Thank you for that warm welcome, Father Joseph, and for the opportunity to be here at Mount Seder. Several years ago, I remember coming across the monastery in monastic studies, worked on Merton and David Standelast, and always wondered if I'd ever have the chance to get here. And lo and behold, many, many years later, I did. It's a wonderful community. And I saw many of you earlier at Mass and over at the reception. And the singing, of course, is divine. I was in Pluskarden Abbey. in Scotland recently, and the abbot there was telling me about a professor of music coming in from the University of, I think, Aberdeen, who was helping them with their chant as well. So monasteries all over the world seem to be upgrading their chanting skills. And of course, we're all the immense beneficiaries of that. But it's not musicology that I'm going to be talking about. It is Thomas Merton. And I'm going to outline some aspects of his life and particular themes of Merton's life.

[01:01]

And then it will be open for a brief question and answer period immediately after. Now, many of you have heard of Thomas Merton, I'm sure. Many of you, I'm also confident, have read some of his books over the years. And even though he's been dead now for quite a number of years, books on him and books by him still appear. And in numerous languages, interest in Merton appears to be, in fact, inexhaustible. I have to ask the reason why, in the year 2015, so many years after his death in 1968, the writings of a monk in the Roman church would be of perduring value, why people are reading him all over the world, why there are conferences and symposias and dissertations of considerable number on him. So what is it about Thomas Merton that continues to attract people? I was struck recently, and I was mentioning this just last night at a ministerial gathering here in Elmira,

[02:02]

that a few years ago, the Education Committee of the Roman Catholic Episcopate, Episcopal Conference here in the States, decided to remove Merton from a high school religion text. And last year, they put him back in. And he increased the number of pages. So he has more pages than anybody else. And I've been wondering, now, why would that be? Why would, at one period of time, he's considered particularly controversial? He is, of course, controversial, to a degree that he exits the high school text. And a few years later, he's back in with more pages than Mother Teresa, under the category, Chapter Heading of Holy. So how can he be in and out in such a short period of time? Well, that's more. He's all over the map, and it's one of the reasons why I think people find him enormously attractive, because they can't hold him firmly in their grasp. He eludes them.

[03:05]

He's more complicated, more subtle, more elusive, and because of all that, more interesting. Thomas Merton was a perpetual pilgrim, always in search of strange lands and new horizons. In a wonderful essay called From Pilgrimage to Crusade, that appeared in a book titled Mystics and Zen Masters, Merton talks about the critical monastic notion of peregrinational, going forth into strange lands, and he uses as a particular example the Irish monks. They got in their little boats and they floated out, and they floated everywhere. They landed in Newfoundland, in fact, the oldest place of habitation by any, now we would call, European community. Of course, there were obviously indigenous peoples, but European community were the Vikings. And the Vikings landed in what is now Newfoundland, a province of Canada, since 1949, and set up shop there in what is called Lancel Meadows.

[04:12]

And they went all over Europe, of course. They went to Turkey. They went up the Tiber. The Vikings went everywhere, and the Irish monks went everywhere. Often the Vikings were chasing the Irish monks. If you go to the great monastic islands of the Skellings off the coast of Kerry, you'll find that the monks tried to outwit the Vikings by getting up at the top of these virtually unscalable cliffs where they could pray as hermits and as monks, free from the Viking sword. which was true for a long period of time, but the Vikings are nothing if tenacious, and they eventually scaled the cliffs themselves. The monks, like the Vikings, preferred to travel. They went everywhere. They explored new horizons. They did it with risk. Merton saw in this a wonderful metaphor for the spiritual life, that a peregrination or a pilgrimage or going forth into strange lands is what we do.

[05:15]

Now, it may be not literally, it may be figuratively, it may be metaphorically, but we only grow spiritually when we go beyond our comfort zone, when we go beyond the boundaries which define us. And sometimes that will involve a pilgrimage, like the Camino, say, or some other kind of pilgrimage. And sometimes it will be just simply an imaginative foray, a spiritual journey that takes us out of ourselves. But we have to do that. One of the reasons why pilgrimages are sacred things and why sites where pilgrims go have special value, not because of their tourist implications, but rather because they bring us into encounter with ourselves. We go out to discover ourselves. Well, Merton went out all the time. He was the quintessential extraterritorial writer Unhoused in any single setting, he crossed boundaries, intellectual and spiritual, that would deter most questers, particularly those consecrated to a religious life distinguished by its stabilitas.

[06:25]

Consider the ironies in this. Merton takes a vow of stability, almost immediately begins to think where he should go. A new book will be published in just a couple of months by an Anglican priest by the name of Donald Greyston called Thomas Merton and the Noonday Demon. and it is a very careful and skillful examination of Merton's correspondence from 1952 to 1955 as he tries to leave Gethsemane. He wants to join the Commodolesi in Italy, either in Fluscati or Commodoli, or he wants to join the Carthusians. or he wants to go someplace else. And eventually, they, well, they always say no, he just doesn't hear it quite. But eventually, he gets a letter from one Archbishop Montini, who will in time, in 1963, become Pope Paul VI. And Montini pretty well tells him, here stay in thought, in a beautifully crafted letter that Merton actually receives spiritually.

[07:30]

And so he settles down for a little while, after three years of trying to go elsewhere, only at the end of the 50s to be right back in it again because a Benedictine monk, abbot, Gregorio Mercier, who was the abbot at the monastery in Cuernavaca in Mexico, invites Merton to join that community. And then Ernesto Cardenal, the great Trappist monk who studied at Gethsemane but would eventually found the community of Solentanami in Nicaragua and eventually become a cabinet minister. Cardenal invited Merton to go to Nicaragua. And so Merton was always being invited to go someplace else even though he took a vow of stability and introduced an element of creative tension in his life. one of the many ironies that defined who he was. Of course, eventually, he would get permission from his abbot to travel extensively, and he would die, a reason why you should always listen to your abbot. If he had listened to the abbot, then he wouldn't have taken that trip, and he probably would be standing here talking to you right now.

[08:36]

He was born in Prague, in the Pyrenees, on January the 31st, 1915. That's why we're in the 100th anniversary year. Something I think that people often forget, he was variously schooled and he was reared in France. He was fluent in French. It was a language which was very close to him. We did a pilgrimage kind of seminar last year. It called Thomas Merton in France. We spent 10 days there. And we lived in Prague and went to mass at his church, St. Pierre de Prague. and we went to many of the great monastic areas in the Pyrenees, Saint-Martin-de-Canijou and Saint-Michel-de-Couchart. The latter is a represents the kind of complicated language mixture to get with Basque, because it's the Basque region in France and in Spain. And then we went to the Lycée Ingres in Montauban, where Merton went to school.

[09:39]

And very importantly, we went to the little village where he spent a lot of time with his father, called Saint-Antoine-Noble-Val in the Midi. Now, this is really interesting because last year they produced a film with Dame Helen Mirren called A 100-Foot Journey. I don't know if any of you saw that. Well, that was shot in San Antonio, Nuevo Leval, where Merton and his father lived. In fact, the home they had built for him is called the Villa Diana, and the street to that home is called Thomas Merton Way. Okay? And in the town of Prague, there is now a plaque acknowledging where he was born, on the Rue du Justice, and also a formal acknowledgment that he was not just a writer, an American writer, but he was a monk. Pretty important in very secular France after 1905 in the introduction of laicite. Lots of stuff in relation to religious was verboten in the public sphere. And here they are now. claiming their native sun.

