I've never been much into Thomas Merton.
I always found his writing weird. Too detached. I frankly never much liked monks, either. I feel the same way about monks as I feel about academics. You know the old saying, "those that can, do; those that can't, teach?" I feel like monks are priests who can't.
OK. I know. Not fair to every good monk and every good teacher out there.
I have one of those "pocket versions" of Merton's Thoughts in Solitude and I was reading on the train on the way to an appointment the other day. And I read this:
…Society, to merit that name, must be made up not of… mechanical units, but persons. To be a person implies responsibility and freedom, and both these imply a certain interior solitude, a sense of personal integrity, a sense of one’s own reality and of one’s ability to give himself to society—or refuse that gift.
When [people] are merely submerged in a mass of impersonal human beings pushed around by automatic forces, they lose their true humanity, their integrity, their ability to love, their capacity for self-determination. When society is made up of [people] who know no interior solitude it can no longer be held together by love….
What struck me was the direct connection between solitude and the capacity to love. I never saw this as clearly as I saw it this week. There is an inner silence we need to be able to hear the gospel in our hearts and commit ourselves to responding to it in whatever context we find ourselves.
For my own part, I've been preaching most every week this year so far, and by this point in the year, I feel like my reflections are tired and un-loving messages. They feel hasty and impersonal, even as I deliver them. They're not my best, most loving works. God, I believe, uses them nonetheless for good. But I'm also desperately in need of solitude. I feel like a dry well. I go down every week to pull up the water and I scrape bottom.
Solitude is important, isn't it? The quiet time. The un-knotting time. The re-freshing time. Being alone-with-God time.
And as Merton suggests, it's not just good for us. It's good because the solitude is how we come to embrace with joy the task of love.
I believe I have that same pocket-sized Thomas Merton book and it's message always seemed to elude me but I carried it around in my coat pocket for weeks just the same.
ReplyDeleteLate one night on the subway I was flipping through it again thinking: "What is the big deal with this Merton guy? I just don't get it." Then I read this:
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 you. 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. Therefor I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death I will not fear for you are with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.
I thought that was pretty nice.
I've yet to find anything else in the book that speaks to me. Maybe that's all I needed. Like the way you buy a CD for just one song.
I can't speak to most of your sermons David but if I were to hear anyone describe you, or anything you did, as hasty and impersonal, let alone tired and un-loving, I would have to say "That's just crazy talk!"
Well, I can speak to many, if not most of your sermons. You know very well that I listen very carefully, remember well, and have a lot of context to put them in. (Hanging around 4 different semenaries for a total of 7 years.)
ReplyDeleteNo one communicates more love in asermon.
I don't mean to discount your subjective experience - but maybe you hold yourself to impossible standards? Doesn't do any of us a favor, does it?
Don't understand about solitude. Couldn't possibly live without it. But, rarely have trouble finding it. Afterall, the one thing I always have is myself.
How could we have conscience without solitude? How could we be faithful Protestants without conscience? How do we create our community without faith?
If you need a different kind of solitude, stand up for it. Being too sacrificial doesn't do any of us a favor either. The love isn't one sided. Don't insult us or your work by forgetting that. Please.