Solitude and Revolution

“No matter where in the world he may be, no matter what may be his power of protest, or his means of expression, the poet finds himself ultimately where I am. Alone, silent, with the obligation of being very careful not to say what he does not mean, not to let himself be persuaded to say merely what another wants him to say, not to say what his own past work has led others to expect him to say. The poet has to be free from everyone else, and first of all from himself, because it is through this ‘self’ that he is captured by others. Freedom is found under the dark tree that springs up in the center of the night and of silence, the paradise tree, the axis mundi, which is also the Cross.” (Thomas Merton, “Day of a Stranger” [May, 1965]; in Dancing in the Water of Life: The Journals of Thomas Merton, vol. 5 [1963 – 1965], 242)

Is it surprising that a life shaped over years of monastic prayer in the long arc of sung call and response might become poetic, or that a person living in this regimen of art and emptiness might write poems, yielding to what the old monks called the “visitation by the word”? This is the story of Thomas Merton, known among his confreres at Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky as Father Louis. From his monastic cell and later hermitage, Merton devoted himself to study and writing. Silence may have been the outward shape of his life, but words seemed to be his constant companion in an outpouring of letters, journal entries, essays, and books. And, in the course of his life, he became one of the most outspoken opponents of the Vietnam War, the proliferation of nuclear arms, and the devastating blight of poverty and racism.

That Merton became a writer is not surprising; one could already anticipate as much from his early attraction to literature, a passionate interest that he did not leave behind when he took monastic vows. But this hardly seems the context for the making of a revolutionary, as it turned out to be true in his case. I was struck by this in the collision of news from the Middle East, heard on a Kentucky NPR station as I recently drove through the hills toward Gethsemani Abbey where Merton lived out his monastic life: news of more killings in Iraq, of violent unrest in Jerusalem and Gaza, of the continuing torture of detainees sanctioned at the highest level of government, stories laden with the anguish of death funded in large measure by US tax dollars.

I don’t know what others were watching that evening, though almost every house huddled along the road’s dark edges flickered with the eerie blue light of television sets. I’ve no idea if they were gathered in solemn remorse as the stories played in an apparently unending elegiac mode, or whether they’d flicked the channel from such “bad news” to find the relief of a “Jeopardy” installment or some version of the current crop of so-called “reality” shows. “Distracted from distractions by distractions,” as the poet Eliot put it. It’s hard to make much sense of this, but the hope that such diversions might establish the foundation for an informed electorate seems unlikely.

What does it mean for us to “keep alert” for the Word of God in such times? How will we attend to “the signs of the times,” as Merton was wont to do? This will require that we listen for the traces of a truth often buried beneath the surface of distractions, and hidden by calls to defend our “peace and security,” the classic defense of empire, which the apostle Paul knew about – and scorned (see 1 Thess. 5. 3). What would it cost us to trust the beatitude, “Blessed are the peacemakers,” and heed Jesus’ admonitions to “love [our] enemies and do good to those who hate [us]” (Lk. 6. 27)? What would the national agenda look like, if we took such words seriously? Merton wondered – and thundered – in his day; will we in ours?