[10:41]

It's really quite beautiful to see, actually. So when you go to the south of France, and we did this in the pilgrimage, we looked at passages from the seven-story mountain, passages from his novel, my argument with the Gestapo, which deals with his experience at the Lycée, to some degree. He's talking about the French angels that has shaped his life, that he does in conjectures of guilty bystander. And very importantly, his close relationship with one of the great Catholic thinkers of the last century, Jacques Maritain, the philosopher, and his poet wife and mystic Raissa Maritain, whom Merton translated into English, both as a poet and as a mystic. I tell you this because very often we tend to think of Merton as uniquely or exclusively American property. He was not. He was not. His father was from New Zealand. His mother was an American. He was born in France, straddling the border with Spain.

[11:42]

He was extraterritorial. He existed outside the territorial boundaries. This is what adds, I think, to the remarkable appeal of him, that he could speak as a genuinely international figure. He was schooled and reared in France, as I said, also in the United States and in England. He went to Clare College at Cambridge, where he was for a period of time until he was kicked out for his roguish behavior. Eventually, he was accepted as a postulant in the Trappist Monastery of Our Lady of Gethsemane in Kentucky on December 10, 1941. He brought a cosmopolitan sensibility to the monastery and a rich educational formation to a community unaccustomed to worldly sophistication. The Trappists are not the Benedictines. The Benedictines come from a long tradition of learning. The Trappists were, by nature, anti-learning. The Trappists are a reform of the reform.

[12:44]

The Cistercians are a reform of the Benedictines, and then they underwent two generations the first generation, second generation of the founders. And then eventually, in 17th century France, under Armand de Rancet, the Trappists, the Cistercians reformed themselves again, going back to a primitive rule with a classically French austerity. And they lived in a small swamp called La Trappe. And the monks who survived became known as Trappists. They are technically Cistercians of the Reform. Now, they're not known, or weren't, it might be slightly different now, but at the time they were not known for their attraction to learning. They were an order that was particularly severe, and learning, maintaining institutions, training professors, writing books, was not a Trappist thing. Now think of how dramatic a leap that would be for a young man

[13:47]

at Columbia University, whose classmate includes the great American poet John Berman, whose teacher is equally great American poet and Shakespeare scholar Mark Van Dorn, who is identified as a rising literary figure in the New York scene, gives it all up and joins the Trappists. Now, he'd given it all up and gone off to Ampleforth or to Downsend or somewhere in Europe to join English Benedictines or French Benedictines. That wouldn't have surprised them. But the Trappists, one of the many things about Merton is he's a surprise guy. He always took the road you didn't think he would take. And that adds again to his appeal. And there is a consistency in all this. Within a short time of joining the Trappists, seven years to be precise, he would explode onto the international literary scene with his spiritual autobiography, The Seven-Story Mountain, a work perhaps many of you have read.

[14:54]

It has become a classic of its genre, in spite of Merton's increasing dissatisfaction with its authorial smugness, triumphalist tone, and oracular pronouncements. He's quite full of himself, actually. And he thinks, God, he's there now. He's got all the passion and the fervor and the zeal of a new convert who's come to know the truth. And he passes quick judgment on people and others that he comes to regret. Particularly the Anglicans get it in the neck. And that's a funny thing, because a lot of the best Merton scholarship is done by Anglicans. And he spends a little time doing repair job for the rest of his life, not just on the Anglicans. Merton became, in time, the sternest critic of his own autobiography. And he lamented, in the introduction to its Japanese edition, the myth that it had created of his life and faith. He became known as the Seven-Story Mountain Man.

[15:57]

And the important thing to recognize is that Merton's Seven-Story Mountain is the first volume of an ongoing autobiography. See, if he had stopped there at the age of about 33, and who writes their autobiography that young, right? We don't. We usually wait. Chesterton waited. He wrote his autobiography, then dropped dead. Perfect timing. Perfect timing, because you can't add to it then, you see. And the marketing value is enormous. But Merton was very young. He finished his autobiography, and then he realizes, wait a minute now. I'm going to be, he was a monk for another 27 years. So obviously, what's he going to do? He's going to continue to revise and write the autobiography. And that's why his journals and diaries are so important, because they tell you about the evolving Merton. If you think Merton's life ended in 1948, you missed the boat. It didn't. Merton evolved as a monk, as a human being, as a spiritual quester.

[17:03]

He evolved. And he changed. He changed his mind. He matured. The seven-story mountain, however, continues to prove to be an enduring work, and rightly so. It's clearly foundational to an understanding of the early Merton. When I teach graduate courses on Merton, and I do, as well as undergraduate courses, I teach for Ron Roheiser, the spiritual writer and president of the Albany School of Theology in San Antonio, and I'll be teaching, I alternate between teaching a course on Henry Nouwen, I'm the official biographer of Henry now, and so I tend to spend a lot of time with him. And then my primary love, Thomas Merton, on alternating years. And when I go down, I say, well, this year, the students want to study the Seventh Story Mountain, and I don't want them to, because I don't think it's the way to come into Merton. I think there are better points of entree. You should read the Seventh Story Mountain, but not coming into it. There's a point for it, there's a place for it, but not at the entry point.

[18:07]

Irrespective its comparative youthfulness, he was 33 when it appeared in 1948. Again, those of you who are over 33, and there seem to be a few of you, try and think if you had written your autobiography at 33, which got published, sold 200,000 copies in its first year. Can you imagine that? 200,000 copies. It was on the New York Times bestseller list when that meant something for six months. And you're a monk in an order that doesn't read. I mean, this is kind of crazy, right? You're in a hill somewhere in Kentucky. You're anonymous, but you're not anonymous. You're now famous. And so increasingly, we'll become the monastery. Its uneven style, its occasionally grating prolixity, remains a key and influential work of and for the post-World War II generation, both in the United States and in Europe.

[19:11]

Large numbers of people became monks because they read the Seventh Story Mountain. There's a good friend of mine who actually just died last week, who was Brother Jude. in Gethsemane. He left Gethsemane in the early 1960s, subsequently married, ended up teaching welding in a high school. And his monastic formation was the most important thing of his life. And all his family recognized that. He was the cheese monk when he was in Gethsemane. And he would talk to me about what it was like living in Gethsemane in the 1950s when there were 300-plus monks in there. The vast majority brought there because they read Martin I remember asking John Oudes Bamberger, the psychiatrist monk who was a scholastic under Merton, and very close to him, and was for many years, as some of you will know, the abbot of the Abbey of the Genesee, which is not too far from here. I asked him once, I said, John Oudes, what kind of a monk was Merton? And he paused for a bit of time, and then he said, he was a great Merton monk.

[20:15]

And the point that the abbot was making was clear. that those who wanted to model their lives on Merton and his fame, this wouldn't work. It would work for Merton, but wouldn't work for anyone else. You had to find your own way into monastic meaning. And Merton's was a little eccentric, a little exotic. It was the entry point of a genius, actually. There's the rub. Merton's uncanny reading of his time Although cloistered for half of his life, he died on December 10, 1968, precisely 27 years to the date that he entered monastic life. He never really left the world of ideas, of art, of spiritual pruning, of engagement with his culture. Certainly, he was as much a product of his religious culture as he was a shaper of its future. And clearly, he had an acute sense of the importance of a nurturing, organic, and vital tradition, as evidenced by his efforts at ressourcement, in other words, going back to the sources, providing translations and commentaries on Griegel the Carthusian, Cassiodorus, Banner of Clairvaux, Guericke-Vigny,

[21:35]

and the Desert Fathers. But this reverent and creative attention to the past did not eclipse or sour his interest in the present. He was as fond of Giorno Mento updating as he was of returning to the sources of the Sussman. He understood and embodied these two key principles of the Second Vatican Council in ways that were prescient as well as unnerving. There is some wonderful stuff in listening to Merton. Many years ago, Creedence Cassettes out of Kansas City produced the cassettes of Merton's conferences to the novices. Merton was master of novices for 10 years, 1955-1965. Very important position to hold in the monastery, and he shaped the monastic vocations of countless numbers. During that period, he would give weekly conferences on topics of interest in their formation. So, he would talk about various of the ancient monastic sources, but he would also talk about contemporary writers and contemporary issues.

