THOMAS MERTON: A PATHFINDER CONTEMPLATIVE

 Robert Trabold

    Father Carl Arico addressed the Queens/Long Island Centering Prayer chapters on January 26, 2008 and gave talks on the life, works and contribution of Thomas Merton, one of the most eminent spiritual leaders of the 20th century. Merton was born in France in 1915 of artistic parents and both died when he was yet a young man. He was educated in boarding schools in Europe and eventually ended up at Columbia University in New York City to do graduate studies.  He was a brilliant student, led a worldly student social life, and dabbled in Marxism, anarchism, etc. He eventually felt the finitude of this style of life and was baptized into the Catholic Church.  His conversion deepened and he felt called to enter the Trappist Order in 1941. At the time, he also published his autobiography The Seven Story Mountain that became a best seller all over the world.

     During the years of his life as a monk, he was encouraged to write and had positions of responsibility in the training of young monks. During his life as an author, he wrote 36 full-length books, many articles, poetry and over 500 letters giving guidance to people who consulted him. He was involved in the East -West contemplative dialogue that enabled him to articulate and rediscover the Christian mystical tradition and see how the Eastern and western contemplative paths relate to and compliment one another. Living in the 1960’s, he became very involved in the social issues of that time and befriended many leaders such as Martin Luther King. During the Vietnam War, he wrote about the peace issue and faced certain restrictions on publishing because the order feared that he might be imprisoned as “un-American.” He died in 1968 in Asia while he was participating in a conference of western and eastern monks discussing the contemplative life.

     We contemplatives have much to be grateful for to Thomas Merton because in the 1960’s, he was a leader in the rediscovery of the Christian contemplative path which had been rejected in the Protestant Reformation and later suppressed by the Catholic Church. He made this discovery in his dialogue with the monks from Asia in which both mutually enriched one another. He wrote many books and articles on the contemplative path and mystical prayer that are helpful to us in our inward journey.

  1.  In talking about his own contemplative prayer, Merton notes that meditation is an orientation to God’s presence deep within us, perhaps more present to us than we are to ourselves, but it also has a dimension of transcendence, ineffability and mystery. For this reason, we have to let go of our images about God and be content to encounter God in silence and darkness. In this quiet, we are not to try to think about God but focus on the presence of the absolute. In addition, he counsels us to ‘let go’ of everything within us and concentrate on our desire to know, taste and experience the interior presence of God. Growth in contemplative prayer requires a detachment from the things of the world so that we can orientate ourselves completely to our inward journey and meet the Beloved at our center and still point.
     

  2. Concerning our growth in the Christian faith and contemplative prayer, Merton mentions that we have to get to know ourselves and see our own defects and selfishness.  It is necessary for us to correct these tendencies within us before we can encourage others to become God-like.  Unless we get our own house in order, we will communicate to others our own self-centered ambitions and obsessions.
     

  3. With his dialogue with the monks from the East, Merton saw that Christianity and Buddhism agreed that the human consciousness has problems in that it does not apprehend reality as it really is. He believed that these two religions are trying to liberate humans so that they can really apprehend the truth about themselves and the world. The role of the monks in both religions is to teach people how to love and this can liberate them to a new way of life for themselves and be help to the world.

    In conclusion, if we look at Western Christianity today, there are many movements of contemplative prayer, such as, the Centering Prayer Movement, the John Main Meditation Movement, the Zen-Christian Prayer Movement, etc. That we have these movements at our disposal and so have the opportunity to grow in contemplative prayer has much to do with the pioneering work that Merton did in articulating the mystical tradition as it grew out of his encounter with the monks of the East. The religious leaders who founded the above movements also had contact with these eastern religious leaders and were then inspired to begin the various contemplative prayer movements of today. Therefore, we are living in a time of great grace and should appreciate the contribution that Merton made to bring this rich prayer tradition back to Western Christianity. He left behind many books and articles on contemplation to which we can refer and find help and inspiration to grow and persevere in our inward journey.

 

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