The Glitter Has Ceased to Matter

As I reached the final pages of Thomas Merton's Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, which follow in the wake of President Kennedy's death and the death of Pope John, I learned that Merton weighed the same as I do today--"which," in his view, "is certainly too much."

I have taken of late to identifying myself much with Merton--his cynicism in tension with his faith, his desire to retreat from the world while still loving and feeling drawn toward the world, his impulse to "reform" everything set against his respect for history and concern for seemingly everyone else's disrespect for the same. There are days when I think that Merton could have been my older brother. (Merton's younger brother, it should be noted, died when Merton was thirty-eight--twenty years prior to Conjectures.)

Merton has little to offer in the way of diet tips. Maybe the last five years of his life focus on weight loss; I don't know. But he has much to say about the Christian's posture toward the world. That shouldn't be surprising, given the circumstances in which he found himself:

* The early Nuclear Age, in which most people felt real anxiety over the real possibility of global atomic devastation.
* The theological hangover from World War II, in which people struggled to reconcile the love of God with the human capacity for holocaust.
* The technological boom, in which most people were reconfiguring their whole life-patterns to make room for radio, television and convection ovens.
* The Civil Rights Movement, in which human rights and equal protection under the law for people of color were actually considered by many to be points of debate and worth shedding blood against.
* The death of God/Christless Christianity movement, in which many people tried to reimagine faith inductively, beginning from the point of disillusioned agnosticism or outright atheism, rather than from the biblical revelation and the Great Tradition of the church.
* The assembling of the Second Vatican Council, in which all the great minds of the Catholic Church considered what tone best articulated Christianity's prophetic voice in this particularly beleaguered world.

Merton was well suited to this puzzle, I think. He had a respect for tradition but not a blind, slavish obedience to it; he had an openness to the best logic and habits from outside Christianity without being naively enamored by them; he had a mystical bent that anchored his intellect, and a way of communicating that was simultaneously simple and sophisticated. I've elsewhere referred to him as a punk prophet, and I'll stand by that--happily acknowledging that to be a punk is to make it hard to be a prophet (although to be a prophet can sometimes make it easy to be a punk.)

I should have anticipated this, I suppose, but Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander has a lot to say about one's posture before the world. The title says a lot, of course, but he goes much farther, and as I read the last entry (with its flirtatious forays into Zen), I found myself not only stroking my imaginary beard but feeling my heart strangely warmed by his understanding of God's atoning love for the world and its implications for those of us who occupy that world. Here, in content pulled intermittently from the last twenty pages of the book, is Merton on the world as we have it:

We do not make momentous decisions. They are made for us, and we either accept or not, with good grace or not. The myth of the man of decision, enlightened, determined, calculating the pros and cons, jutting out his jaw and ready to go--this is our consolation for being passive, petulant, confused, ineffectual, dominated by routines. . . .

Only faith is to be taken seriously [here he is reflecting on an idea from Karl Barth] because only the mercy of God is serious. . . . We are judged as men who have taken seriously something other than His infinite mercy. . . .

The real trouble with "the world," in the bad sense which the Gospel condemns, is that it is a complete and systematic sham, and he who follows it ends not by living but by pretending he is alive, and justifying his pretense by an appeal to the general conspiracy of all the others to do the same. . . .

The Father's will did not arbitrarily impose suffering and death on Christ, but sent Him into the world to use His freedom to save man. It is out of love for the Father that Jesus chooses this particular way, the way of humiliation and of the total renunciation of power, in order to save man by love, mercy, and self-sacrifice. . . .

Will the words of the children be lies also, like those of our generation--or worse lies still? When one takes this deeper view he does not have to ask. There is the hope, there is the world that remakes itself at God's command without consulting us. . . . The glitter is false? Well, the light is true. The glitter has ceased to matter. It is even beautiful.

Thinking the Right Thoughts, Wearing the Right Hats

I've been reading Thomas Merton's Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, a collection of brief journal entries from the early 1960s, coinciding with, among other things, Vatican II, the Cuban missle crisis, the early Civil Rights Movement and the "death of God" movement. One of the many reasons I love reading Merton is his punk profundity--he loves people, even those many people who annoy him, and he is wildly inventive in the ways he calls out their inconsistencies. He's passionate about his times while maintaining the "contempt for the world" appropriate to his office as a monk. From Merton I learn to think of contempt not as an emotion but an interior action--opposing ("con") temptation--and I likewise see the difference between condemnation (an all too easy word used to denounce the other) and contemnation (the costly act of discipleship).