[22:41]

So, the conference of the great German mystic and writer-poet, Rainer Maria Rilke. then one on Hopkins, one on W.H. Auden, one on William Blake, one on the race situation, race relations in the United States and Martin Luther King, all kinds of things. Now what was really interesting, if you listen to them, because now you know media, a Washington outfit has gone over these tapes, augmented them, made them of a very fine quality, and now you can hear these wonderful conferences with Burton. What you discover is his intense interest in the world that's going on outside the grounds of Gethsemane. Not that he wants to be in it, but that he has come to love it. That's his world, too. He wants to, in a sense, help to redeem that world. That's what Amont does. So you can see the tremendous energy that he brings to this when he talks about these things. They matter to him. And two of the things that were very important were rassourcement and adjournment. He lived through the council, and he was master of novices during the council.

[23:45]

The council was 1962 to 1965. Merton corresponded with Pope John XXIII. I was mentioning this last night at the ministerial gathering. And in that correspondence, which is a really quite beautiful one, you see Merton identifying so brilliantly with what John XXIII is doing. He's completely sympathical. with the Pope. Now, the Pope actually doesn't write directly to Merton. That's done by his secretary, Loris Capovilla, whom Pope Francis created the oldest cardinal in living memory. He was 99 when he was created a cardinal. And it was a wonderful gesture because what Francis was doing was he's taking John XXIII's secretary, bringing him out, validating him as an important figure in the life of the church at the same time as he was canonizing John XXIII. It was an act of great generosity and a brilliant stroke. Capovino was the one who corresponded with Merton in his capacity, and it's remarkable to see the exchange of idea, enthusiasm, over this new Pentecost.

[24:52]

Merton's publication output during his life was prodigious, some 50 books spanning numerous areas and genres. Poetry, over 1,000 pages of poems, 10 volumes of poetry. A drama, he wrote a drama called Tower of Babel, which was also a radio drama. A novel, My Argument with the Gestapo, which was originally called Journal of My Escape from the Nazis, but it was retitled My Argument with the Gestapo and was published one month after he died. The diaries and the journals, they're numerous. There are so many of them. Commentaries and translations from the Italian, from the Latin, from the Greek, from the French. Merton was a polyglot. He spoke several languages. Social and literary essays took up a great deal of his time, and he was published in many of the finest magazines in the United States. Published by New Directions when it came to his literary work, same publishing houses, William Carlos Williams, Tennessee Williams, all the literary greats are published by New Directions.

[25:59]

Theological expositions, Enchiridia, or spiritual handbooks. Many of you will remember Thomas Akempis' The Imitation of Christ, right? That's a spiritual handbook, or Enchiridia. Erasmus wrote one too. They were manuals that were written to help us live our lives. They were spiritual handbooks, if you like. Merton wrote several of them. Seeds of Contemplation, New Seeds of Contemplation, Thoughts in Solitude, No Man is an Island. These are all spiritual books to help us improve our spiritual lives. He wrote detailed studies on the interfaith dialogue and on the art of contemplation. And he had provocative forays into the complex and incendiary areas of race relations, peace in a nuclear age, and monastic reform. I often think, I did my doctorate on Merton and published four books on him, so I've been in the Merton industry for a long time.

[27:03]

I often think, if this is what he did by the time he was 53, what would he have done in the age of the internet? It would be virtually impossible. to exhaust his work, because the correspondence he had with people is almost as heavy and weighty as his journal entries. An extraordinary correspondence with the mighty, the famous, and the humble, and the unknown. Didn't matter to him. Volumes and volumes of letters that are now increasingly being published in their full context. Originally, they came out with Merton's letters, but not his interlocutors, not his correspondents. But I never thought that that was a wise move. Now what they're doing is, I think, much more valuable. They're bringing out the correspondence of Merton in which you see the dialogue with his correspondent. So, Jean Leclerc, the great Benedictine monk and writer.

[28:05]

Czeslaw Milosz, the Nobel Prize laureate from Poland. Rosemary Radford Ruther, the very controversial pathologist of the 1960s with whom he had a long correspondence. Catherine de Keurig-Dorothy, the founder of Madonna House and subsequently Combermere. All of these people, and they're just some of them, he has this correspondence with, and you can see the electric mind at work, probing, trying to figure out, fearful sometimes, ironic, witty, self-defensive sometimes, because he knows he's wrong and he's unsure. They're marvelous. Merton's publication after his life is almost as impressive. The candid and controversial restricted journals, compendia of writings previously of limited circulation, the appearance of several unpublished, fragmentary, or unfinished projects, including, as I mentioned earlier, my argument with the Gestapo, the Asian Journal, which is the chronicle of those last months of his life,

[29:07]

which appeared in 1973, five years after he died, and The Geography of Lucre, a very complex, detailed, Blakeian epic poem that remains fragmentary and incomplete because of his untimely death. The publication of his voluminous correspondence, Evelyn Waugh, the English novelist who edited The Seven-Story Mountain and The Waters of Silloway for the UK readers, was never a fan of Merton's expository style, but declared him a very gifted letter writer, in fact, a correspondent of genius. And the appearance of a book celebrating his skills as a visual artist, specifically as a photographer. He was also a calligrapher and a cartoonist. The man of almost inexhaustible gifts as a writer and as a thinker. And here we are, several years after his death, and we're still poring over things, still discovering new things about Merton. Probably the newest thing we discovered about Merton appeared in the publication of the restricted journals, which were the raw data, if you like, the diaries that eventually he would go to chip away, form into what he called pensées, carefully crafted entries that would be in the published journals.

[30:23]

And these restricted journals were restricted for reasons. And Merton, before he died, a few years before he died, worked out with the Thomas Burton Legacy Trust and with the establishment of the Center and a number of other things that were going on, an arrangement where the restricted diaries would not be published until 25 years after his death. Well, of course, it was not unreasonable, though he does suggest at one point in his mid to late 40s that he thinks he's going to die early. Other than that, most Trappists live a long life. They live into their 80s. It's the diet. It's the diet. It's all the bourbon-laced fruitcake and chocolate, everything else. It just keeps them elastic and full of life. So Merton would not unreasonably think that, oh, well, in spite of intimations of my mortality, maybe I will live to my 80s. Okay, by which time many of the principles in the restricted journals, though not all, obviously because reasonably he would have continued writing the journals, will be dead.

[31:31]

And if you wait 25 years after his death, he most assuredly would be dead. Well, he dies at 53, which means, of course, you can do the math, many of them are alive. Okay, so now there's a mounting anxiety level because now the restricted shuttles are going to come out and all kinds of things are going to be revealed that have been up until now in the closet. As a consequence, in 1993, the lifting of the 25-year embargo, you have from 1993 to 1999 the publication of seven volumes of what are called the restricted journals. So now you've got Merton out there in the square completely naked. There's Merton's there now. There are no more secrets or anything else, which is kind of, in a way, what Merton was like. Merton was given to transparency, to probing, to the exercise of endless self-scrutiny. I mean, the dark side of that, of course, is narcissism.

[32:34]

The bright side of that, of course, is holiness, trying to, in very real way, bring the scalpel of discernment. to the careful dissection of who you are and of the false self, of the ego, OK? So it is a matter of maintaining the balance. Of course, as human beings, we're always interested in the underside more than we are in the holy side, right? That's why we read things like this, because there's an element of, oh, good. We can participate vicariously. You know, if that's what holiness is, maybe I have a shot at it, right? And it does seem to me that, in an important way, Merton wants us to recognize that to be holy is to be fully human. It's not to eschew humanity, to jettison it, which he thought was the case at the beginning, but it's to incorporate it, to redeem it. No matter how you measure it, Merton was a publishing tsunami.

