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Introduction

What is man, that you make so much of him

And that you set your heart on him,

Visit him every morning

And test him every moment?

Job 7:17

Some contemporary thinkers have expressed their uneasiness about the absolute absence of new ideas to change the world. Even if there are dispersed tendencies and incipient movements, we still find ourselves trapped within the current complexity and do not know how to respond when confronted with it.

One of the main merits of Thomas Merton’s literary project is that it can greatly contribute to untie the knots and dilemmas of personal and social conflicts by liberating us from the dream of fictitious individualism and, therefore, untapping possibilities for an authentic communal experience rooted in “the hidden ground of love.”¹ The relevance of his message has been recently underlined by Pope Francis in his address to the Congress of the United States, when he mentions Thomas Merton, together with three other American – Abraham Lincoln, Dorothy Day and Martin Luther King –, and refers to him as “a man of dialogue, a promoter of peace between peoples and religions.”²

This book aims to bring together a series of critical essays on Thomas Merton’s poetry, which clearly shows how the quest for self–detachment and mystical communion with the divine is indeed at the center of Merton’s spirituality and political concerns. Together with a chronology of Merton’s life and works and two interviews with Dr George Kilcourse and Paul Quenon, ocso, the volume contains some of the most relevant papers I have delivered in different national and international conferences both in Spain and in the UK over more than a decade. They have all been published in specialized journals relating to the fields of Religious Studies, Comparative Literature, and Translation and they can be considered as vivid testimonies to Merton’s perception of human egocentrism as the main root of all international confrontations and social violence:

We live in an age of bad dreams, in which the scientist and engineer possess the power to give external form to the phantasms of man’s unconscious. The bright weapons that sing in the atmosphere, ready to pulverize the cities of the world, are the dreams of giants without a center […] One is permitted to wish their dreams had been less sordid.³

My tenet is that the entire body of Thomas Merton’s poetry can be thought of as a poetics of dissolution: the dissolution of the old corrupt world full of pointless slaughters in favour of an apocalyptic vision of a new world; abstract categorizations of the supernatural giving way to a more direct, humanized and intimate experience of the sacred at home in the world; and above all, a fading away of the false self in the light of the true self in Christ: “O flaming Heart/unseen and unimagined in this wilderness,/You, You alone are real, and here I’ve found You.” Indeed, Merton has been regarded as a prophet and poet of transformation, and his transformative metaphors may help us celebrate the best and most universal of our human civilization’s achievements by bringing forth the most regenerative radiance from deep inside the heart of contemplation.

Through the eight chapters in which this book has been divided, Merton invites us to live a contemplative life. Such contemplation is “the highest expression of man’s intellectual and spiritual life,”⁴ “a listening in silence, an expectancy,”⁵ “a simple intuition of the truth” (simplex intuitus veritatis),⁶ and above all the capacity to see beyond the idols and masks of the ego into the “mystery in which God reveals Himself to us at the very center of our own most intimate self.”⁷ As he beautifully wrote:

At the center of our being is a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lies, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us. It is so to speak His name written in us, as our poverty, as our indigence, as our dependence, as our sonship.⁸

Greatly influenced in his mysticism by the apophatic theology found in such people as Gregory of Nyssa, Pseudo–Dionysius, Meister Eckhart, the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing, or John of the Cross, Merton claimed that God is me and that I am God, and that no word or image can contain God or me. In other words, God is neither a “what” nor a “thing,” it is not a being among other beings, but a pure “Who” or a pure “I” that cannot be apprehended by conceptualization but must be experienced directly in the darkness where God is “everything and nothing,” and where “I” am “everybody” and “nobody.” Throughout Merton’s poetic corpus, we are witness to his own experience of the dark night of the soul, characterized by strong inner contradictions:

This afternoon, let me

Be a sad person. Am I not

Permitted (like other men)

To be sick of myself? [… ]

