Echoing Silence

Thomas Merton is going to be on any list of the twentieth century’s most influential spiritual figures. His bestselling autobiography, Seven Storey Mountain, published when Merton was just 33 years old, was immediately hailed as a contemporary Confessions; to date, more than a million copies have been sold in twenty-plus languages. Several of Merton’s other books - including Seeds of Contemplation, Thoughts in Solitude, and Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander - are modern-day classics. He counted among his confidants, the Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hahn, Abraham Joshua Heschel, the poet Czeslaw Milosz, and peace activist Daniel Berrigan.

Merton wrote and taught on a wide range of topics: monasticism, contemplative prayer, violence and nonviolence, mysticism eastern and western, Gandhi and the Desert Fathers, nuclear war, economic equality, literature and poetry. He used his pen to foster interfaith dialogue and support the civil rights movement and protest the Vietnam War. In all, more than 60 titles bear his name.

But Merton’s impressive oeuvre was by no means inevitable. Neither was a spiritual legacy that extended far beyond the walls of the Abbey at Gethsemani where Merton lived as a Trappist monk for 27 years. Robert Giroux, Merton’s friend and publisher, said the success of Seven Storey Mountain and the celebrity that followed was “a source of embarrassment for Tom.” Merton was concerned early on by the conflicting interests of the monastic and literary lives. And if Merton was forced to choose between becoming a writer and becoming more like Jesus - he was willing to put away his pen for good.

Thankfully he didn’t have to. Merton came to see that rather than being an “obstacle to spiritual perfection,” writing had become “one of the conditions on which my perfection will depend.” His calling, he wrote in his journal in 1949, was to put himself down on paper “with the most complete simplicity and integrity - masking nothing, confusing no issue…To be frank without being boring.”

It is a kind of crucifixion. Not a very dramatic or painful one. But it requires so much honesty that it is beyond my nature. It must come somehow from the Holy Ghost.

One of the results of all this could well be a complete and holy transparency: living, praying, and writing in the light of the Holy Spirit, losing myself entirely by becoming public property just as Jesus is public property in the Mass. Perhaps this is an important aspect of my priesthood - my living of my Mass: to become as plain as a Host in the hands of everybody. Perhaps it is this, after all, that is to be my way of solitude. One of the strangest ways so far devised, but it is the way of the Word of God.

Echoing Silence, a new anthology edited by Robert Inchausti, is the first Merton collection to focus on the monk’s “writings on writing.” It attempts to tell the story of how Merton, in Inchausti’s words, “progressed from an inwardly-divided modernist to a stylistic innovator who used language reflexively to construct a critique of itself” - even as he remained committed “to origins, to emptiness, and to God.”

The book includes a section called “The Christian Writer in the Modern World” which details Merton’s thoughts on how an artist can “live creatively” in the face of the “anxiety and meaninglessness inherent in contemporary technological culture.” Merton starts to develop a theology of creativity. “Since there is no genuine creativity apart from God,” he writes, “the man who attempts to be a ‘creator’ outside of God and independent of him is forced to fall back on magic.” Merton saw in the New Testament the creative potential of suffering. The cross becomes the center of a new creation, and it is a direct reply “to the secular and demonic over-emphasis on the individual, his self-fulfillment in art for its own sake.”

There are other interesting details here. For example, I was impressed at how engaged Merton was with classic and contemporary literature even after entering the monastery. He was a fan of Joyce, Blake, Camus, Faulkner, and O’Connor. And he corresponded regularly with Dorothy Day, Boris Pasternak, Walker Percy, James Baldwin, and (to my surprise) Henry Miller.

Forty years after Merton’s death by accidental electrocution, it’s surprising that there is still new material which can be mined and sifted through for nuggets of wisdom. What’s more surprising - given how important writing was to Merton’s spiritual development - is that it took someone four decades to produce this collection. Robert Inchausti is an exciting Merton scholar (you should go out immediately and buy his Subversive Orthodoxy), and he did a fine job editing a book that will be an important addition to the library of any Merton fan or Christian writer. It is not the kind of book you’re likely to read straight through. But it’s great for pulling off the shelf when you are in throes of writer’s block and need creative or spiritual inspiration. To prove it to you, I’ll end the review with a few random quotes, today’s Daily Thomas Merton.

On the language of war: The incoherence of language that cannot be trusted and the coherence of weapons that are infallible, or thought to be: this is the dialectic of politics and war, the prose of the twentieth century…Meanwhile, it is the vocation of the poet - or anti-poet - not to be deaf to such things but to apply his ear intently to their corrupt charms.

On the language of nonviolence: The real dynamic of nonviolence can be considered as a purification of language, a restoration of true communication on a human level, when language has been emptied of meaning by misuse and corruption. Nonviolence is meant to communicate love not in word but in act. Above all, nonviolence is meant to convey and to defend truth which has been obscured and defiled by political double-talk.

In a letter to Russian novelist Boris Pasternak: It has give me much food for thought, this bare fact of the communication between us: at a time when our two countries are unable to communicate with one another seriously and sincerely, but spend millions communicating with the moon…No, the great business of our time is this: for one man to find himself in another one who is on the other side of the world. Only by such contacts can there be peace, can the sacredness of life be preserved and developed and the image of God manifest itself in the world.

On creativity and the Christian: The way for sacred art to become more “creative” is not just for the artists to study new and fashionable trends and try to apply them to sacred or symbolic themes. It is for the artist to enter deeply into his Christian vocation, his part in the work of restoring all things in Christ. But this is not his responsibility alone. This is the responsibility of the whole Church and everybody in it. We all have an obligation to open our eyes to the eschatological dimensions of Christian creativity, for, as St. Paul says, “all creation is groaning” for the final manifestation of this finished work, the only work that has an eternal importance: the full revelation of God by the restoration of all things in Christ.

Echoing Silence is available from Powells Books.