THE POVERTY OF THOMAS MERTON

I have been grappling with the presence of Thomas Merton (1915-1968) for many years. He is a most challenging person, not least because he is a puzzle. It seems that sometimes we are drawn to those situations and influences we just can't figure out easily. We can't pinpoint what it is about them that causes them to return to our consciousness over time. I have been reading Merton for over thirty years and he has meant something different to me at different stages of my life. I think this is the case for all of us. We are changing and so are the situations and people with whom we have relationships. I do think we can have deep relationships with individuals through reading their thoughts and ideas or through knowing something about their biographies. Isn't it wonderful that others are willing to share their lives in this way and to throw at us the puzzles, contradictions, and paradoxes of their own lives? We do the same with those in our lives as well.

What is obvious about Merton's life from his biography is that he felt abandonment as a young boy when his mother died and then later in his life when his father died of brain cancer. Abandonment and loss were part of his psychic orientation. It seems possible that this loss of familial orientation led to a life of loosened rigging and an escape into a life of sexual pleasures, alcohol abuse, and profligacy. It isn't clear to me even after reading his popular autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, how he managed to find the path he did to his eventual life as a Trappist monk. Certainly, he had relationships with others that served as important influences (Mark Van Doren, the poet; Robert Lax, another poet; Daniel Walsh; Catherine De Hueck). His path was also broken by influential writers: Etienne Gilson (The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy), Aldous Huxley (Ends and Means), Augustine of Hippo (Confessions), Gerard Manley Hopkins (his poetry and path into priesthood), Aelred Graham (Zen Catholicism). While I think of Merton as one of my own friends, he, too, had what might be considered friends among his teachers and authors.

Whatever the deciding factor(s), Merton made his way to a commitment to a life of monasticism. Among the many tensions in his life that I have been able to discern were those of freedom/constraint, knowledge/innocence, abandonment/belonging, a life of the mind/social activism, ego/no-self, and means/ends. Even as he was leaving a life of untethered sensual pleasures, he was caught in the conundrum of needing to be a writer and feeling that he was indulging an excessive ego. He was leaving a life of sensual riches for a simpler, stripped-down life of contemplation and commitment to a religious community. What might have seemed like an escape from a life of confusion and uncertainty morphed into a life of contradictions and more uncertainty. Within the walls of Gethsemani Abbey he encountered the tensions of ego/no-self once more. He remained a writer with activist passions, even though he was restricted by his order in where he could travel and what he could publish. It wasn't until later in his short life that he became more involved in exploring spiritual traditions outside his Catholic faith. One of his last books was Zen and the Birds of Appetite (1968, the year of his death). This book is a wonderful guidebook to some of Zen Buddhist thought and practice seen through the eyes of someone ensconced in the Catholic tradition.

Grappling with Merton is difficult because there are so many available sources he left behind from which to pull threads. I wanted to focus on one thread in particular to highlight his explorations and experiments with faith. I thought it might be useful to write about his life's changes and diversions or about his devotion to his community. I thought about the tensions mentioned above and wondered if any of them held some clearer teaching for someone just acquainted with him from his writings. What finally seemed timely and appropriate was to explore what poverty means and how that might have played out in Merton's life in ways that can open new ground for us, householders and citizens of a very complicated world. I do think he can show us a different way of looking at our lives and that is always a mark of a very good writer who is dedicated to a life of the mind. Merton, of course, had a very different path as a monk but he was insightful about his life and its intersections with the lives of the majority of us.

Webster says that poverty is: The state or condition of being poor, lack of the means of providing material needs or comforts: Lack of something necessary or desirable; insufficiency, paucity: Deficiency in amount, scantiness.

In one sense, then, poverty is about lack, about need, about a state that one is dealt by fate. But Merton and his predecessors in monasticism saw poverty as a positive frame and as a choice. This remains a very contrary notion in our times when we are bombarded by how we can overcome the deficiencies, deprivations, absences, and missing ingredients in our lives. We are offered remedies that only more consumption can provide. We are caught in a mental web of achievement, success, striving, gaining, climbing ladders, maneuvering, spending, sensual pleasures, and in so many ways driven by ideals of living and consumption rendered by society and culture. But there is a noticeable gap between this way of life and the life that I (and Merton, too) believe most people are missing. This is the life of poverty. It is the life of self-emptying, of discipline, commitment, hard psychic work, of giving up what are considered advantages, and seeing within poverty not a sense of lack but an open field in which our energies can be offered to others in an infinite number of ways. This life of poverty is about humility and caring.

It occurs to me that every time we sit to meditate we are choosing this poverty. We show up, we sit or kneel, we leave our material possessions behind, and enter a realm of silence and it is within that space of silence that we lay open our hearts and minds to a limitless terrain. Merton explored these possibilities in his book on Zen and this is what he wrote:

“... they [Christianity and Zen Buddhism) have … the same kind of limitlessness, the same lack of inhibition, the same psychic fullness of creativity, which mark the fully integrated maturity of the 'enlightened self.'”

Merton continues by saying that it is only when we empty ourselves of our wants that we make room for something more vast and deeper. It is by choosing poverty and a greater simplicity in our material lives and in our minds and hearts that we can arrive at new ways of being in the world. It is clear to me in my own experiences and experiments with meditation that meditation itself is a poor container for what we ask it to hold, and that is all possibilities. Meditation is a poor vehicle for the actions we are driven to as humans. Meditation is a preparation for compassion. Compassion is what emerges from the silent spaces that we inhabit in meditation. Meditation is a great poverty that we choose to help us slip out of the daily rat race and oppressions of social pressures and tensions. Our souls want to be so poor that we can cultivate the creativity that brings us closer to deep relationships with others in our lives, if not with a power that we feel animates us in miraculous ways.

And can the poverty we have chosen and practice meet the poverty that has been dealt to others, the poverty of lack and deficiency? Can we bring together in one shared space the compassion that lets us know at a deep level the poverty of another? Do we not all want to be lifted beyond our poverty into some relationship that brings joy and belonging to everyone? What will fill the large space of cleared ground we have prepared in our meditations? What happens next?