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

We need nothing more urgently than the superfluous. 

Part III:  Continued from Part II

Contemplative life in all its forms
and on all different levels is really a quest for living from the heart.  It is a quest for the heart.  I would like now to go a little beyond the strict confines of Merton’s talk in Bangkok, exploring something that here and there in his writings comes through which seems important in context, namely, the idea of the heart as the organ for finding meaning.  The heart is the one center that unites us on the religious level with all human beings, everywhere in the world, at any time we engage in the ultimate quest for meaning.  It is not only the intellect, although it must engage all of our intellect.  It is not only the will, although all our devotion must enter into it.  It is not only our emotions, although all our emotions must reverberate with it.  It is the heart, that realm of our being where intellect, will, and emotions are still one and united, the very taproot of our whole being.

Meaning is what really counts in our lives.  If our life is filled to the brim with purpose, we may one day wake up and still wonder:  Where is the meaning of it all?  Purpose is not of itself meaningful.  We must give meaning to our purpose; we must allow meaning to flow into our purpose, opening our hearts and giving ourselves to the Word of God, to the situation.  There is more than purposefulness, and if we come to see it on many different levels, what really matters is not the useful but the superfluous!  All the great things in life, like poetry and music and friendship are totally superfluous – superfluous in the sense of superfluity, of an overflowing, of not fulfilling any particular practical need, but being gratis.  Then we come to see that the whole world is really superfluous.  Who needs it?

We create the impression sometimes that God worked hard to make himself a world.  Well, did he need it in the first place?  No.  It’s a superfluity of his love; it’s a superfluity of his enjoyment.  It’s not like someone making a woolen sweater against the cold, or a fan against the heat.  No, it’s much more like someone singing a song (in the shower, maybe, just for enjoyment).  It is like someone dancing, an image often used in spiritual tradition – God as the Cosmic Dancer.  Much more than work or purpose, all of creation is play, unfolding of meaning, celebration of the meaning that is at the root of it all.

This is where Merton’s vision of the monk at the margin of society comes in, the monk as being totally superfluous.  Nobody needs the monk, and yet, from another point of view, nobody needs anything as urgently as we need monks.  For we need nothing more urgently than the superfluous.  What would life be without poetry?  What would life be without music?  What would life be without friendship?  But real friendship goes far beyond comradeship, where you still need one another.  Comrades, like two sides of a step-ladder, hold one another up.  But when you get to friendship, it is pure gift.  It is more than practical help and support.  It is mutual enjoyment.  It implies this letting go, this freedom to let go.  I am not bound to you.  As the Sufis say, “Two birds tied to one another do not fly better for having four wings.”  That is something true friends understand.  They fly with one another, but they are not tied to one another.  They are completely free.  The realm of our life where the superfluous matters most is our contemplative life.  In that sense all of us have a contemplative life.  The contemplative life of every human being consists in the search for meaning over and beyond purpose.

That was another step where Merton cracked the egg of contemporary monastic life and went far beyond what his contemporaries could, or even now can, accept:  that the monastery belongs to all.  A monastery is not a kind of museum nor a place where you come and from a great distance look at the monks singing their chant down there, while you sit way up in the loft, removed from their life.  Merton said, speaking about Trungpa Rimpoche again:  “Incidentally” – for that’s one of those incidental remarks where the real essence of the talk comes through – “incidentally, he has a monastery where you can be a monk for a time.”  “Incidentally,” that is a possibility, and not only a possibility, it is a real need for our time.  Everybody has, we all have, a contemplative life and so we all deserve monastic life. 

Then he speaks about monastic therapy, a very ancient concept, monastic therapy, a healing that goes on in the monastery.  God knows we all need that healing, and it isn’t only for monks.  The earliest monks in the West, the Essenes, were called “the Therapists.”  What this monastic therapy is all about is a liberation of the truth imprisoned in us by ignorance and error.  It’s not something outside, but it’s an inner liberation, a liberation of the truth.  Merton closes his talk with a very beautiful image.  It is interesting that this image occurs in the original notes for the talk, but it occurs as a subheading somewhere in the middle of the talk.  When a speaker takes something he has as a minor point and uses it as a final image, you can be sure that, either in the process of the talk or at some other point, this began to be very important to him.  Here, an hour before he died, Merton uses an image from Buddhist iconography.  The Buddha is seated, pointing toward the earth and holding a begging bowl.

The background of the story is that the tempter, immediately after Buddha’s enlightenment, challenged him and said:  “That little piece of ground on which you are sitting is really mine.  You are sitting on my own little piece of ground.”  But the Buddha answered:  “No, it now belongs to me because I have been enlightened.”  I belong to it, and it belongs to me.  I belong to the world and the world belongs to me because I have been enlightened.  Merton says, “This is a very excellent statement, I think, about the relation of the monk to the world.  The monk belongs to the world, but the world belongs to him insofar as he has dedicated himself totally to liberation in order to liberate it.”

We come now to a much deeper concept of contemplatio, which is liberation of the world.  Buddha, holding the open begging bowl as a sign of total openness to everything given to him as a gift, points to the ground.  Totally liberated, he can liberate the world, give himself to the world.  That is the second half of contemplatio – putting the two temples together.  Only when you are liberated can you liberate. 

Merton says, “You can’t just immerse yourself in the world and get carried away with it.  That is no salvation.  If you want to pull a drowning man out of the water, you have to have some support yourself.  Suppose someone is drowning and you are standing on a rock, you can do it; or suppose you can support yourself by swimming, you can do it.  There is nothing to be gained by simply jumping into the water and drowning with him.”  You must be liberated from the world to liberate the world.  And that is the final word with which he leaves us at this talk.  Liberation is the monastic life.  It is imperishable, an instinct of the human heart.

That is the crack of dawn, that is the crack where I see Merton standing, just at the moment when he actually passes over into that life that is hidden with Christ in God.  It is a crack that is widening these days...and tremendous things are going to come from it.

Additional resource:

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