Louisville Process Theology Network

Uncritical Reverence

"Merton’s own anarchic sense of the absurd would have found wry satisfaction in the uncritical reverence accorded to his most ephemeral utterances; and I do not think he would be pleased at the sight of the new illustrated version of the ‘The Seven Story Mountain’, when he had gone to such pains in his later years to insist that it was, for him, an historical document – that he had, curiously and humanly enough, changed his mind.

We are determined that we shall know him, in all the meticulous detail possible. And so we shall make it quite, quite certain that he will indeed be a ‘person that nobody knows.’ Unknown and yet well-known.

We are in danger of forgetting something utterly fundamental to Merton, something which makes more intelligible the fact that he could give equal veneration to Catholic and Buddhist traditions ….

Truth can only be spoken by a man nobody knows, because only in the unknown person is there no obstruction to reality. The ego of self-oriented desire and manifold qualities, seeking to dominate and organize the world, is absent …

It will not be the story of an interesting and original personality, but the story of one series of responses to and reflections on the currents and structures of the world …

(Merton believed) that truth was found not in the pursuit of an individual fulfillment or destiny, but in responsive attention to every possible human influence.

There is no isolated, pure, and independent ‘I’, but there is a vast and universal web of ‘I’s; in which I have a true and right place. And, understanding for me and for you comes by concentration not on your or my ego as such, but upon the web, the interrelation, through and in it several component parts …

This is the Christian view, not only because the gospels too preach renunciation of self, but because Christian belief finds the grounds of truth in the silence of Christ, in the story of a man so ‘poor’ that, at the end of his days, he preaches no word, no idea, but suffers only, takes the world to himself by resisting nothing of it, by exercising none of the self’s habitual violence, and whose life is thus transparent …

Merton’s genius was largely that he was a massively unoriginal man: he is extraordinary because he is so absorbed by every environment he finds himself in --- America between the wars, classical pre-conciliar Catholicism, monasticism, the peace movement, Asia. In all these contexts he is utterly priestly because utterly attentive: he does not organize, dominate, or even interpret much of the time, but responds …

Merton will not let me look at him for long: he will, finally, persuade me to look in the direction he is looking.”

From pages 17 to 20, “A Silent Action: Engagements with Thomas Merton” by Rowan Williams