November, 2007:

THOUGHTS IN SOLITUDE

Merton’s Thoughts in Solitude was written in 1953 and 1954 during an intense time of solitude and meditation afforded to him, as he puts it, “by the grace of God and the favor of his Superiors.”1 There was no intention for the book to address advanced or sensational adventures in these disciplines, but rather to state their basic function and importance in the life of a contemplative.

Solitude and Silence

Solitude held a place of chief importance for Merton and he believed that the loss of solitude in society both caused and perpetuated much evil. “Society depends for its existence,” he says, “on the inviolable personal solitude of its members.”2 Merton believed that a society made up of people who knew no interior solitude could not be held together by love and as a consequence would be forcibly held together by violence and abusive authority.

Merton’s love and continuous search for God was without limits. “If a man is to live,” he says, “he must be all alive, body, soul, mind, heart, spirit. Everything must be elevated and transformed by the action of God, in love and faith.”3 The spiritual life needs both thought and feeling; to assign it to a single realm is to embrace it incompletely. If the spiritual life is consigned to merely thinking, we rely on our own limited reason and squelch the voice of God. Man is more than a disembodied mind.

The Conquest of True Self

The driving force of Merton’s thinking and subsequent writing was the nature and conquest of “true self.” Through strict discipline and a life of intentional physical and spiritual poverty, Merton believed that “true self” could be found. However, this was no self-absorbed, pop-psychology, self-fulfillment endeavor. Merton believed that the “true self” could only be found in God, that seeking God and seeking self was a singular pursuit. To seek and then know God’s will is to know one’s own purpose; to know what God has planned is to know how to proceed; to know what God is doing is to glory in the trials we face.

“Real self-conquest,” Merton says, “is the conquest of ourselves not by ourselves but by the Holy Spirit. Self-conquest is really self-surrender.”4 The search for self begins and ends in the search for God.

Knowing oneself is both the pursuit of self-knowledge and the pursuit of God. According to Merton, “before we can surrender ourselves we must become ourselves. For no one can surrender what he does not possess.”5 By seeking the One who created us, knows us, and has a plan for us, we will know both Him and ourselves. For we are only truly ourselves as we exist in His will and nothing short of that self is the “true self.”

Meditation

Merton describes meditation as one of the ways a spiritual man can “keep himself awake,” that meditation will nurture and maintain our sensitivity to spiritual things. “Meditative prayer is a stern discipline,” Merton acknowledges, and it is a discipline that requires “unending courage and perseverance, and those who are not willing to work at it patiently will finally end in compromise,”6 which is only another name for failure.

It is so difficult because it is not merely a prayer spoken with ones lips but a prayer of the entire self. In meditative prayer we turn all of ourselves towards Him.

Nothingness

Merton speaks of a “habitual realization” that in the grand scheme of the universe, God is everything and we are nothing, that He is the centrifugal force to whom all our actions are directed, whether intentionally or not. The only matter to be decided is whether we will willingly cooperate with His sovereign will or resist Him, at our own peril.

It is worth quoting at length Merton’s summary of this idea:

That our life and strength proceed from Him, that both in life and in death we depend entirely on Him, that the whole course of our life is foreknown by Him and falls into the plan of His wise and merciful Providence; that it is absurd to live as though without Him, for ourselves, by ourselves; that all our plans and spiritual ambitions are useless unless they come from Him and end in Him and that, in the end, the only thing that matters is His Glory.7

Abandoning oneself to God, trusting Him with our fate, is necessary if we are to find ourselves in Him. Through this trust and self-abandonment, this willing self-denial, we show our love for God and we truly discover that “all things work together for good.”8 Without this trust, everything simply leads to our destruction. Our purpose is found in the pursuit of His ultimate glory.

There is a paradoxical aspect to this seeking and self-abandonment. We cannot find Him unless He reveals Himself to us, and yet He is the one who forms in us a desire to seek Him. In the course of this search, there may still be times of dryness and distance. Merton, however, sees these times as God’s intentional withdrawing of the sense of His presence in order to strengthen our faith. In these times we find the value of our poverty and our weakness. They are, Merton says, “the earth in which God sows the seed of desire.”9 To be constantly enveloped in His presence would negate the need for the desire for His presence.

And since we worship a God who is unseen, to desire Him is to renounce the desire of anything that can be seen. We may still desire these things, but we must renounce the direct desiring of them and seek them only with a desire that is initiated by God.