[33:39]

and his influence universal. Most of his work has been translated into several languages. In addition, he is the subject of literally hundreds of theses and dissertations. Conferences and symposia on his life and his work are regular occurrences. We have one this coming year in June in Louisville at Ballarmine University, where his archives are, which will have special significance, I think, because of the 100th anniversary, but also, interestingly, because the keynote speaker, or one of the keynotes, is the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, who, among many others, as a poet and as a student of spirituality, has written about Merton and loved Merton. Well, why is it that a monk who lived in seclusion in a largely non-Catholic American southern state, who represented something of the spiritual and intellectual fecundity of US Catholicism in the 1960s, and who died of accidental electrocution in Thailand in the year of assassinations, both Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were felled by bullets months before Merton's own death, why is he of relevance now?

[34:52]

in the second decade of the 21st century. You could say, wow, he's a very interesting phenomenon of the 1960s. But he's kind of passé now. And that's true of a number of figures of the 60s. We look back at him now, and some of us, again, remember what life was like in the 60s. And many of the figures of the 60s are in amber. They exist in our nostalgia. They have occasional revivals, but they don't have any staying power. especially true of our entertainment celebrities, but of others as well. Many of the spiritual writers of the 1960s, Dewey, Everly, Michel Koist, we don't read them anymore. We should, but we don't. Kehill of Gabran, who reads him now? But in the 1960s, everybody read him. But Merton, Merton hasn't changed. It's as if every new generation discovers something about him. People continue to read him. He doesn't actually have an eclipse. Oh, there's rises and falls and publishing and everything else. But interest in Merton can shift from one great apologist of Tridentine Catholicism, perhaps, in the 1940s, a great explorer of meaningful interreligious dialogue in the 1960s, which we're all interested in, in the age of ISIS.

[36:10]

in the age when failure to engage in meaningful interreligious dialogue can result in severe bloodletting. In an age when religion now has become such a dirty word that we try to keep it out of the public square because we see it as incendiary and divisive. At the same time, when somebody rises who gives us hope, like Pope Francis, People all over the world, Catholic, non-Catholic, doesn't matter, are enormously interested because there's a figure that gives them hope. It speaks something to the ambivalence we have in the public sphere about religion. We need Merton now more than ever, actually, because he represents a marvelous balance of sanity, openness, vulnerability, and prophetic insight that allows for religions that appear on the surface to be either antagonistic or engaged in what Pope Benedict XVI calls a false Irenicism to actually go deeper to find the common ground of holiness

[37:20]

to move to a new level of mutual understanding. No one did that better than Merton. I think there are three reasons for Merton's continuing appeal. Three reasons. He's a spiritual voice of searing honesty and transparency. He's a public intellectual of a deep Catholic conviction. And he's a visionary poet with a bold plan for unity and communion. As a diarist of the spiritual life, Merton has few equals. Eschewing the pious and platitudinous prose of spiritual writers and of establishment bent, Merton's diary entries are rich in the description of nature, self-disclosing in a sometimes raw manner that makes us feel uncomfortable, sublime in capturing the ordinary epiphanies of the transcendent. a panorama of insights that send the reader coursing through history, politics, literature, and mysticism. In his diaries, Merton underscores the significance of existential change, true conversion, the consequences of seeing, and I put seeing in italics, seeing clearly, not darkly.

[38:35]

For instance, in an entry in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, which was a published journal that covers entries dating from about 1955-56 to 1965, Merton underscored the unsettling discovery that even though he was a monk, he was like other people. Here's what he said. In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the centre of a shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, and that the conception of separation from the world that we have in the monastery too easily presents itself as a complete illusion. the illusion that by making spiritual vows we become a different species of being, pseudo-angels. Well, this sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud."

[39:39]

As a public intellectual, Merton saw models for his critical stand vis-à-vis the world and the Church in those masterful clerical satirists Desiderius Erasmus in the 16th century and Jonathan Swift in the 18th. Deploying Erasmusian courage and Swiftian tropes, Merton denounced morbid institutional monasticism. He denounced the obsessive power politics of scheming prelates and abbots. He denounced the corporate mentality of Wall Street. He denounced the hegemony of Western U.S. mass culture. And he denounced the false superiority of our civilization. And as a poet visionary, he mapped out a strategy of redress and recovery, a way of integration and communion in a world sundered by reason's narrow rule. And for this vision, he drew on his profound reading and creative assimilation of the poetics and spirituality of William Blake.

[40:43]

Now, just think of this. Again, so unusual. that Merton would go to a Swedenborgian mystic, a poet of hitherto unprecedented originality, a visual artist whose artistry stands along with his poetics to define him as the towering figure of his time. He goes to Blake. Just as he says in a couple of places, both in the Secular Journal and in the Seventh Story Mountain, that Blake was instrumental in his conversion to Catholicism. What did Blake give him? What did this poet and this visual artist give him? Well, he gave him a plan, a scheme, a methodology that allows him to work out a mythology of unity and communion. It's extraordinary. Although there were many British writers who influenced Merton, and on whom he wrote, Gerard Manley Hopkins, the Jesuit poet, who was the subject of his aborted Columbia University doctoral dissertation, John Henry Newman,

[41:54]

the English paradise mystics Julian of Norwich and Richard Rowe, and Scotland's great poet Edwin Muir. But it was Blake who won his heart, shaped his imagination, and powered his expansive spirituality. Merton's master's thesis at Columbia University was on Blake, and it is an adumbration of his own unique unfolding as a visionary poet. It was his artist father Owen who first introduced him to Blake. Merton's father was a landscape and watercolorist, absolutely gorgeous work in the tradition of Cézanne and tradition of the later Impressionists. Occasionally there are retrospectives of his work either in New Zealand, which was his home, in Australia, in England. I don't know if there's been a retrospective in the United States, although there are various of his paintings that are in Bardstown, or in Columbia University, or at the Ballerman.

[42:57]

In fact, there's some wonderful ones at the Ballerman, if you go to the Merchant Center there. He was quite an impressive artist, and he had an influence on his son. an influence that sadly was cut short by his own death from cancer when Merton was 16, and he had lost his mother when he was six. He often thought of himself as an orphan. He would lose his brother, by the way, in 1943 in a bombing expedition returning from Mannheim. His brother John Paul He joined the Royal Canadian Air Force during the war because the Americans didn't enter the war until 1941, and his brother was on a flying expedition. He was returning. He was shot down in the North Sea where he perished after several hours of pain. Evidently, his back was broken and they didn't have any water either, so it was quite an agonizing death. Merton was overwhelmed by this and wrote one of the most powerful poems he ever wrote, which is an exquisite, beautiful elegy called For My Brother Reported Missing in Action in 1943.

[43:59]

And when his brother died, he then, after that, as early as 1943, begins to understand himself as an orphan. It's rather important. Blake was at the core of Merton's self-definition, both as an artist and as a religious visionary. As Merton observed to his fellow poet, contemplative, and Catholic convert, Robert Latz, who's not unknown in this area, having been associated with St. Bonaventure University in Oleon, he studied Blake. He measured him. He weighed him. He spied on him. And he held him up to a range of mirrors, all in an effort to genuinely know him. And he did come to know Blake in his fashion and to appropriate Blake's vision in his way. Merton knew, like Blake, that wholeness or holiness, final integration, would be achieved only through the careful balancing of what Blake called the creative contraries, of the complementarity of opposites, the marriage of heaven and hell. Psychological and spiritual health come not from the elimination of the tension, the creative polarities, but in their artful juxtaposition, what are called Blake's fourfold vision.

