A More or Less Imperfect World: Reading Merton in Modernity
I grew up Catholic and full of longing. What it meant to be a Catholic, what I longed for — this always changed. Most days they weren’t related. I made my begrudged way to mass, and longed for other things while I was there. A big field under a blue sky. Holding someone’s hand for just the first time. A way out of home. A way in. A quick homily to set me free. In high school, years after the beginning of my mother’s struggle with addiction and my parent’s subsequent divorce, I found in the daily mass at my Jesuit school a kind of thing that satisfied what I was longing for then. Another home. Ritual. Community.
I arrived at school early, before 7, and ate a Pop Tart before mass began, and then walked into the small chapel where, surrounded by just a few of the teachers I knew — hardly ever any other students — I felt part of something larger than myself. I didn’t want it to end, and then it did, and I was thrust out into a hallway with hundreds of just-arriving students, and made my way among them, lost for peace. I thought I would keep this up in college, but I didn’t. I found other communities, solid ones. I fell in love. I made friends. Nearly just as soon as the church appeared in my life like bedrock, it was gone. It’s been years now.
Sometimes, I told my therapist the other day, I pick things up and hope to be struck by god. That notion still lingers in me, that desire to be shot through right to the spirit, punctured-wounded by the spark that leads to faith. I picked up Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain late last year, and though I wouldn’t have admitted it to any of my friends, it was for that same reason. I told people I was interested in Merton, that I knew about him, that I was struck by his desire to leave the world entirely, that I wanted to write about his relevance. But really, I read him for me.
When you read Merton, you are confronted with a man so devoted to God that at times it comes across as almost pure, rampant egoism. His commitment to his faith is so hard to contextualize with the modern world, and it is not as simple as saying that this is a result of the cynicism that is sometimes directed towards faith, or the weakness that is sometimes associated with it. It seems to me to be a result of practice. And the notion that practice, secularly or religiously, is not a thing that is so often celebrated in our world. It is not that it is looked down on, but that, perhaps, it is taken for granted.
Toward the end of The Seven Storey Mountain, Merton asks: “Was there any possibility of happiness without faith?” As a lapsed Catholic, my initial answer is I don’t know. I think of the moments of happiness I have had in these past years, the ones I thought were true or real. I think of how my friend George, as a sort of bar game, often asks me to think of a moment of pure, unadulterated joy in my life, and to describe it to him. It often has to do with things lining up when you didn’t think they would. You work on a poem for an hour, and then the final couplet presents itself to you. You run a marathon and realize, at the twentieth mile, that you know with confidence you can sustain your pace until the end. Early on in the memoir, Merton writes of a moment like this. “October is a fine and dangerous season in America,” he writes, before saying later, “You have a new hat, a new sweater perhaps, or a whole new suit. Even the nickels and the quarters in your pocket feel new, and the buildings shine in the glorious sun.”
I wonder now what happens if you change the word faith in Merton’s question to practice. Aren’t so many of these moments of happiness — so often described as being in the right place at the right time — the result of practice? The practice of the mind, the body, or whatever you mean by the spirit? For months, my therapist and I have been working on changing my own practice about the way I relate to shame, to learn how to — rather than shame my choices, which is a zero-sum game — think about my choices as they are related to my needs and wants, and what supports those needs and wants, and what detracts from them. It is a daily practice. It requires belief, dare I say faith, in my own humanness and the humanness of those around me. What results from this is the potential for joy in a world that so often terrifies me because of its — and my own — lack of joy.
Merton’s writing did not change my faith in God at all, but it made me question my relationship to the world. Part of being a good monk, he writes, “is the willingness to accept life in a community where everybody is more or less imperfect.” Perhaps he would disagree with me by posing this hypothetical question, but isn’t that a wonderful definition of what it means to be a good human, living among other humans?
I read Merton, in part, because I was curious about what string of events or choices might lead to someone making the active choice to depart from the world and live in isolation from it. I read him, in part, because I have sometimes had that desire and wanted to find comfort in another’s desire reaching its actuality. In reality, Merton did not so much leave this world as he found a different world within it, a world of God and the practice of faith, a world that he believed could help change the world he left. When I look at this world now, the one I am living in, I see the way in which consumerism and capitalism have made of Merton’s decision a kind of commodity. You can pay to leave for a short time. You can rent a cabin. And then you come back.
What I long for in this world is an acknowledgment of practice. This is something I am still working on. What, I want to ask people, are you practicing? I don’t care if it pertains to any god, or any organized faith. Rather, I want to know how it pertains to you. I want to know how you are being intentional about the life beneath your life, especially if you have the privilege and time to make this choice. I want to know how you are actively trying to be in this life when everyone, including me, including you, is more or less imperfect. I think this requires vulnerability, the kind that Merton gave up to God when he became, as he might say, a servant of his suffering. It is all suffering, isn’t it? I want to know how we aren’t giving up.