contemplative life echo, if not copy, these words from the
gospel of John. This life, this way of
being, contemplation, was the ground of Merton’s entire life.
As a
monk Merton was not exactly like the others.
Mostly he was always a bit restless in the community (and often a bit at
odds with the Abbot), and he yearned for a completely solitary life. He was also an avid reader and prolific
writer, and his writings, beginning with his autobiographical “The Seven Storey
Mountain,” were wildly popular beyond the monastery. Though no one in the monastery really knew
it, Merton was famous.
In
fact, people have tried to compile bibliographies of Merton’s and they have
gone on for dozens and dozens of pages: books, essays, poems. In Wikipedia, the partial bibliography of
Merton has its own separate page completely because it’s so long. In addition to everything he published, he
meticulously kept a journal which details, in brutal honesty, his entire life, and
all his thoughts and ponderings. He also kept correspondence with numerous
people over the years. These people
ranged in diversity from friends to famous authors, from Christians to Hindus,
Buddhists, and Jews. These were not
letters describing his daily life. These
letters were dialogues with some of the best thinkers of his time about the
life of faith.
Through
all these writings, you can see how he changed in his thinking over the
years. In one of his early books he
wrote about how God plants seeds of love in us, but they don’t grow because the
seeds are overcome by evils in the world.
He writes, “Let us throw off the pieces of this world like clothing and
enter naked into wisdom.” When Merton
began at the monastery, the world was a place to escape from because any
dealings with it would keep you from finding God.
It
doesn’t take long before you see Merton begin to ask questions that challenge
this notion that withdraw from the world is how we find God. He was haunted by what was happening in the
world. At one point he wrote, “All over
the face of the earth the avarice and lust of men breed unceasing divisions
among them, and the wounds that tear men from union with one another widen and
open out into huge wards. Murder,
massacres, revolution, hatred, the slaughter and torture of the bodies and
souls of men, the destruction of cities by fire, the starvation of millions,
the annihilation of populations and finally the cosmic inhumanity of atomic
war: Christ is massacred in His members,
torn limb from limb; God is murdered in men.”
The
sufferings of the world impacted him greatly, and he struggled with the
question of how does a monk live apart from the world but not be indifferent to
it? How does one live out the
traditional monastic flight from world without making that flight into a
gesture of callous contempt for the world?
In
answer to these questions, he began to look for ways he could share with the
world what he called “the fruits of his contemplation.” In other words, he began to realize that
contemplation was not just for him and his relationship with God, but such a
life offered him a vantage point from which to engage and impact an
increasingly distressed world.
Merton
believed that if he could find unity with God in contemplation, that unity
would then be possible in the fractured world.
Union with God, with Christ, and with others were all of the same cloth. Merton writes, “When the love of God is in
me, God is able to love you through me and you are able to love God through
me.”
If we
want the races to be reconciled, then we start with finding unity in
ourselves…you can’t, he knew, impose unity on one another. It has to be contained with in each of
us. This unity was the fruit of his
contemplation, and he knew he had to share it with the world, which he did
through his writings. One of the great
gifts of Merton’s life was to model for the world how to be in relationship
with people from a different faith traditions.
He spent his life in conversation with Buddhists, Hindus and Jews,
including Thich Naht Hahn, the Dalai Lama, and Abraham Heschel – all of whom he
respected greatly. “God speaks,” he
wrote, “and God is to be heard, not only in my heart, but in the voice of the
stranger.”
Merton
believed that even though monks may flee the world, they are, whether they like
it or not, part of the world – which includes war, race hatred, mass media, big
business, technology, and so on. To
pretend that such a world does not exist in the name of contemplative living,
he decided, is immoral.
Merton
had his critics, in some senses from opposite corners. First, he had his critics from other monks,
the Catholic hierarchy, and fellow Catholics.
He was criticized for being too leftist – he refused to stand with the
West in the cold war, he supported the civil rights movement, vehemently
opposed the Vietnam War, and wrote often about nuclear disarmament.
On
the other hand he was criticized by people in the peace and justice movements
for not standing with them on the front lines.
Joan Baez, for example, once went to the monastery to beg him to leave
there and enter the “real” world where people are fighting for peace. These criticisms were more agonizing for him.
