MERTON, THOMAS – FROM HIS WRITINGS

1. The Seven Storey Mountain - an autobiography recording Merton's childhood (influenced by his Quaker mother); education in private schools (financed by his grandfather); wild period and sporadic attraction to the Catholic Church with eventual conversion and later induction into the priesthood at Gethsemani Trappist Monastery, Kentucky. Very passionate/powerful passages on the meaning to Merton of his vocation, wherein because of his spiritual communicative skill he was 'directed' to write 30+ books of prose and poetry. A 'pilgrim's progress' of Catholic spirituality.

2. Mystics and Zen Masters (1961) - an analysis of Western, European, Russian, Chinese, Japanese and Existential thought and spiritual mysticism, from which the following has been extracted:

· Zen is NOT simply sitting quietly away from everything and “guarding the mind” to keep it clean of all concepts; nor is it a resting in one's own interiority. Rather, Zen is a complete release from bondage to the limited and subjective self - 'The truth that makes us free' - i.e. not the truth as an object of knowledge only, but the truth lived and experienced in concrete and existential awareness. The aim of Zen, like Buddhism itself, is the "ultimate emancipation from duality", and is neither ‘atheistic’ nor ‘pantheistic’ since God is neither affirmed nor denied by Buddhism insofar as Buddhists consider such affirmations and denials to be dualistic and therefore contrary to emancipation from all forms of dualistic thought.

The day before his death, Suzuki stated "Remember that Zen always aspires to make us see directly into Reality itself, that is to be Reality itself so that we can say “Christ is born every moment in my soul” and that “God's Isness is my Isness”.

· One of the most astute sayings of the Tao Te Ching is that in a war the winner is likely to be the side that enters the war with the most sorrow (i.e. knowing what losses and damage lie ahead).

Again, from the Tao, the five basic relationships platforming family and civilization are:

Father to son - Justice

Mother to son - Compassion, or merciful love

Son to parents - Filial love (our person is received as a gift from our parents and is to be fully developed out of gratitude toward them)

Elder brother to younger brother - friendship

Younger to elder – respect

from which arises a wonderful organic complex of strength from the father, warmth from the mother, gratitude from the son and wholesome, respectful friendship between brothers.

· From the teachings of Mother Ann Lee, of the Shakers:

i. Do be natural – a poor diamond is better than an imitation

ii. Do not be troubled because you have no great virtues. God made a million spears of grass where he made one tree.

iii. Do be truthful; do avoid exaggeration – if you mean a mile, say a mile, and if you mean one, say one and not a dozen.

iv. Whatever is really useful is virtuous though it at first does not seem so.

v. Every force evolves a form.

vi. Order is the creation of beauty. It is heaven's first law, and the protection of souls.

vii. Sincerity is the property of the universe.

· From Existentialism, reference to the writings of Flannery O'Connor, Kierkegaard, Sartre, Camus, D.T. Suzuki, Bonhoeffer.

Existentialism calls into question the validity of people who are perfectly convinced that they are headed in the right direction; that they possess the means to attain a perfect happiness, and that they have a divine mandate to remove anyone seen as interfering with this aim. There is an inherent passionate resistance in Existentialism against the positivist outlook, in which outlook one’s ‘rightness’ is never in question.

· Kierkegaard describes ‘leveling’ as that process by which the individual person loses himself in the vast emptiness of a collectivist public mind. Because he identifies this abstraction with objective reality, or simply with the 'truth', he abdicates his own experience and intuition, renounces personal conscience, and is lost. The public mind is only an abstraction, a non-entity, made up of individuals at the moment when they are a collective nothing, i.e. when they have abdicated conscience, personal decision, choice, and responsibility, and have yielded themselves to the joy of being part of a pure myth. All are 'leveled' to the common, on-looker state. The individual no longer belongs to God, himself nor his beloved, but only to the public abstraction and thereby is estranged from value in his life.

Such a collectivist system which demands the abdication of personality destroys all possibility of community. What we have then is a conflict between two concepts of community: on one hand, a false and arbitrary fiction, collectivist togetherness, in which all possibility of authentic personal existence is surrendered and one remains content with one's neutral quasi-objectified presence in the public mass; on the other hand, a genuine community of persons who have first of all accepted their own fragile lot, who have chosen to exist contingently, and thereby have accepted the solitude of the person who must think and decide for himself without the warm support of collective fictions. Only between such free persons is true communication possible. At the same time, such communication is absolutely necessary if there are to be free and mature persons, authentically existing, with faces, identities and histories of their own. The authentic person is not born in stoic isolation but in the openness and dialogue of love.

· Camus’ “The Plague” is described as a novel of crisis and alienation in which a few people manage to prove themselves authentic persons by openness and availability in a mass of thoughtless, stupefied human beings.

3.Quotes from other sources:

v A humble man can do great things with an uncommon perfection because he is no longer concerned about accidentals, like his own interests and his own reputation, and therefore he no longer needs to waste his efforts in defending them. For a humble man is not afraid of failure. In fact he is not afraid of anything, even of himself, since perfect humility implies perfect confidence in the power of God, before Whom no other power has any meaning and for Whom there is no such thing as an obstacle.

v It is in deep solitude that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brothers. The more solitary I am, the more affection I have for them. It is pure affection, and filled with the reverence for the solitude of others. Solitude and silence teach me to love my brothers for what they are, not for what they say. (Source: The Sign of Jonas)

v My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going, I do not see the road ahead of me, I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please. And I hope that I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust you always, though I may seem to be lost in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me and you will never leave me to face my perils alone. (Thoughts in Solitude)

v What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it, all the rest are not only useless, but disastrous. (Source: ‘The Wisdom of the Present’: quoted by Soygal Rinpoche ‘Tibetan Book of Living and Dying’)

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