[45:13]

Blake was not only crucial to Merton's poetry, but to his understanding of interreligious dialogue. His numerous explorations of the wisdom of the Zen masters, the Hindu holy men, Sufi mystics, Taoist sages, are grounded in a theological modality that balances the contraries, achieves a creative harmony among competing systems of belief. strips creeds of their Eurozenic or reason-dominated control, and frees the spirit to soar, not by means of a superficial capitulation to trendy efforts that lead to a false ecumenicity and ironicism, but by means of a contemplative co-sympathy that rattles the spiritual and intellectual complacency of atrophied structures. I just want to talk a few minutes here about what Merton meant by contemplation. Because we're in a monastery. It is a sanctuary for contemplation. And we all carry within us what Raimundo Panicar called our essential monkhood.

[46:19]

We are all called to be, in our own way, contemplators. Well, Merton was persuaded that contemplation is not restricted to the professionals. that it is a way of being and a way of seeing. And he knew that in its advanced stage, contemplative illumination or mystical union is profoundly transformative, that we are made anew. Here's what he says. Notice the name. In Blake's words, the doors of perception are opened and all life takes on a completely new meaning. The real sense of our existence, which is normally veiled and distorted by the routine distractions of the alienated life, is now revealed in a central intuition. What was lost and dispersed in the relative meaninglessness and triviality of purposeless behavior, living like a machine, pushed around by the Holy Spirit."

[47:23]

Now Merton was not unaware that for the doors of perception, Blake's doors of perception, to be fully opened for the brilliant focus to be rediscovered, some fundamental truths about our human condition need to be remembered. That the contemplative quest for integration is first of all a life project and not a passing fancy. I'm often amazed by this. I'm called upon sometimes by people in the corporate world to speak about spirituality. And they gather together various CEOs, and CFOs, and CIOs, and whatever. They're all gathered there, and they expect me to give them a blueprint on spirituality. They would have a budget worked out. So I go in there, and my chart, my remit, is make these people spiritual. Well, this is a hopeless task, right? A hopeless task, not because they're professional businessmen, but because you can't do that. you know, by clicking your fingers together and then having this transformation.

[48:27]

This is a life project. And I explained to them in one of Irten's poems, which is kind of like a Zen koan, he said, you know, we possess, because they understand this, I mean, we possess knowledge, but wisdom possesses us. So you can't go out and buy holiness. It's not a commodity. Okay. Chicken soup for the soul spirituality is nonsense. Nonsense. That's hucksterism, spiritual hucksterism. Discipline, understanding, prayer, suffering, endurance, patience. These are the stuff that make you a contemplative. Not taking a course or going at a workshop. And so I go in there, and I'm supposed to, because these are guys I'm used to, and they're nearly all guys, right? Go in there, and I'm supposed to make them holy. at the end. Like, I go with you, somebody comes in and they say, okay, here's your investment portfolio, this is what we're going to do, this is what we're going to increase the bottom line. Higgins is coming in now, he's going to make you holy.

[49:28]

And the first thing you have to do is to remind them that this is a task that neither I can accomplish or any human agency, and you're in for the long haul, and there's nothing I can do but to make you aware of that project. Merton is key to this. Some fundamental truths of our human condition, as I say, need to be remembered. The dialectic played out between the true self and the false self requires discipline, discernment, and detachment. Doesn't happen overnight. The false self, Merton understands, to be all that which is illusory, self-inflating, distancing from grace, sealed from the rays of liberation. The true self, which we're all after, by contrast, and I quote from Merton, is our entire substantial reality itself, on its highest and most personal and most existential level. It is like life, and it is life. It is our spiritual life when it is most active.

[50:33]

It is the life by which everything else in us lives and moves. It is in and through and beyond everything that we are. If it is awakened, it communicates a new life to the intelligence in which it lives so that it becomes a living awareness of itself." End of quote. Contemplation is at the heart of the making of the fully human. It's not an add-on. It's not a declaration. So you say, well, I'm speaking particularly to lay people here. Because this is our great seduction, right? We have various periods in our lives in which we do certain things. We have certain ends, and we have certain success and certain failures. And that's all part of what we do. And so we look at each stage, right? And we say, OK, so this is the pre-marriage stage. And we have the marriage stage. And we have the childhood. And we get the children through university. Then we deal with personal bankruptcy. Then we build our lives. We all build our lives.

[51:34]

And the grandchildren come. And then somewhere along the line, We have to become contemplative and religious and spiritual because we're moving to the end point here. Okay, the horizon's now shrinking, all right? It doesn't matter now anymore about the social insurance or whatnot because soon we're going to have to start looking at the burial plots. So maybe we better start getting serious about the spirituality side, right? So that's our next phase and then we go out to find the books that tell us how to do it. Then we come back, and I've seen this, come back well-meaning people, highly educated people, professionals, coming back with busloads of books. Okay? With the understanding that if they read this like they read a work that helps them with their investment portfolio, or helps them to recover their sex lives after their first child, right? Because they've got all these books out there to help you to deal with every crisis you have, from the most mundane to the most sublime. And they can say, well, you know, this is a lot of work, right? I'm like, I'm 70, I don't have time to be... Isn't there something we could, you know, move this a little faster, accelerate this?

[52:43]

Well, it's not the way it works, right? It's not the way it works. Contemplation, the development of the careful stripping away of the false self, is a life project. And we live in an age of instant ratification, don't we? I mean, we can't even watch the same show to the end on television. We use the remote as if it's a military machine. Blitzkrieg in the living room with countless things coming in and out. And our human consciousness or awareness begins to think, well, this is what the spiritual life must be like, too. There must be some kind of portfolio or investment or program we can enter that will give us what we need. But it's not about that. It's about these other things. It's about discernment and detachment and discipline. Contemplation, then, is at the heart of what it is to be human. It brings us into rare intimacy with the transcendent.

[53:46]

It allows us for the casting off of the shackles of self-delusion. Contemplation actually ensures our true freedom. This is a tough thing to hear, and we don't really believe it. And that is that contemplation makes us free. We don't think, well, we think of, again, we think of meditation, a little quiet time, right breathing, calms us down, stress inhibitor, all this kind of stuff. No, it's a mode of entering more deeply into who we are and our relationship and our tradition with Jesus. And that is the mode to true liberty. It can't be bought. Thomas Merton's understanding of contemplation, sophisticated, highly nuanced, historically flavored, and spiritually expansive, and his appreciation of the role of prophecy combined to guarantee his continued reputation both as a monk open to the world, a critic of Catholicism's institutional inadequacy, and an astute and rigorous judge of the world's political, social, and philosophical pathologies of the spirit.

[54:53]

In the words of his former student and fellow monk, the psychiatrist John Hoods Bamberger, Merton presented contemplation, and this is what John Hoods says, as the activity of a person who becomes whole in his humanity through seeking intimate union with God. Merton thus gave a fresh life to the word contemplation and to the ideal of a contemplative life. that continues to speak to the minds and hearts of Cistercian monks today, and which has equally a broad appeal to persons living in our modern world. Merton knew that the revivifying springs of authentic contemplation can nurture a deepening dialogue among other faiths. And his own encounters with other religious traditions provide an ideal example of how that can be done, of how we can make sense of religious pluralism, how we can value religious diversity and yet seek new commonalities.

[55:57]

We like to think we're open, but often we're tribal. We're often fearful. And even the most progressive of us can be sectarian when confronted with the other, with the stranger. On this centenary anniversary, then, perhaps no better tribute to the perduring legacy of this monk for all seasons can be found in the words of the Hindu scholar and friend, Amaya Chakravarti, who says this, the utter tenderness, the infinitude of a life lived with courage and an encompassing wholeness, these These are my devoted memories of Thomas Merton, whose redemptive holiness is a light to all of us who knew him and will continue to shine in the hearts of people who will know him as the ages pass. Thank you.

