Last Updated:Friday - 09/24/2010

Thomas Merton championed personal authenticity

Dec. 10 will mark the 40th anniversary of the death of Thomas Merton, the most prominent American spiritual writer of the 20th century. If Merton's writings do not deserve to be counted among all-time spiritual classics such as those written by Teresa of Avila or John of the Cross, he nevertheless was the purest Christian expression of the tumultuous 1960s.

From his humble monk's cell at Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky, Merton was a peace activist and poet of the counterculture. He gave that counterculture spiritual underpinnings that one only hears hinted at in the music of Bob Dylan and other lesser secular "prophets" of the age.

Merton, a convert whose 1948 autobiography The Seven-Storey Mountain was a paean to traditional Catholicism, became a rebel against regimented monasticism and a depersonalized mass society. "The winds are blowing and a lot of dead wood is going to fall," he accurately predicted. Merton's rebellion grew out of the recognition that in an affluent society that has turned man into a consumer, it is only the Church, especially the monastery, which can reaffirm human values.

Personal authenticity – the need to be true to one's inner self – was the value Merton saw as most in jeopardy in mass society. He lamented "the despair and languor of a depersonalized man incapable of authenticity."

The monastery, he hoped, would be the place where the flame in the human soul could be re-ignited. But Merton was not optimistic about the renewal taking place in monasteries following the Second Vatican Council. There was too much "obsession with novelty for its own sake." Rather, he urged monks to maintain "your fidelity to your ancient traditions."

In the end, he turned to the East. Two weeks before he died in a freak accident, he said, "We need the religious genius of Asia and of Asian culture to inject a dimension of depth into our aimless threshing about."

Contemplation, Merton maintained, is not a time to merely recharge one's batteries before another assault on the active life. It is the core of life itself. It is the place of communion with God. Anything that has lasting meaning – social action, plowing the fields, friendship – is rooted in contemplation.

The quest for personal authenticity is a tricky thing. It tends to put the self at the centre and God on the periphery. Merton wanted something else: "We do not detach ourselves from things in order to attach ourselves to God, but rather we become detached from ourselves in order to see and use all things in and for God."

Here is the font of freedom and personal authenticity. If Merton spoke that message in the language of the 1960s, it is nevertheless one that needs to be heard even more clearly today.

Glen Argan

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