Thomas Merton
Now at the Crack of Dawn
by Br. David Steindl-Rast, OSB

Real monks live with great alertness, criticizing, sifting out what is essential, and changing life accordingly.

Merton says that the confrontation with Marxism forces him to face what it is to be a Christian monk.  He tells a little story about meeting a Marxist student at California’s Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions.  During a break-period conversation, the student said to him, “We are also monks.”  It really sounded like:  “We are the real monks!  Who are you?  We are the dedicated ones.”  What is essential is that the monk take a critical attitude towards the world.  The monk is a critic.  We know from Merton’s life to what extent he was a critic of our times.  The monk has this in common with the Marxist, that both Marxist thought and monastic tradition are critical of society.  But Merton says, “Marxism criticizes and tries to change the economic structure; monasticism criticizes and tries to change people’s consciousness.  While Marxism is concerned with externals, monastic criticism is concerned with the inner attitude."

Merton sees a complete parallel between the movement in Marxist ideology from capitalistic greed to communist dedication, and, in monastic spiritual psychology, from cupiditas to caritas, from selfishness and desire to real giving love.  He calls that movement a great “yes” to reality, to love, the giving of oneself to life, to the other in service, rather than clinging and hanging onto and grasping.  Unselfishness is one of the essentials which Merton sees in confronting the monastic crisis.  We are critics, not entering some sort of frame of reference and doing what has always been done, but instead being much like those on the social forefront of what is happening in our times.  Real monks live with great alertness, criticizing, sifting out what is essential, and changing life accordingly.

This focus on change leads Merton to see a second essential of monastic life – transformation.  Marxism doesn’t simply make a comparison between capitalist greed and communist dedication; rather, it implies a call for change.  Thus, monks cannot sit back and compare selfishness with love and service; there has to be a change taking place.  It is a dynamic thing.  Merton sees this liberation – and monastic life – as a process rather than a state of life.  We have here one of those indications of a crack in the egg shell.  Before Merton’s time, monastic life was considered, on the whole, as a state of life.  After Merton, this is no longer possible.  Of course traditionally, monastic life as a process was always the ideal.  Merton is very traditional in the true sense that to be truly traditional means to be on the forefront.

In the recent and customary view, but not necessarily the most deeply traditional one, monastic life was seen as a state into which one enters, a state in which one perseveres, rather than a process in which one goes forward dynamically to conquer new ground.  Merton hinges this notion of progress and of transformation to what he calls the central monastic vow of conversio morum, conversatio morum.  It is very interesting to note that he uses here the term conversio morum, translated as “conversion of life,” which is one of the three Benedictine vows.

There has been a great controversy in the history of the Benedictine Monastic Order, Trappists included, about whether Saint Benedict wrote:  conversio morum or conversatio morum.  Conversio is a conversation that takes place once and for all; conversatio is a conversion that is expressed over and over again.  It does seem that even Saint Benedict’s original text vacillated between conversatio and conversio.  Our own monastic tradition emphasizes the fact that, regardless of what the original word was, we monks are to live in conversation – in constant renewal and constant conversion, which is the very essence of monastic life.  Merton, too, considers conversion, a constant turning, to be the very essence of monastic life.  This is how he came to take a very critical attitude toward the structures of monastic life.  He formulated this clearly when he said that the time for relying on structures has come to an end.

Here is the high point of his whole Bangkok talk, the background of which is the story of Trungpa Rimpoche, who moved to the U.S. and founded a number of lively, prospering meditation centers.  Merton met him on his Asian journey and was impressed.  When the communists invaded Tibet, Trungpa Rimpoche was abbot of a large monastery, but was out on a visitation and got caught by the invasion at some farmhouse.  Now the question was, what should he do?  Should he go back to his own monastery, or should be flee across the border?  He sent a message to a nearby abbot-friend to ask, “What shall we do?”  The abbot sent back a message which Merton found most significant:  “From now on, Brother, everybody stands on his own feet.”

Merton goes on to say, “To my mind, this is an extremely important monastic statement.”  (Remember, this man is now speaking in the last hours of his life!)  “If you forget everything else that has been said, I would suggests that you remember this for the future:  ‘From now on, each one will have to stand on his own feet.’”  He throws everything back on each monk personally:  “Don’t rely on structure; stand on your own feet.”  Then Merton expresses his relationship to structures:  “Yes, we do need structures; we are supported by structures.  But they may be destroyed at any moment by a political power or a political force.  We cannot rely on structures.  Use structures, but do not rely on structures.”

The moment we stand on our own two feet, the moment we find contemplative life at the root of monastic life, deep down in our own hearts, in our own center, we go beyond division. That is the third essential that Merton sifts out in facing the monastic identity crisis:  that the Christian monastic calling is one that unites us with all monks.  There again is this crack where he breaks out from the enclosed shell of a Trappist, Christian, monastic structure into universal monasticism.  Monks East and West share the same quest, the contemplative quest of the human heart, in which we are all united.  We go beyond division to an inner liberty which no one can touch.

Merton sees the essence:  “What is essential in the monastic life is not embedded in buildings, not in a habit, not necessarily even in a rule.”  (That must sound like enormous heresy to some.)  “It is somewhere along the line of something deeper than a rule.  It is concerned with this business of total inner transformation.”  Once we have reached that last quest for total inner transformation, to quote Saint Paul, “there is no longer slave or free-born, there is no longer Jew or Gentile,” there is no longer Asian or European, but we have transcended these divisions.  “This kind of monasticism,” Merton said in his last talk, “this kind of monasticism cannot be extinguished.  It is imperishable; it represents an instinct of the human heart.”

(Continue to Part III...)

Additional resource:

Final Memories of Thomas Merton, by Dom Jean Leclercq, OSB