Do not forbid me (once again) to be

Angry, bitter, disillusioned,

Wishing I could die.⁹

If there is something we can learn from Merton it is that I am not the one I think I am. On the contrary, he helps us understand that – like the prophet Jonas – I live in the belly of a paradox, that there is not only “one” but at least “two” within myself, and that my real person carries an eternal war between what I am supposed to be and what I really am. This is a perpetual agony, a war without end which – in the case of Merton – was manifested in a ferocious struggle between his religious call to the contemplative life and his unquestionable vocation to become a writer. Nevertheless, he did not hide this contradiction but learnt to breathe through his wound, accepting his destiny as one of the greatest poet–prophets of the twentieth century, whose word fiercely denounces all the horrors of human history but also sets up a new beginning through art and symbolic imagination.¹⁰ As he himself recognizes in one of his literary essays:

All really valid poetry (poetry that is fully alive and asserts its reality by its power to generate imaginative life) is a kind of recovery of paradise [… ] Here, the world gets another chance. Here man, here the reader discovers himself getting another start in life, in hope, in imagination, and why? Hard to say, but probably because the language itself is getting another chance, through the innocence, the teaching, the good faith, the honest senses of the workman poet.¹¹

Moved by a deep poetic inspiration, Merton creates a new geography, the geography of Lograire,¹² the geography of the Living Word which puts into question all the false political, scientific and technological discourses which have contributed to create the collective fiction we are living in. And he himself becomes “his own geography [… ] his own wild bird, with God in the center/his own wide field which nobody owns,/his own pattern, surrounding the Spirit/by which he is himself surrounded:/for the free man’s road has neither beginning nor end.”¹³ Let us accompany him in this endless path towards real communion with the divine beyond the limits of our own constrained subjectivities. Let us be awakened to the paradise consciousness, that child mind which is “the only mind worth having.”¹⁴

We live in the things we love and the things we expect. I do hope that the compassionate but somehow incisive message of Thomas Merton, the silent rumour of his poetic voice, can be heard and expanded worldwide during his Centenary Year¹⁵ so that we can get rid of “the overlying layer of duplicity that is not ourselves”¹⁶ and recover our native nakedness, that point of nothingness where we become the Incarnate Word, the dance of the Lord in emptiness.

I would like to conclude this introduction by expressing my heartfelt gratitude to my thesis supervisor, Dr Fernando Beltrán Llavador (University of Salamanca), who enthusiastically encouraged me to start this project, providing great ideas to give shape to this book and revising its final version; my sincerest acknowledgements to Peter Ellis (archaeologist and co–editor of Merton’s centenary volume Universal Vision), Fiona Gardner (Senior Lecturer at Bath Spa University and Committee Member of the TMS of Great Britain and Ireland), Stephen Dunhill (retired teacher and current co–editor of The Merton Journal), and Manuel Poggio Capote (Official Chronicler of Santa Cruz de La Palma and editor of Cartas Diferentes Journal) for their generosity in reading and polishing the manuscript of this book, adapting it to conventional editing guidelines and making its English language sound more felicitous. My warmest thanks to Dr Paul Pearson (Director of the Thomas Merton Center, Bellarmine University, Kentucky, USA), whose constant support and mediation has favoured the publication of this collection; and to Brother Paul Quenon (Gethsemani Abbey, Kentucky, USA) and Dr George Kilcourse (Bellarmine University, Kentucky, USA) for their kind offer to be interviewed and share their thorough knowledge and understanding of Merton’s poetic voice. Finally, I would like to pay homage to my parents, whose sparkling creative streak has always taught me that a person should be independent, original, and should not “run with the herd.”¹⁷ Thank you for their neverending patience and trust in my work.

¹ Merton used this phrase in a letter to Amiya Chakravarty, 13 April, 1967. “And the simple fact that by being attentive, by learning to listen [… ] we can find ourself engulfed in such happiness that it cannot be explained: the happiness of being at one with everything in the hidden ground of love for which there can be no explanations.” The Hidden Ground of Love: The Letters of Thomas Merton on Religious Experience and Social Concerns (London: Collins Flame, 1990), p. 115.