In Conjectures Merton is rightly observing that (a) the mid-twentieth century is a time of significant turmoil and historic change; and (b) the mid-twentieth century is not, and must not be, what defines us. I'm left to wonder what Merton would think of the cultural, religious and geopolitical changes that came after his death in 1968, but I suspect that he would continue to be consistently contemplative, persistently prophetic, annoyingly astute, insert superlative alliteration here.

Today's reading is focused on "worldliness," something we tend to think of only in the form it takes in us and among us: the "worldly," in the eyes of the church today, view Internet pornography and subscribe to Showtime and play softball on Sunday mornings. They smoke and drink and chew, and go with girls who do. But the idea of "worldliness" is meaningless without considering the reality of who we are and the reality of how that links us both to the world and to God. If we take "worldly" to be bad, we need to immediately ask what it then means to be persons in the world, made of the dust of the earth. If, on the other hand, we take "worldly" to be good--to be sophisticated and well-traveled and liberated from archaisms such as "church"--we are quickly confronted with the question of what the world delivers us from, and what the world delivers us to.

Both sides of this equation, however motivated by pious faith, are kind of missing the point. Merton is happy to make sense of "worldliness," not in a way that simplifies it as a concept, but in a way that keeps us vigilant:

The "wordly" attitude which I think is nefarious is not simply the "turning to the world" or even the total and would-be uncompromising secularism of the "honest to God" set. Still less is it the noble concern for social justice and for the right use of technology. . . . What I mean by "worldliness" is the . . . cultivation of the ability to redefine one's identity day by day in concert with the self-definition of society. "Worldliness" in my mind is typified by this kind of servitude to care and to illusion, this agitation about thinking the right thoughts and wearing the right hats, this crude and shameful concern not with truth but only with vogue. To my mind, the concern of Christians to be in fashion lest they "lose the world" is only another pitiable admission that they have lost it.

The Ministry of Anonymity

This morning I was reading a column in Entertainment Weekly from a few weeks ago (we're in sort of a magazine co-op with my mother-in-law, so we get them a bit late); the author of the column was calling out the Hollywood film industry for leaving so many female characters unnamed, and giving them no lines, and using them only as props. Examples included "topless cheerleader" and "blonde junkie," if I recall correctly. I suppose you might think it part of my master literary plan that I haven't named the columnist by now, but I must confess that in fact the magazine is on the other side of my house and I'm too lazy to go get it. But that's not the point of this post.

The point of this post is that I went from reading that column (it's in the bathroom, OK?!?!) to settling into my recliner and reading Thomas Merton's Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, specifically the part in which he discusses--and I am not making this up--the unimportance of the names of his neighboring nuns.

Nuns are generally women, in case you didn't know. That's where I was in my reading. Two sides of my house taking two completely different positions on the importance of giving women names. When stuff like that happens to me, I sit up and take notice. Then I blog about it.

You might jump to the conclusion that the column is a couple of weeks old, while Merton's meditations are a half-century old and reflect the prejudices of the day. How important, for example, do the men on Mad Men--peers of Merton, if we apply the timeline--consider the women in their lives: their spouses, secretaries, mistresses? How often do they even remember those women's names? I confess I don't know, since I don't generally watch Mad Men, which is helping this post to be perhaps my least researched ever. But that's not why I bring it up.

I bring it up because between the columnist and Merton, I think Merton remains the more enlightened. The columnist's case, for all its righteous anger (and I do think women should be given names and voices alongside men, for the record), is pretty weak. Meanwhile, Merton's more speculative thinking transcends the question of gender to consider the meaning of each moment, the value of relationship and service, even the ministry of anonymity. Here's how he enters into his reflections:

At the Little Sisters of the Poor in Louisville: the beauty of the Church is evident in the charity of her children, and especially her daughters.

The "Good Mother" is transparent, simple, of no age, both child and mother, and hence something like Mary. Perhaps the complicated names of nuns (which I can never remember) are in the end no names at all, s if nuns could not have names anyway. As if only God could know their names.

Merton is generally happy to give his strong negative opinion of the thoughtless apostasy and quiet desperation of his age, so when he gets this awestruck, I sit up and take notice. He doesn't impress easily, and yet here he is undoubtedly impressed.

Yet how real they are as persons! How much more real (often enough) than people who have "big names" in the world. One does not need to idealize the Sisters. They have their problems. Often they have to struggle with a difficult "system." Yet their faith and their love give them greatness.

Merton--decades prior to the advent of social media, where people establish their "big names" by amassing thousands of friends and followers--is himself a case study in the relative importance of a name. A bestselling author, he was nonetheless one of a small number of Trappist monks in a small town in Kentucky. For a while his was a household name; for many it still is. And yet his story is a flirtation (with its inevitable frustrations) with the ministry of anonymity--a life of quiet reflection that nonetheless challenges our cultural presumptions and shapes our ethics.

