Thomas Merton

***This is a series of posts based on writing I did on personal retreat in October 2009. Read earlier posts in the series here: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 |Part 5|Part 6|Part 7***

The most famous work on spiritual disciplines among Evangelicals is Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth by Richard J. Foster, but the origins of my interest and practice go back a bit further. Around 1993, as an 18-year-old I began to read my first Thomas Merton book, Thoughts In Solitude. I had just begun my adult life in a way as I was beginning my first full-time job after graduating high school.

I decided to start daily morning devotions and Merton’s book was the one I decided to start with. And these two days at Medaille are an attempt to re-experience those days when I first discovered the nourishment I found in the works of Thomas Merton.

The book (Thoughts In Solitude) is now in very rough shape, having been read more than once, and referenced countless times. The cover has come apart from the pages; the pages themselves are coming apart from one another.

It was written in 1953 and 1954 during an intense time of solitude and meditation afforded to Merton, as he puts it, “by the grace of God and the favor of his Superiors.” There was no intention on his part 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.

“Society depends for its existence,” Merton sets out in the introduction, “on the inviolable personal solitude of its members.” Indeed, we are in deep trouble then. “When society is made up of men who know no interior solitude,” he continues, “it can no longer be held together by love: and consequently it is held together by a violent and abusive authority.”

John Calvin said, “Without knowledge of self there is no knowledge of God.” Merton echoes this thought in saying that, “Real self-conquest is the conquest of ourselves not by ourselves but by the Holy Spirit. Self-conquest is really self-surrender. Yet before we can surrender ourselves we must become ourselves. For no one can give up what he does not possess.”

More precisely – we have to have enough mastery of ourselves to renounce our own will into the hands of Christ – so that he may conquer what we cannot reach by our own efforts.

The driving force of Merton’s thinking and subsequent writing was the nature and conquest of “true self.” 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 were one and the same 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.

The search for self begins and ends in the search for God. 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 are in His will and nothing short of that self is the true self.

Two references – both positive – can be found, not in the works of CS Lewis but in his letters.  In a letter to Dom Bede Griffiths on December 20^th, 1961 Lewis asks, “Have you read anything by an American Trappist called Thomas Merton?  I’m at present on his No Man Is an Island.  It is the best new spiritual reading I’ve met for a long time.” Lewis mentions Merton again three days later in a letter to an American friend.  “I’ve been greatly impressed,” Lewis writes, “by the work of an American Trappist called Thomas Merton – No Man Is an Island. You probably know it?”

Lewis in league with Merton. Who would have guessed? Could this be a doorway for others also to take interest in the works of Thomas Merton?