Recollections of Thomas Merton’s Last Days in the West by Bro. David Steindl-Rast O.S.B.

"What truly matters is not how to get the most out of life, but how to recollect yourself so that you can fully give yourself.” 

We were sitting in front of a blazing fire when Thomas Merton again took up this theme of growing.  “The main theme of time is that of inner growth.  It’s a theme to which we should all return frequently in prayer.  There is a great thing in my life – Christ wants me to grow.  Move this around a little bit in meditation.  Instead of worrying – Where am I going? What kind of resolution should I make? – I should simply let this growing unfold in my prayer.  I should see what is holding me back from it.  What is it?  What kind of compromises have I made?  Am I substituting activity for growth?  (I have often asked myself, is this writing getting in the way?  For me writing is so satisfying an activity that it is hard to say.)  In someone else it is easier to see this process of growing and to see what hinders it.  But when it comes to ourselves, all we can do is try to honestly be ourselves.

“One of the greatest obstacles to your growing is the fear of making a fool of yourself.  Any real step forward implies the risk of failure.  And the really important steps imply the risk of complete failure.  Yet we must make them, trusting in Christ.  If I take this step, everything I have done so far might go down the drain.  In a situation like that we need a shot of Buddhist mentality.  Then we see, down what drain?  So what?  (So that’s perhaps one of the valuable things about this Asian trip.)  We have to have the courage to make fools of ourselves, and at the same time be awfully careful not to make fools of ourselves.

“The great temptation is to fear going it alone, wanting to be ‘with it’ at any cost.  But each one of us has to be able to go it alone somehow.  You don’t want to repudiate the community, but you have to go it alone at times.  If the community is made up of a little group of people who always try to support one another, and nobody ever gets out of this little block, nothing happens and all growth is being stifled.  This is possibly one of the greatest dangers we face in the future, because we are getting more and more to be that kind of society.  We will need those who have the courage to do the opposite of everybody else.  If you have this courage you will effect change.  Of course they will say, ‘this guy is crazy’; but you have to do it.

“We are too much dominated by public opinion.  We are always asking, what is someone else going to think about it?  There is a whole ‘contemplative mystique,’ a standard which other people have set up for you.  They call you a contemplative or a hermit, and then they demand that you conform to the image they have in mind.  But the real contemplative standard is to have no standard, to be just yourself.  That’s what God is asking of us, to be ourselves.  If you are ready to say ‘I’m going to do my own thing, it doesn’t matter what kind of a press I get,’ if you are ready to be yourself, you are not going to fit anybody else’s mystique.”

He himself certainly didn’t.  When I saw him for the first time at the Abbey of Gethsemani he was wearing his overalls and I thought he was the milk delivery man.  He wasn’t going to fit my mystique either.  Two other faces came to mind whenever I looked at his features, Dorothy Day and Picasso.  When the chapel was getting dark and he bent down to hear confessions, there was more of Dorothy Day.  When he read poetry (his own reluctantly, but his friends’ poems with relish) there was more of Picasso.  Again and again I was amazed to find him at once so totally uninhibited and so perfectly disciplined.

He saw the wrong kind of self-fulfillment as one of our great temptations today.  “The wrong idea of personal fulfillment is promoted by commercialism.  They try to sell things which none of us would buy in our right mind; so they keep us in our wrong mind.  There is a kind of self-fulfillment that fulfils nothing but your illusory self.   What truly matters is not how to get the most out of life, but how to recollect yourself so that you can fully give yourself.”  Self-acceptance, sober and realistic, was basic in Thomas Merton’s view.

“The desert becomes a paradise when it is accepted as desert.  The desert can never be anything but a desert if we are trying to escape it.  But once we fully accept it in union with the passion of Christ, it becomes a paradise.  This is a great theological point:  any attempt to renew the contemplative life is going to have to include this element of sacrifice, uncompromising sacrifice.  There is no way around it if we want a valid renewal.

“It’s all a matter of rethinking the identity of institutions so that everything is oriented to people.  The institution must serve the development of the individual person.  And once you’ve got fully developed people, they can do anything.  What counts are people and their vocations, not structures and ideas.  Let us make room for idiosyncrasies.  The danger is that the institution becomes an end in itself.  What we need are people-centered communities, not institution-centered ones.  This is the direction in which renewal must move.