[57:00]

Thank you so much, Michael. I told you you wouldn't be disappointed. We're just overwhelmed by all of this. It's wonderful. And since you can't read it in a book, if you want to return them, you may. I'm just kidding. Anyway, Dr. Higgins will take a few questions if anybody has them. If anybody wants to engage in a little dialogue, we can do that now. Any questions, comments? Yes. It's a very good question. The question is, if I was going to introduce someone to Merton, what book would I give? I think a wonderful introduction to the whole Merton, if you like, can be found in Volume 8 of the Restricted Journals, which was a compendium of the best of the seven journals, called The Intimate Thomas Merton.

[58:25]

And what it does is it takes snippets and shards of all the diary entries and gives you an insight into the Merton over the several decades of his life. That, I would also recommend the selected poems of Thomas Merton. It's a small, thin volume that's been republished. And the literary essays, the selected essays of Merton. That way you get the diaries, you get the essays, and you get the poetry all introductory. If you want an introductory text, I don't think you can do any better than the two books I've written. Because, I should tell you, there's no humility in me. I'm still wrestling with the false self. It's got complete control. Marie and Father just asked me to bring copies of the two books that I've just published on Merton. And they're both introductions for people who don't know a great deal about Merton and would like to know more. One is an introduction to his thought called The Unquiet Monk. One is the introduction to his life called Faithful Visionary.

[59:27]

And I would give some small volume like that. There are others. Of course, J.S. Porter has a wonderful introductory volume. And there are other books that give you an oversight into the life and the legacy. And then once you've kind of been smitten by Merton, then you know which direction to go. I'm interested in the literary Merton. I think I'll get caught up in the contemplation. I'm very interested in Zen Buddhist dialogue. You'll know where to go because these books give you the biographical overview. Okay? Yes? It's a dramatic type. We're listening to all of the most powerful people in the world on this earth right now. And I think that's a great person to be. Possibly entirely on the issue of talking about an environment that's impoverished, not accepted by human existence. That is to say, I'm the kind of person

[60:30]

And I was getting very younger, and I had almost 25 cents. So I went to a place called the Porcelainers. And I bought, I don't know, four or five of these boots for a certain price. And then I got another one in the corner. Where can you get chocolate bars four or five for $0.25? Is that still true in this part of Nicollet Woods? Yes, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And I'm also wondering, too, as well as I've heard Nicollet Woods, Nicollet Woods, and Woodington in the Western world, Yes, Suzuki said at one point, he went to see Suzuki in New York in 1964, who was over from Japan, and he took part in a tea ceremony while he was there.

[61:37]

And Suzuki, there's a wonderful correspondence between Suzuki and Merton, some of which is captured in a book called Zen and Birds of Appetite. which deals with complex issues around what we understand by spiritual emptiness. And Merton relied very heavily on John of the Cross. And it's a wonderful exchange between Buddhist and Christian thinking around the concept of spiritual emptiness. And what you discover, again, with Merton is his remarkable openness, his fearlessness in talking without a beat. He did not see. that as a Christian monk grounded in his tradition, that communication from somebody outside that tradition would weaken him. He saw it as the occasion to strengthen him. And so Suzuki commented that there was no figure in the Western world who understood the Buddhist imagination and sensibility better than Thomas Merton. Chakravarti would say the same thing about Merton and Hinduism.

[62:39]

I don't know if he phrased it that way. Certainly he understood Buddhist contemplation as engaged in the long term in the same kind of direction that all mystics are going in. Okay, and so he looked at this in unitive terms. Because he knew that Buddhism doesn't really deal with the same kind of language, ontology, it's not interested in doctrine in the same way as the Roman communion is, Merton had to find different ways to enter into this dialogue that would be meaningful. It is interesting that he observed in one of the last things that was published in Swanee Review, which was a review of a book on the death of God theology by a death of God theologian, William Altizer, on the new apocalypse. And he says, Merton says in this, talking about the theology of process, because process theologians were beginning to emerge as the latest thing in the late 1960s, Merton said, I remain an atomist.

[63:52]

that my metaphysics sees being itself as dynamic, which is kind of a very interesting way of making that argument. He did not see being, with a capital B, essence as static. He saw it as dynamic. And in that, he saw himself as very clearly within the legitimate school of Thomas Aquinas. Part of that because of his friendship with Jacques Maritain, but it shows you again Merton Merton's radical conservatism. There is a tendency sometimes to think of Merton as just, you know, always on that trendy edge. And he was. He was a figure often on the edge. But it is wrong to perceive or to construe that Merton was a lightweight, that he was indifferent to the sources of the past that shaped him. He was very much the Cistercian monk with a strong intellectual predilection for a creative and dynamic Thomism who was actually open to the world and other religious. He knew where he was standing so he could be comfortable in meaningful and deep dialogue.

[64:58]

You know, I think if you're unsure of what you're rooted in, or you're overly zealous, or you're caught up in certitude and you're not comfortable with your own intellectual fragility and vulnerability, then you won't make a good interlocutor in an interfaith dialogue because you're looking to convert the other and to protect your position. And so Merton doesn't do it either. He's interested in co-sympathy, co-understanding. And that calls for something that I'm afraid I've seen, maybe it's just the narrow world I work in, seems to be a quality lacking in a lot of theology, imagination. One of the reasons why theologians need to be fed by our artists. You know, our novelists, our writers, our poets, our visual artists. It's the imagination, and Merton understood this, the imagination that keeps theology alive. Any other questions or comments?

[66:00]

Yes? They were very crucial, his years at Columbia, in helping to shape him as a public intellectual. His writing for the New York Times, his work for the Jester, his involvement with the then Herald Tribune, his many efforts to write novels with his peers, with his friends, some of whom became converts to Catholicism and were lifelong friends, like Seymour and Rice and, of course, Lacks, whose friendship would be the most perduring of them all. And his fascination with literature, of course, is a cliche, because he did his master's on Blake. He was doing his doctorate on Gerard Manley Hopkins. He was on a comfortable and reasonable trajectory to professorial success. He could have been not only a poet, but a scholar teaching in the university.

[67:02]

It would have made a lot of sense, really. But then he does a complete change, right? And he goes to the opposite of this. Henry Nouwen does something somewhat similar. And I mention him here in this context partly because he was not unfamiliar in this area, also to this area, but also because he was a disciple of Martin. One of the first books Nouwen wrote in English was on Thomas Martin. Nowen does something like Merton with a surprise, right? He is, teaches at Ivory League universities, he's at Notre Dame for a couple of years, he's at Yale for ten years, he's at Harvard for three, and he gives it all up and he goes and works for the mentally challenged in a large hall for the last ten years of his life. He gives up the Ivy corridors of power, prestige, and position, and he goes to work with the most severely disabled, in fact, Adam, who is the one he has special responsibility for in his large home.

[68:07]

Well, Merton does a somewhat similar thing, in a way, earlier in his career, where he's moving towards a career, a pretty well-insured career, as a literary figure in the United States. And he goes off to live in a world which is the antithesis of what he knows. And many years later, now people in the university are writing books on him. But in an important way, although it didn't begin at Columbia, it began at Cambridge. He flourished in Columbia. He did not flourish at Cambridge. I mean, he did all right academically, but his life was a bit of a mess. Whereas Columbia, he calls it that sooty factory. Cambridge, I don't know if any of you have been to Cambridge University. It's really very attractive. It's idyllic, actually. The River Cam runs through it. It's quite distant from a major city. It's not like Oxford. It doesn't have the same kind of industrial urban, not industrial, but urban quality to it.

