The third period of monastic life, extending from early 1956 through August 1965, corresponds to most of Merton’s term as Gethsemani’s novice master. It is also the time when he opened up to the world again and became involved in social and political issues. Merton’s monastic writings during this period are marked by a concern with monastic reform, and enforced by the call for the renewal of religious life during the Second Vatican Council.197
2.3.3.1 Accompanying the novices
In 1955, Abbot James Fox appointed Merton as the master of novices at
Gethsemani.198 Merton was always loyal to the novices as well as to the authorities. He was an inspiring novice master—intellectually, spiritually, and psychologically.199 He carried out this responsibility with passion and commitment.
Monica Furlong writes that his novices remembered Merton as being very human and loving in his dealings with them in the monastery. One of them recalls that
“Everybody loved him. Some of the monks might think some of his ideas were wild, but he was much loved.”200
The feelings of mutual love and affection between the novices and the master were very strong. He was humorous and compelling during his lectures to the novitiate, which he often began with anecdotes about things going on in the world or in the monastery—perhaps an election, a point of social or political concern, the struggles
197 Ibid., 302. 198 Inchausti, 55. 199 Furlong, 223. 200 Ibid., 219.
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in monastic life, or even secular examples of human love and sexuality. He related these realities to the particular subject matter he was teaching. Such subjects included
contemplation, the mystical life, asceticism, the Blessed Virgin Mary, St. John’s Gospel, martyrdom, the Early Fathers, Pseudo-Dionysius, St. Gregory of Nyssa, St. Maximus, St. Augustine, the Spanish mystics, the struggles in the spiritual direction of contemplatives, or modern psychology and how it affects the training and understanding of
monasticism.201
Merton trained the novices according to his understanding of a true monastic spirituality. For him, the purpose of the monastic life is to abandon oneself completely to the Holy Spirit. It is a path to grow in “humility, obedience, solitude, silence, [and] prayer,” in which the monk learns to renounce his own desires and will in order to live a life of freedom as a true child of God.202Amidst his responsibilities as a novice master, Merton was constantly seeking God through contemplation, which included
contemplating the presence of God in nature, “in the hills, fields, flowers, birds and animals, the sky and the trees.” In this way, Merton affirmed that in the monastic life, the monk’s senses are “educated and elevated rather than destroyed.” 203
He also encouraged the novices to continue seeking God in the movement toward chastity and wholeness. The first step on this path is the “total acceptance of one’s whole being—body and soul, mind and instinct, emotions and will,” in order to develop an integrated spirituality.204
201 Ibid., 219-220 202
Thomas Merton, Basic Principles of Monastic Spirituality (Bardstown, KY.: Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani, 1957), 10; cited Furlong, 230.
203
Ibid.
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Merton helped the novices to discover their spiritual potentialities to be seekers of God. He had an integrated approach to life and insisted that “if our emotions really die in the desert, our humanity dies with them. We must return from the desert like Jesus or St. John, with our capacity for feeling expanded and deepened, strengthened against appeals of falsity, warned against temptation, great, noble and pure.”205
This return from the desert was to become one of Merton’s central themes as a spiritual guide to the novices. The decision to join the Trappists was not about running away from the world but turning toward the true source of our being in God. Turning to God, a monk returns to his true self.206
2.3.3.2 Return to the world
When Merton began his monastic life in Gethsemani in 1941, he never imagined he would return to the world. He had entered the monastery to seek God and leave the world behind. However, while remaining a monk, he would eventually return to the world he thought he had left behind forever, a world now “transfigured by his
contemplative vision,” bringing to it the compassion that grows out of true solitude.207 He saw a world influenced by a technological culture that controlled the interior freedom of human beings, and filled with men and women engulfed in delusion, not knowing themselves or what destiny awaited them.208 As a contemplative, Merton looked at the world in compassion and love.
205 Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1958), 14. 206 Inchausti, 60.
207
Shannon, SL, 178.
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His re-engagement with the world was marked by a profound mystical experience which occurred in Louisville on an ordinary day in March of 1958 while he was running errands for the monastery. He recounts,
Yesterday, in Louisville, at the corner of 4th and Walnut, suddenly I realized that I loved all the people and that none of them were, or, could be totally alien to me. As if waking from a dream—the dream of my separateness, of the ‘special’ vocation to be different. My vocation does not really make me different from the rest of men or put me in a special category except artificially, juridically. I am still a member of the human race—and what more glorious destiny is there for man, since the Word was made flesh and became, too, a member of the Human Race!209
For Merton, this awakening was the catalyst for his becoming fully a man for others. It was a moment of revelation of the divine amidst the human. Merton became aware that the true meaning of being a “monk” lay in recognizing that he was merely “another member of the human race, like all the rest of them.”210
In the mystical insight of his oneness with the rest of humanity, he recognized his “shared responsibility for the future of human kind.”211
On November 10, 1958, a few months after his awakening in Louisville, Merton wrote a letter to Pope John XXIII, in which he congratulated him for taking up his new responsibility as the “Vicar of Christ Our Lord,” and expressed his desire to become a contemplative monk in the world in order to serve humanity in a more radical way.212 He writes,
It seems to me that, as a contemplative, I do not need to lock myself into solitude and lose all contact with the rest of the world; rather this poor
209 Merton, Search for Solitude, 181-182. 210 Ibid.
211
Bochen, “Fourth and Walnut’ Experience,” TME, 160.
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world has a right to a place in my solitude. It is not enough for me to think of the apostolic value of prayer and penance; I also have to think in terms of a contemplative grasp of the political, intellectual, artistic and social movements in this world—by which I mean a sympathy for the honest aspirations of so many intellectuals everywhere in the world and the terrible problems they have to face. I have had the experience of seeing that this kind of understanding and friendly sympathy, on the part of a monk who really understands them, has produced striking effects among artists, writers, publishers, poets, etc., who have become my friends without my having to leave the cloister.213
In this letter, Merton expressed to the Holy Father his wish to form a “monastic foundation,” or apostolic friendship group, which would be supported by monks and contemplatives and would include “special groups, such as writers, intellectuals, etc., into [the] house for retreats and discussions.” 214
In great humility, trust and “complete
commitment,” Merton presented this request to the Holy Father for the “salvation of souls and to the growth of the monastic contemplative life in their world.”215
The Holy Father graciously granted Merton’s request to begin the gathering of intellectuals at
Gethsemani.216 This apostolate occupied him for the rest of life, and led to many fruitful ecumenical exchanges, and eventually, interreligious dialogue at Gethsemani.217 It also led to significant studies of social issues, as will be examined later.