“Maybe new structures are not that necessary.  Perhaps you already do know what you want.  I believe that what we want to do is to pray.  After all, why did any of us become religious if we didn’t want to pray?  What do we want, if not to pray?  Okay, now, pray.  This is the whole doctrine of prayer in the Rule of St. Benedict.  It’s all summed up in one phrase:  ‘If a man wants to pray, let him go and pray.’ That is all St. Benedict feels it is necessary to say about the subject.  He doesn’t’ say, let us go in and start with a little introductory prayer, etc, etc.  If you want to pray, pray.

“Now that all the barriers are taken away and the obstacles gone and we find ourselves with the opportunity to do whatever we want, we see the real problem.  It is in ourselves.  What is wrong with us?  What is keeping us back from living lives of prayer?  Perhaps we don’t really want to pray.  This is the thing we have to face.  Before this we took it for granted that we were totally dedicated to this desire for prayer.  Somebody else was stopping us.  The thing that was stopping us was the structure.  Now we simply find that maybe a structure helps.  If some of the old structure helps, keep it.  We don’t have to have this mania for throwing out structures simply because they are structures.  What we have to do is to discover what is useful to us.  We can then discard structures that don’t help, and keep structures that do help.  And if it turns out that something medieval helps, keep it.  Whether it is medieval or not, doesn’t matter.  What does matter is that it helps you become yourself, that it helps you live a life of prayer.

“It’s a risky thing to pray, and the danger is that our very prayers get between God and us.  The great thing in prayer is not to pray, but to go directly to God.  If saying your prayers is an obstacle to prayer, cut it out.  The best way to pray is:  stop.  Let prayer pray within you, whether you know it or not.  This means a deep awareness of our true inner identity.  It implies a life of faith, but also of doubt.  You can’t have faith without doubt.  Give up the business of suppressing doubt.  Doubt and faith are two sides of the same thing.  Faith will grow out of doubt, the real doubt.  We don’t pray right because we evade doubt.  And we evade it by regularity and by activism.  It is in these two ways that we create a false identity, and these are also the two ways by which we justify the self-perpetuation of our institutions.

“But the point is that we need not justify ourselves.  By grace we are no longer under judgment.  I must remember both that I am not condemned, yet worthy of condemnation.  How can I live the message of Christian newness in these final days?  I am not called to gather merit, but to go all over the world taking away people’s debts.  (This is not the prerogative of a priestly caste.)  We need a theology of liberation instead of an official debt machine.  I belong entirely to Christ.  There is no self to justify.”

There were so many points of contact with Zen Buddhist teaching in all this that I couldn’t help asking whether he thought he could have come to these insights if he had never come across Zen.  “I’m not sure,” he answered pensively, “but I don’t think so.  I see no contradiction between Buddhism and Christianity.  The future of Zen is in the West.  I intend to become as good a Buddhist as I can.”

And yet, Thomas Merton’s Christian faith wasn’t watered down to the point where it would become compatible with most anything.  It was throbbing with life.  This came out most clearly in little personal remarks, for example in what he said about so traditional a theme as prayer of intercession.  “It’s simply a need for me to express my love by praying for my friends; it’s like embracing them.  If you love another person, it’s God’s love being realized.  One and the same love is reaching your friend through you, and you through your friend.”

“But isn’t there still an implicit dualism in all this?” I asked.  His answer was, “Really there isn’t, and yet there is.  You have to see your will and God’s will dualistically for a long time.  You have to experience duality for a long time until you see it’s not there.  In this respect I am a Hindu.  Ramakrishna has the solution.  Don’t consider dualistic prayer on a lower level.  The lower is higher.  There are no levels.  Any moment you can break through to the underlying unity which is God’s gift in Christ.  In the end, Praise praises.  Thanksgiving gives thanks.  Jesus prays.  Openness is all.”  He was ready to go to Bangkok.

Excerpted from Monastic Studies (Mount Saviour Monastery, Pine City, NY; 1969).  Before leaving for the East – and his death on December 10, 1968, in Bangkok – Thomas Merton attended a meeting of Our Lady of the Redwoods Abbey in Whitethorn, California.  The preceding notes by Brother David were made there.