[69:09]

It's more remote, if you like. And that's where he goes. And he goes to the opposite. He ends up at Columbia, right in downtown Manhattan. Right? And he loves it. He loves it. It's the right thing at the right time. But it's not the permanent thing. Yes? Sure. There are several books actually written on this because Merton's involvement in the peace movement was so comprehensive and it got him into difficulty. It was because of his work on peace that there was pressure put on the American hierarchy and, indeed, pressure put on the Cistercian authorities in France to have Merton desist from writing about peace. It was considered unseemly and certainly was controversial. And Merton was at his rhetorical best when he was writing about peace. As a consequence, there's a period of time in which Mertens has to go in a slightly different direction.

[70:16]

He's ordered not to publish on piece, but he's not ordered not to gestetner on piece. Do you remember the old gestetners we used to use before photocopying and whatnot? The teachers would put them on these bins and they'd come out and the student would inhale the blue ink and be virtually intoxicated by the time he got from the office back to the teacher's room. We didn't realize it's toxic effects two years later, but I think we don't use the gestefters anymore. But Merton, the gestefters, and they were writing these things with using kind of what we would now consider primitive modes of duplication. And they were called Cold War letters. They have now been published in their full, I don't know, it's about 100. 13, 120 of them, I can't remember, and to all kinds of different people. They're mostly about issues around peace. Of course, in addition, he wrote extensively on various publications and elsewhere that did publish before the censure. The censure was lifted about 1965.

[71:16]

In addition to that, he was associated with the Catholic Peace Movement, people like Daniel Berrigan, of course, Philip Berrigan, Dorothy Day, and others were, Jim Forrest, others were drawn into the Peace Movement and Merton was part of that. The tragic death by his own hand of Roger LaPlante by suicide of course, if it's by his own hand, it's suicide, was a form of protest statement. And Merton was so horrified by this that for a brief period of time, he distanced himself from the peace movement from the fellowship. But when he was persuaded that this was the act of obviously a disturbed person and was not the policy of the Catholic peace movement, he allowed his name to be part of that larger group. What is very important in the peace movement is to see his relationship to Gordon Zahn. Gordon Zahn was a professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts, I think in Amherst, but it may have been Boston.

[72:21]

He was a pacifist and wrote many books about pacifism. uh... or any articles but he also wrote a very important book about one of the great catholic pacifists of the last century who is uh... i think has now been beatified and very likely will be canonized and that's Franz Jägerstacker Franz Joggerstaffel was an Austrian layman who was beheaded for his refusal to join the Wehrmacht after the Anschluss in Austria, when Austria was annexed to the Reich. And he resisted it on grounds of Catholic conscience. And in spite of tremendous pressure from various circles to conform, he refused and he was executed. The witness, it's called Solitary Witness of Franz Jafferstatter, book was actually published by Zahn. Merton wrote the review and later an introduction to the book as he did with the writings of Alfred Delft, the journals of a Jesuit who perished in the same prison as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, but two months prior to Bonhoeffer's death.

[73:36]

So Merton's interest in and commitment to peacemaking was longstanding and firm and not without personal cost. Yes. When Merton was in New York, he was drawn to Friendship House, which was the community that then subsequently the Baroness, they called affectionately the Bee, Catherine de Hewitt, had founded. And Merton was divided at one point about whether he was going to continue to work in Friendship House or whether he would be drawn to religious life. He wrote about Harlem. He wrote about it in the Seven Story Mountain. He wrote about it in some of his journals. He wrote about what he contrasted Harlem with Hollywood. And very interestingly, because he wanted to see where was the real spiritual core. Merton was very critical of Hollywood, as you would expect. And his identification particularly with the black community grew over the years in part because of his friendship with John Howard Griffin, the author of Black Like Me, who became Merton's official biographer.

[74:52]

and who lived in the Hermitage, wrote the wonderful book called the Hermitage Journals, which is a chronicle of his own writing of the biography of Thomas Merton before he died in 1980 and it was shifted over to a Cornish-American-Anglican poet by the name of Michael Mott. But Merton talks in one of the conferences specifically about the real possibility of Martin Luther King coming to Gethsemane and bypassing Memphis. And then he wonders aloud if he had bypassed Memphis, of course he would still be alive. And then talks about the Kairos. The issue over civil rights is a Kairos moment in the United States. You can see this in his wonderful book, Seeds of Destruction. in which he talks about these various issues. James Baldwin, particularly Aldrich Cleaver, but many other leaders of the black community recognized in Merton one white voice that generally understood black suffering, the black agony, and the struggle for freedom.

[75:58]

Again, quite extraordinary. And he's in a monastery. He's in a monastery. So around race relations, around peace, Merton is engaged with the world. He's not withdrawn. And people are coming to see him. And sometimes, of course, he would say they would come, and they would go into the woods. They'd sit under a big tree, the wonderful picture of a Brazilian father, Stan Murphy, and Jacques Médetain under the tree. And I think John Howard Griffin may have taken it. And Merton would say, well, you know, when you come, could you bring some Budweiser? He never lost his taste for beer, and it was set under a tree, so it wasn't in vino veritas, but it was close to it. Hey, thank you very much. Again, our thanks and our thanks to all of you for participating and being with us this morning.

[77:00]

And a special note of thanks to the Friends of the Monastery who sponsor this and who work so hard to organize and publicize it and provide the refreshments. We're very grateful, especially to Marie and to Bob Ivers and to Marie Colucci who serve on that planning committee. So thank you all, God bless you, have a happy day, a good remainder of Lent, and a holy, holy week. So if you can do whatever you like, we'll see. Oh, right. Thank you. Are you willing to put a name? Oh, sure, yeah. We might need it somewhere. And the name? Greg and Cindy, Cindy and Greg. Cindy and Greg. Cindy.

[78:02]

Cindy, oh. Thank you for coming today. I enjoyed it. I've been to Gethsemane. It's just a joy. Do you have any of that fruit cake? What? Do you have the fruit cake? No. I have cheese. Oh yeah, the cheese and stuff. That's it. That's it. I'm proud. I'm very pleased. Thank you. I've been thinking, I don't know, so, weather is, yeah, and I, it takes me so long, my wife always insists that I drive it. I mean, I don't drive it, she's not going to drive it. speed limit because my attention wanders and so I have to stop regularly. I just can't sit still. I can't sit still for quite a while. So what takes four hours and a half takes six hours and I don't

[79:05]

I don't slide or stumble too darkly. So I said to her last time, I said, I mean, she'd pretty good get on the road before she started. I said, well, yeah, I'm going to cancel for lunch. I wouldn't bore it merrily. If I'd stayed home, if I was not doing this thing at St. Joseph's, I would have stayed in Newcastle. Yeah, I never got to New York City, so I, that was that. Maybe. I can't talk too much. I can't. I'm glad. I think it's only a wonderful thing to do. I know there's something about journeys, but I don't like to talk about it. And last week we were celebrating, you know, Max Hall was here. It's a huge pleasure to talk to you about half an hour ago. It was just that we were serving our coffee with dessert, you know, and so in fact my canola was sitting there.

[80:10]

And when he finally shot up and I started to eat the canola, he said, well, when the fire finishes its dessert, maybe we can go. So then everybody was laughing and watching me, it was a big panola. But yeah, you do this really good. So, it just comes out of the lake. It's good, very nice. And you too, no? No. I mean, people would, like, who's guy is it? Who's guy is it? Perfect. Hi, how are you? Welcome. Where are you from? Ridgley, here. So, you need to go to the store. Yes, we go to the store.

