Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander: Introduction by Thomas Moore (Image Classic) - Softcover

Merton, Thomas

 
9780385010184: Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander: Introduction by Thomas Moore (Image Classic)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0385010184 ISBN 13: 9780385010184
Verlag: Image, 1968

Inhaltsangabe

In this series of notes, opinions, experiences, and reflections, Thomas Merton examines some of the most urgent questions of our age. With his characteristic forcefulness and candor, he brings the reader face-to-face with such provocative and controversial issues as the “death of God,” politics, modern life and values, and racial strife–issues that are as relevant today as they were fifty years ago.

Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander is Merton at his best–detached but not unpassionate, humorous yet sensitive, at all times alive and searching, with a gift for language which has made him one of the most widely read and influential spiritual writers of our time.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

THOMAS MERTON (1915-1968), Trappist monk, author, and peace activist, came to international prominence at a young age with his classic autobiography, The Seven Story Mountain. Over the rest of his life he wrote prolifically on a vast range of topics, including prayer, interior growth, social responsibility, violence, and war. Toward the end of his life he played a significant role in introducing Eastern religions to the West. He is today regarded as a spiritual master, a brilliant religious writer, and a man who embodied the quest for God and human solidarity in the modern world.

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In this series of notes, opinions, and reflections kept since 1956, Thomas Merton examines some of the most urgent moral issues of the modern era.

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INTRODUCTION
by Thomas Moore
The Silent Heron

Toward the beginning of this mind-bending collection of short pieces, we find a lovely Zen-like entry that positions the reader at a luminal place appropriate for someone contemplating monastic experience: “This morning, before Prime, in the early morning sky, three antiquated monoplanes flew over the monastery with much noise, followed by a great heron.” This little lyric captures the role of Thomas Merton in our world today: many antiquated machines have come and gone in the time since Merton wrote these lines, an explosion of technology giving the illusion of progress, while Merton himself continues to fly, pulling up the rear, a great silent heron reminding us that the noisy are not necessarily the knowl­edgeable.

At first Merton shocked us by speaking to the world so effec­tively under a vow of silence. Now he gives us another jolt by show­ing us that almost thirty years after his death his words are still vivid, valid, and challenging. The world of violence and bigotry that he complained about so passionately is still with us, more out­rageously than ever. His broad imagination of religion, holiness, and monkhood, far beyond tolerance and even mere appreciation of many cultures and traditions, is still elusive and rare. And most of all, his insights into the paradoxes and subtleties of the religious vision still sting with the vigor he brings to matters of faith.

For example, he says, “We believe, not because we want to know, but because we want to be.” Steeped in the great spiritual literature of holy ignorance, Merton can urge us away from information for its own sake or from the illusion that we can know everything, and should, if we want to flourish. For him, faith is a way toward being, not knowing. Today we seem more obsessed than ever with factual knowledge, to the extent that not knowing something ap­pears to be a failure rather than a precondition for faith. We have gone so far as to define faith as intellectual conviction rather than living fully in a condition of limited knowledge. Merton’s faith-oriented understanding of the intellectual life, so familiar to the monk, is a stumbling block for modern education and even reli­gious institutions. Again, Merton appears as the dumb heron in the exhaust of the noisy machine.

He also takes a strong poke at American innocence, saying that we live as though this land were paradise—before, beyond, and outside of history. Yet, our problems with bigotry and our tendency toward international aggression “disturb the peace of paradise.” Merton lived in a protected, secluded environment that some would consider at least marginally paradisiacal, but with one foot in Eden he stomped and kicked the other in this historical, real-time arena of the polis.

Merton’s stance shows that we can, and perhaps ought, to live at that infinitesimally narrow line where paradise and history meet. We need real innocence or we will be condemned to the cynicism we see all around us. We need real-world political savvy or we will be condemned to the innocent irrelevance of those who are caught up in their personal dreams and narcissistic ambitions. Merton’s solitude was precious to him and amazingly fertile. His communal life extended far beyond the walls of his abbey and the years of his personal lifetime.

Another central paradox Merton knew well is perhaps the most diffi  cult of all: power and vulnerability. I won’t say “nonviolence,” because it shouldn’t be described negatively, this grossly misunder­stood human capacity to be dependent, open, tolerant, forgiving, and compassionate. The words of Gandhi are strewn throughout these entries. Merton quotes John Chrysostom, as well from the lessons of St. Barnabas’ Day: “As long as we remain sheep, we over­come. Even though we may be surrounded by a thousand wolves, we overcome and are victorious. But as soon as we are wolves, we are beaten.”

People who profess religious faith can listen to words like these from pulpits week after week and still go on trying to avoid being victims and to flex their political and business muscles. All our political news and speeches sound like the howling of wolves, and never the bleat of sheep. Maybe we think about power too literally, and imagine that in being sheep we would be literal masochists, puny hearts in uncourageous bodies. But in all his writing Mer­ton was onto this mystery that can be appreciated only through religious vision or through an extraordinarily subtle psychology: genuine strength arises only in a condition of vulnerability. Th e flagrant display and self-serving use of power are an admission of deep incapacity.

Hawk with Hands in His Pockets

Again and again Merton takes up yet another monkish paradox: contemptus mundi, contempt of the world, which he says needs to be reexamined and appreciated anew. He tells us that he doesn’t mean fulminating against lax sexual morals, divorce, and por­nography—the usual easy targets of religious moralists. He means something more subtle: a giving up of the understanding of one­self that comes from identifying with society’s aims. Th e monk has contempt for the world in the sense that he refuses to partici­pate in its values and assumptions. It makes no difference if you live like a prince or a hermit; the point is whether or not you live out in your own life the unconscious and unconsidered principles of the society at large.

I have come to think that care of the soul requires a high de­gree of resistance to the culture around us, simply because that culture is dedicated to values that have no concern for the soul. To preserve our precious hearts, we may have to live economically against the grain, perhaps so as not to be forced into soul-maiming work just to place bread on the table or put our children through college. We may not want to be plugged into electronic media and have our thoughts laundered daily with biased news, superfi cial commentary, and “lite” entertainment. We may not want to con­tribute to disastrous pollution of nature or participate in the cur­rent value-empty philosophy of education. Th is contemptus mun­di is not a misanthropic, superior rejection of life’s pleasures but, rather, a compassionate attempt to find more grounded pleasure and communal fulfillment in deep appreciation for life relieved of ambition and control.
We need not seek happiness, says Merton, but, rather, discover that we are already happy. “To live well myself is my first and es­sential contribution to the well-being of all mankind.” But not to restrain our desire for happiness obscures our essential well- being. Merton often seems to be in the direct line of those spiritually minded Epicureans who give themselves wholly to life’s richness, both its pleasures and its pains, but who have the wit to fi nd a place for restraint on that road of excess—another paradox that unusually perceptive monks, East and West, love to entertain.

We have watched for several decades now as the Western world has engaged in orgies of spiritual development in mountain growth centers, island retreats, oceanside spas, and mid-city con­ference centers. I myself have participated in some of these eff orts to force well-being into a life and world stuffed with tragedy. Th ese thousands of people and hours upon hours of spiritual exercises have not addressed the world for which Merton had monastic con­tempt and which he loved. They have aimed at personal growth, development, and fulfillment—a dance of death in a world suff er­ing from a plague of soullessness. The...

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Verlag
Image
Erscheinungsdatum
1968
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0385010184
ISBN 13 
9780385010184
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
400
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
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