Poverty

Trappist poverty is intentional and it is both physical and spiritual, but it is not something they are unwillingly subjected to or by which they are victimized. On the contrary, it is an intentional, self-imposed state for the purpose of mystical identification with those whom Jesus called “blessed.”10 This intentional poverty is meant to drive the willing participant to God, to rely on Him for everything so that he relies on himself for nothing, recognizing that we are given everything by God anyway. “As long as we remain poor,” Merton says, “as long as we are empty and interested in nothing but God, we cannot be distracted. For our very poverty prevents us from being ‘pulled apart’ (dis-tracted)”11

These gifts of grace – silence, solitude, and poverty – are meant to turn our focus so directly to God that everything we do becomes prayer. In this state Merton could most closely live out the biblical command to pray without ceasing.12

To be in a position where we must ask in order to receive is a concept foreign to an individualist society which prides itself on being self-sustaining and self-supportive, but this is what intentional poverty demands. “The solitary, more than anyone else is always aware of his poverty and of his needs before God. Since he depends directly on God for everything material and spiritual, he has to ask for everything.”13 In a society where we plan for decades into the future and consider living day-to-day, or “paycheck-to-paycheck”, a sign of poor financial management, this intentional poverty seems like foolishness.

Go to: Part 1|Part 2|Part 3|Part 4|Part 5|The Thomas Merton Page

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1 Thomas Merton, Thoughts In Solitude (New York, USA: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1980), 11.
2 Ibid., 12.
3 Ibid., 27.
4 Thomas Merton, Thoughts In Solitude (New York, USA: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1980), 29.
5 Ibid., 96.
6 Ibid., 48.
7 Thomas Merton, Thoughts In Solitude (New York, USA: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1980), 52-53.
8 Rom. 8:28 (ESV).
9 Thomas Merton, Thoughts In Solitude (New York, USA: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1980), 54.
10 Matt. 5:2 (ESV).
11 Thomas Merton, Thoughts In Solitude (New York, USA: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1980), 93.
12 1 Thess. 5:17 (ESV).
13 Thomas Merton, Thoughts In Solitude (New York, USA: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1980), 105.

LIFE AS A TRAPPIST MONK

“It is customary,” Merton says in The Silent Life, “to begin discussions of Cistercian spirituality with a historical flourish”1 – and so I will begin as custom dictates.

On Palm Sunday in 1098 Robert of Molesmes and a group of monks left their Benedictine monastery and traveled to the woods of Citeaux, there to follow The Rule of St Benedict “to the letter.” As most reform movements tend to be viewed, this one was looked upon with some suspicion and accusations of, among other things, pharisaism, literalism, and fanaticism. Robert of Molesmes and his monks believed that St Benedict had successfully set into rule the simplicity, intentional poverty, and sacrificial love of Christ and the early Christians.

This group of monks came to be known as the Cistercians. “The Cistercian reform aimed,” says Merton, “to restore the pure charity of the early Christians by means of a simple and austere common life.”2 Simplicity and austerity – these two words characterize the life Merton lived as a monk.

In time, the practices within this reform movement became too lax for some, and another reform movement arose at the Abbey of Notre Dame de la Grande Trappe in 1664. This group came to be known as the Trappists.3

The Cistercian family is divided into three groups: the Common Observance, the Middle Observance, and the Strict Observance, also known as the Trappists.4 This last Monastic order is the one to which Merton belonged and is, as the name implies, the strictest of the three. All branches of Benedictine monasticism have a common founder in St Benedict, a sixth-century monk, and a common rule: The Rule of St. Benedict.

The Rule of St Benedict

The Rule of St Benedict is the owner’s manual for the Benedictine life. It is a strict and detailed set of rules and requirements for those who desire to belong to any Benedictine order. “The purpose of the Rule,” according to Merton, “is to form Christ in the soul of a monk in much the same way He was formed in the soul of St. Benedict.”5 The Rule is, in essence, St Benedict’s autobiography, the experiences of his life codified and unadorned; it is his revealing of the outworking of the Gospel of Christ in his life for the benefit of those who would later seek to follow him.

It was not, however, meant to be followed in a manner of pharisaic legalism. “On the contrary,” Merton says, “it is meant to remind us of our human frailty and keep us humble. We are sanctified not merely by those precepts we keep, but by those which we inadvertently break, provided that we make use of the remedies the Rule provides.”6 The Rule serves not as a tool of isolation or punishment, but as a reminder of the inherent weakness and helplessness of man. It is a tool of humility, meant to orient the adherent toward an ever-increasing recognition and reliance on the mercy of God.