[81:11]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's been amazing. It's been amazing. Yes, well, I'm, uh, my Facebook page is dead. Oh, my connection, uh, with a lot of the website is dead. Well, that page is dead, by the way. Thank you so much. The Air Force Academy.

[82:37]

It's that bottom. It's that area. It's snowing. [...] It's snowing Thanks for coming, Al. Do you want me to sign these two? Sure. I just finished a seven-story mountain, like, two months ago. Very good. You're already on the journey. Yes. And after you read this, you'll be a saint. Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Take the time. I'm Leon.

[83:37]

I'm just curious. Did you know Gray Matthews, by any chance, in Memphis? I'm an emergency study group in Memphis. I see. Yeah. I'm visiting my family. I do. He shows up at the American conferences every two years. Yeah, yeah. That's right. Yeah, I'm a lay Cistercian of Gethsemane, so I'm... I'm... Oh, you're right about that stuff. So talk about it. Leon, right? Leon? Yeah, yeah. How did you know that? You told me. I did? Yes. I'm an absent-minded pirate. Enjoy the book, Pete. Yeah. We're doing no man is an island right now. Yeah It's taken over a year. We kind of get involved with it. Oh, yeah. Every month, every chapter. Right, sure. Exactly. That's the way to do it. Have you done new seeds of contemplation? I've read it. We haven't done it. Before I knew of the groups, I think they did it.

[84:39]

We did Rays on the Unspeakable. Oh, that's when I interviewed them. That was not a good interview. Tough. Tough. It's a tough one. But it provided all the background, which really There was no commentary online or anything, but he basically provided it. It's a beautiful book, but it's a strange entry point. Yeah. That was a tough start to the Merck study group. But you're still in it, so it must have done some good. Nice to meet you. Thank you. Thank you. Yes. I wanted to ask, while still, The flooding will explain the natural disasters that hit. You know, the flooding and all that. It brings the suffering to the people. I think it's the ancient problem of what is called theodicy. How does one reconcile belief in an all-encompassing God with disaster?

[85:44]

And I think what we would do is try to avoid any kind of reductionism or make an argument of cause and effect. I think the world natural and human behavior, operate according to specific rules, some of which are discernible, some of which are not, and that God's orbit is a different orbit. God suffers with the suffering. God doesn't cause the suffering. God is not indifferent to the suffering. God suffers with the suffering. And so... So we don't have complete control? No. That's what I wanted to hear. Thank you for coming today. Thank you so much. Our daughter lives in Fairfield. Get out. What's her name? Her name is Beth Monroe. Her husband is the head of the Fairfield Country Day School. It's an all-boys school. Oh, yes, I've heard of it. Yes, yes. What's your name now? My name is Mary Ellen. Two words.

[86:45]

Mary Ellen. And the other thing, are you familiar, we subscribe to Commonweal on that. I write for Commonweal, regularly. Do you know Fall, Ellie? Yeah, I know up here. Wonderful book. Yes, on Merton and Day and... Walker Percy. Walker Percy, and there was one other, who was it? It was Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Walker Percy. and a Plenary Apartment. Yes, Plenary Apartment. Yes, I don't love him. He has a wonderful blog called Everything That Rises. I should check into that. I think you would. Yeah, I should check into that. I enjoy his work. I do, too. We spend our summers at Chautauqua. I don't know if you've ever been there. No. But it's a great city. Yeah, it's around this area. Western New York State. South of Buffalo. And it's founded by Methodist Sunday School teachers. And it's a very vibrant, spiritually rich and culturally rich

[87:48]

Yes, I've heard about it for years. I've never been there. Opera, chamber music? Yes, everything. It's an arts festival. It really is. But a very vibrant, progressive department of religion. Oh, yes. I've heard only good things about it. I've just never been able to make it. Oh, thanks for coming. I remember Thomas had bad teeth. Did he ever get his teeth fixed? Yes. The things you remember, right? Yeah, somebody remembers the chocolate bars. Do you remember the teeth? I attended Presbyterian College in Columbia, and I recall it was Christine. Oh, that's where he was received, yes, in 1938. It was huge. In fact, they have annual events at Corpus Christi. I'm giving a lecture, not at Corpus Christi, but at Columbia next month, because they're opening the Rare Book Room. poor merchant there, and a Jew in conjunction with Corpus Christi and Monsignor Rafferty, who was the long-time pastor there.

[88:53]

I've got a new chap there now. But they have a very good merchant chapter at Corpus Christi. They meet there regularly. Do you live in the parish now? I do. You know where Sacred Heart University is? We own several houses across the street. The president lives in one. The chaplains live in one. As the vice president for mission, I live in the other. And so we actually live in Bridgeport, but we walk across the street to Fairfield, and they're university properties. And so we actually live adjacent to the campus. Oh, it's a pleasure. Oh, you're very kind. Yes. So nice to meet you. I wrote our name. Oh, that was great. Thank you. Listen to your lecture, look at what I wrote. I love writing. I thought you were taking notes.

[89:54]

Thank you. It's a pleasure. It was my pleasure to have you here. Thank you. It's been a pleasure and I'm going to let you sign those off. I'd be happy to do so. My name is Laura. L-I-T-A. [...] I mean, it's lovely having you here. Thank you for taking the time to come. You know, this only works when people come, you know. And this is... The same thing, Laura Alita, and then we're going to have a Hawaiian son. The other son? I have my other son, Patrick. Patrick, I'll say. This is going to be Laura Alita, because you to me, and then I'm following you to them. Patrick. He's the Irish boy, is he?

[90:58]

That's right. Theodore was born on May 27th. I'm the main baby and then Teddy. And then I said to my friend Paddy, I've got to get the boys each a book. That's right. Get them different books so they don't fight amongst themselves. So there's a question, sir. No, the baby's 42. Well, Patrick, same Patrick. It's my age. So this is my friend, and I said, being that I'm maturing and I forget things, but I don't know where I'm going. Yeah. The little thing from Morton is the one that I say today, but I just used him on my heart. That's not what you're doing. I'm only going to be in five, so I'm still good. Oh, my God. I'm still having a long way to go. For God's sake. So this is why, but Morton, that's the one I say every day, but it's another thing. Don't worry about that. Thank you. Say hello to your sons for me. I will. Tell them to enjoy the books. Definitely. Okay. Thank you, Lord Leader. coming up here and thinking I really enjoyed it.

[92:01]

It was interesting, because I'm in the process of joining the Church of Millennials Day, but I was reading Swedenborg, so it's funny, Swedenborg, so it's really nice to know you guys are going to play in Swedenborg, and then Winky, who I don't really know very well, but I know that they will talk about him playing in Swedenborg, so I just wonder what sort of like, There's some sort of commonality in there that, you know, I don't know, interesting how they all connected with each other, and it was just kind of weird for me. Well, it's a pleasure. Yeah, I need to learn a little bit more about, I don't know much about you. That was because of the talk at St. Bonaventure's, wasn't it? Yes. That was a good conference. There's a very big difference.

[93:17]

One by a Spanish scholar, and one by a poet, Susan Patterson, and a lot by the French. Where did you live exactly? Late 1930s, late 1930s. It's romantic. Contemporary. Who was the artist? Yes, this is the third style. Formation folk, there's no... and they find it much more accessible than they do the poetry, but the poetry and the artwork, they work together. I see them in Canada. And you can see some of the artworks in Canada. It's literature. It's poetry, it's religion. So it's very, very interesting. They're very careful with it. It's a heritage book. It's in Italian, French, and English.

[94:20]

It's been a favorite by both. If you're interested in the book and her relationship to Sweden, read the book. It's a book devoted to Sweden. What about the books that they got? Some of those books, like the book Unquiet Mind, You are going to have the presidential election.

[95:08]

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