² We are referring to the speech delivered by Pope Francis to the American Congress on 23 September, 2015. In his talk, the pontiff describes Merton as a notable American, a man of prayer, a thinker who challenged the certitudes of his time and who still remains a source of spiritual inspiration, a guide for many people. He even quotes a passage from Merton’s autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain: “I came into the world. Free by nature, in the image of God, I was nevertheless the prisoner of my own violence and my own selfishness, in the image of the world into which I was born. That world was the picture of Hell, full of men like myself, loving God, and yet hating him; born to love him, living instead in fear of hopeless self–contradictory hungers.” See www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issues/transcript-pope-franciss-speech-to-congress/2015.

³ “A Letter to Pablo Antonio Cuadra Concerning Giants,” in The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton (New York: New Direction, 1977), p. 374.

⁴ Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (New York: New Directions, 1961), p. 1.

⁵ Thomas Merton, Contemplative Prayer (Garden City, New York: Image Books, 1969), p. 67.

⁶ Thomas Merton, The Ascent to Truth (New York: Harcourt Brace Jonavovich, 1951), p. 133.

⁷ Thomas Merton, The New Man (New York: Bantam Books, 1961), p. 11.

⁸ Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Co., 1968), p. 158.

⁹ The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton (New York: New Directions, 1977), pp. 231–232. All the citations in this book have been used with permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

¹⁰ In his essay “Poetry and Contemplation: A Reappraisal,” Merton emphasises the intimate relationship between the contemplative and the writing vocation: “In the true Christian poet we find it hard to distinguish between the inspiration of the prophet and mystic and the purely poetic enthusiasm of great artistic genius.” The Literary Essays of Thomas Merton (New York: New Directions, 1985), p. 344.

¹¹ “Louis Zukofsky: the Paradise Ear” (1967), in The Literary Essays of Thomas Merton, op. cit., p. 128.

¹² Paul M. Pearson, The Geography of Lograire: Thomas Merton’s Final Prophetic Vision, in Thomas Merton: Poet, Monk, Prophet, Proceedings of the II Thomas Merton Society of Great Britain and Ireland (Great Britain: Three Peaks Press, 1998).

¹³ The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton, op. cit., p. 245.

¹⁴ See Fiona Gardner, The Only Mind Worth Having: Thomas Merton and the Child Mind (Eugene: Oregon Wipf & Stock, 2015).

¹⁵ A full listing of all the books published around this Centenary year can be found listed on the Centenary website at: http://merton.org/centenary/books.aspx. These are some of the titles published in Spain: Thomas Merton, “La voz secreta”: reflexiones sobre mi obra en oriente y occidente, edited and translated by Fernando Beltrán Llavador from “Honorable Reader”: Reflections on My Work (Santander: Sal Terrae, 2015); Fernando Beltrán Llavador, Thomas Merton: el verdadero viaje (Santander: Sal Terrae, 2015); James Finley, El palacio del vacío de Thomas Merton, edited and translated by Fernando Beltrán Llavador from Merton’s Palace of Nowhere (Santander: Sal Terrae, 2014); Ramón Cao Martínez, Ocultarse en una hoguera: Thomas Merton a través de sus diarios (Ourense, Galicia: Eurisaces Editora, 2015); María Luisa López Laguna, rcm, Thomas Merton: maestro y amigo (Madrid: Edibesa, 2015); Thomas Merton, Oh corazón ardiente: poemas de amor y de disidencia, edited and translated by Sonia Petisco (Madrid: Trotta, 2015); Diccionario de Thomas Merton, translation of The Thomas Merton Encyclopedia, ed. William Shannon, Christine M. Bochen and Patrick O’Connell, under the supervision of Francisco Rafael de Pascual, ocso (Bilbao: Editorial Mensajero, 2015).

¹⁶ Thomas Merton on St. Bernard (Michigan: Cistercian Publications, 1970), p. 119.

¹⁷ Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1978), p. 11.