Silence, Labor, and Poverty

The discipline of silence is the center of Trappist life. “For it belongeth to the master,” says The Rule of St Benedict, “to speak and to teach; it becometh the disciple to be silent and to listen… coarse jests, and idle words or speech provoking laughter, we condemn everywhere to eternal exclusion; and for such speech we do not permit the disciple to open his lips.” The rule goes on to say, “Therefore, because of the importance of silence, let permission to speak be seldom given to perfect disciples even for good and holy and edifying discourse.” 7

Manual labor is also a staple of Trappist life. “The charity of a life of labor and poverty lived in common,” Merton says, “is meant to prepare the monk for contemplative union with God.”8 To labor and not profit, to rely on God for everything was to Merton identification with the poor whom Christ called blessed.9 Merton sought to establish a mystical unity with Christ by intentionally associating with the poor. “This concept,” says Merton, “is the key to the whole Cistercian theology of labor.”10

“Poverty is the door to freedom,” Merton says in Thoughts In Solitude, “not because we remain imprisoned in the anxiety and constraint which poverty itself implies, but because, finding nothing in ourselves that is a source of hope, we know there is nothing in ourselves worth defending. There is nothing special in ourselves to love.”11

Above all, Trappist life is a life of community, but the community as a whole seeks separation and solitude from the world. The value of poverty is that it causes us to rely on something other than ourselves, and rightly ordered it should drive us toward God and His mercy. It should also compel us toward others with whom we share genuine community.

Daily Schedule

Cistercians rise very early in the morning, between 2:00 and 2:15 AM, to chant. This is followed by half an hour of meditation, and then a stretch near dawn of one and a half to two hours for mass, communion, and Lectio Divina (meditative reading). Prior to another session of chant around 6:15 AM, a meager breakfast of coffee and bread is served. This is followed with a talk given by the Father Abbot and an opportunity for the monks to confess their faults against the Rule. Next this there is another time of Lectio Divina and a mass. The work-day ends when monks return to their reading and chanting before retiring around 7:00 PM.

Each day there are two hours of manual labor in the morning, and another two to two and a half hours in the afternoon. The Trappist diet is quite restricted; no meat, fish, or eggs are served unless one is sick. The regular meal consists of milk, cheese, and vegetables.

Go to: Part 1|Part 2|Part 3|Part 4|Part 5|The Thomas Merton Page

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1 Thomas Merton, The Silent Life (New York, USA: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1980), 95.
2 Ibid., 96.
3 Wikipedia, “Trappist,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trappist, (accessed November 8, 2007)
4 Wikipedia, “Cistercians,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cistercians, (accessed November 7, 2007)
5 Thomas Merton, The Silent Life (New York, USA: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1980), 61.
6 Ibid., 109.
7 Kansas Monks, “Chapter VI, Of Silence,” The Rule of St Benedict, http://www.kansasmonks.org/RuleOfStBenedict.html (accessed November 7, 2007)
8 Thomas Merton, The Silent Life (New York, USA: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1980), 97.
9 Matt. 5:2 (ESV).
10 Thomas Merton, The Silent Life (New York, USA: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1980), 99.
11 Thomas Merton, Thoughts In Solitude (New York, USA: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1980), 53.

Thomas Merton has been rightly called “one of the most influential Catholic authors of the 20th century,”1 but his influence has spread far beyond the limits of the Catholic population. The endurance and diversity of his influence is due in large part to the strict observance of The Rule of St. Benedict Merton practiced at The Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani, the monastery where he spent his 27 years as a monk.

Merton was no stranger to the disciplines of the spiritual life. As a monk, the spiritual disciplines would have been his main focus. As a Trappist monk in particular, silence and solitude were two disciplines he practiced constantly. These were wellsprings of insight for Merton and he directed the flow into a body of work that can easily be described as prolific.

To understand Merton and his writings, we must first examine his daily life. Next we will examine how his spirituality was formed and practiced in the context of this disciplined life by an analysis of his book Thoughts In Solitude. We will then look at the extent of his influence on other people of influence and conclude with some personal reflections.

Go to: Part 1|Part 2|Part 3|Part 4|Part 5|The Thomas Merton Page

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1 Wikipedia, “Thomas Merton,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Merton, (accessed November 7, 2007)