One
of the things he would tell his friends/critics in the peace and justice
movement was that he felt like he could be most helpful where he was because he
was “on the edge” of it all. He could be
prophetic because he was not steeped in a culture that could swallow people up
without them knowing it. He had a
perspective that was unique and would be lost if he left the monastery.
In
being on the edge, he also saw his monastic life as a protest against
injustices. He writes, “To adopt a life
that is essentially non-assertive, non-violent, a life of humility and peace is
in itself a statement of one’s position…by my monastic life and vows I am saying
NO to all the concentration camps, the aerial bombardments, the staged
political trials, the judicial murders, the racial injustices, the economic
tyrannies, and the whole socioeconomic apparatus…I make monastic silence a
protest against the lies of politicians, propagandists, and agitators, and when
I speak it is to deny that my faith and my Church can ever seriously be aligned
with these forces and injustices.”
It is
in this way that I think Merton has much to say to us non-catholic, non-monks,
and non-nuns. This is because he raises
a very important question that we need to wrestle with ourselves, even if we
don’t come to the same conclusions. We
have to ask ourselves how to live and oppose the evils of our culture – where
Christ is being massacred, as Merton would say – without being swallowed up by
the false promises of a purely materialistic existence. In other words, if we are living in the very
culture we see destroying others, can we separate ourselves enough to see
clearly what needs to be done? One of
Merton’s deep longings was to find ways to help people who weren’t living a
monastic life a chance to find some measure of peace and solitude…to “get
perspective” as he called it.
Short
of joining a monastery, how do we put ourselves at the edge of culture enough
so we can have perspective and be prophetic.
I suspect we need more than this, but Church – worship – is certainly
one way we have to step out of time and space to gain some perspective. We seek God in our worship, and with all of
the symbols and forms that are so different from the world in which we live, we
affirm that God can be distorted by the trappings of our individualistic,
materialistic culture, and so we need to shed those distortions – if only for
an hour – to draw closer to God.
Here
we try to grab at least a few moments of silence, precious in this world of
constant noise. Here we look for ways to
defy consumerism – passing a plate for offering without demanding we “get”
anything in return. Here things look and
feel differently – sometimes so much so it makes us uncomfortable. No screens, no pop music, no couches; we read
ancient words, pray ancient prayers, and do everything we can to remember that
our life is not ours…it is God’s. We try
to strip away the trappings of our every day life that seek to attract our gaze
and turn us away from the sufferings of our neighbors.
Merton
writes, “Without a certain element of solitude there can be no compassion
because when a man is lost in the wheels of a social machine he is no longer
aware of human needs as a matter of personal responsibility.” Contact and union with God are essential to
act rightly in the world…for Merton, and we need opportunities outside of our
normal experience to fully connect with God.
We
have to find connection to God, not because it feels good, or makes us believe
something, but because it means that God lives in us and moves in us and pulls
us out of that which destroys us and others. “If you love me, you will keep my
commandments,” the gospel says. This
does not mean keeping the commandments is how we love God. It is our love for, our connection to, God
that compels us to keep the commandments.
Merton
died in a freak accident in 1968, when he was just shy of 54 years old. It was an incredible loss for the world. But he helped many, myself included,
understand that life is not action alone.
Action alone, without intentionally nurturing a connection to God, can
be dangerous. We might think we are
doing the “right” thing, but without a chance to see where we are blind to our
own distortedness and enculturation our actions will not always be faithful to
the God who calls us into this world to care for other people.
Merton
was an activist, he worked for social justice and protested many evils in the
world. I admire him for this. But the most important thing he teaches me is
that God is not an “add on” to living the gospel. God is the first mover, the primary
motivator, the one in whom I rest and dwell, the one who helps us transcend the
world so that we might transform the world.
In Merton’s words – which draw explicitly on our passage this morning:
“Christ
prayed that all men might become One as He was One with His Father, in the
Unity of the Holy Spirit. Therefore when
you and I become what we are really meant to be, we will discover not only that
we love one another perfectly but that we are both living in Christ and Christ
in us, and we are all One Christ.” Amen.