A couple of years ago I read Jose Saramago's book Blindness. (I saw the film also, and wrote about it here, in case you're interested.) In that story no one is named: not the women, not the men, not the children. Saramago makes a big deal out of it, actually--although I can't quote his rationale because the book is all the way over on the other side of the house--as a way of helping the reader (and the characters) look beyond the particular context of each person to see the bigger picture of the human condition: what assails us, what entices us, what empowers us. One of Saramago's many insights revealed in this book about blindness was made clear already in Merton's experience with the nameless nuns, and would be a helpful reminder to my nameless EW columnist: Our names are a gift, a luxury, even; but our conduct is what ultimately defines us. Whatever you call me--"Dave" or "lazy blogger #1" or anything else that comes to mind--I am called beyond myself into ministry to God's creation; my name may be my birthright, but in the words of Jose Saramago, "Today is my responsibility."

Between Churches: Merton on Basic Pseudo-Christianity

I have the privilege of working for a "long tail" publisher, whose business model involves looking past the BIG BOOK OF THE MOMENT to work on books that will endure over time. Some books may sell modestly in their first year but continue to sell steadily every year after that, and before you know it, the editor who acquired it has retired while the book keeps selling.

I occasionally, then, reread books that were written thirty, forty, fifty or sixty years ago, when they're up for a new cover or a new edition or approaching a milestone anniversary. Most recently this was the case with Basic Christianity, fifty years old in 2009. John Stott wrote this book while he was rector of a church in post-WWII London; he went on to become one of the most influential people in the world. If you've not heard of him, that's not our fault.

Anyway, Basic Christianity is what it claims to be--a simple, straightforward presentation of what is, in the mind of Stott and the evangelicals of his era, basic to Christianity. As his later career proved, Stott has remarkable clarity, enabling him to transcend the cultural quirks of his era to declare something timeless that nonetheless speaks prophetically to his times. No wonder it continues to sell like hotcakes.

But I'm not writing today about Stott. I'm writing about Thomas Merton, Stott's Roman Catholic contemporary whose books leave Stott's in the dust in terms of sales and whose name you are even more responsible for not knowing. Merton entered monastic life in roughly the same time period that Stott entered pastoral ministry and went on to publish numerous books of theology and social commentary before his death in 1968. One late entry in his corpus, which I'm currently reading, is titled Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. (Let me here acknowledge that his publisher has more fun titling books than mine does.)

In this book, mostly sketchy thoughts and commentary on the "interesting times" we inhabit and our inherent responsibility to such times (and our all-too-common failure to live up to that responsibility), Merton devotes a couple of pages to "the basic Christian faith." I find myself wondering whether he's responding to Stott here; perhaps he glanced at Stott's little book on a shelf in the library at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky and thought, Hmmm, maybe I should do something like that. Such a plainspoken, presentational book is not his cup of tea, however, so he journaled about it and moved on. Here, digested from its already digested state, is Merton's perspective on basic Christianity--and, perhaps more interestingly, its corrupted form as experienced today:

The basic Christian faith is that he who renounces his delusive, individual autonomy in order to receive his true being and freedom in and by Christ is "justified" by the mercy of God in the Cross of Christ. His "sins are forgiven" in so far as the root of guilt is torn up in the surrender which faith makes to Christ. . . .

The Church is the place in which this surrender of individual autonomy becomes real, guaranteed by the truth of the Spirit and by His love, and by the pardon of sins: for the Church herself takes upon herself all man's sin. The Church at once confesses the sins of all men as her own, and receives in herself the mercy that is offered to all men.

But now, supposing that, instead of confessing the sins of the world which she has taken upon herself, the Church--or a group of Christians who arrogate to themselves the name of "Church"--becomes a social mechanism for self-justification? . . . Suppose that she becomes a perfect and faultless machine for declaring herself not guilty? . . . SUpposing that, instead of conscience, she provides men with the support of unanimous group approval or disapproval? . . . The "Church" becomes simply a place where men gather to decree that others are guilty and they themselves are innocent. . . .

It is characteristic of pseudo-Christianity that, while claiming to be justified by God, by faith, or by the works of faith and love, it merely operates a machine for excusing sin instead of confessing and pardoning it--a machine for producing the feeling that one is right and everyone else is wrong. . . . Thus gradually the determination to pervert the Christian conscience becomes a function of the "Church"--perhaps even its prime function. And this becomes, inevitably, the sign of God's judgment upon that "Church."

So here's my confession: I don't want to go to that kind of "Church"--except that I kinda do. And assuming that the church is portable--that it's a "we" embedded in every Christian's "I"--to the extent that I nurse and nurture this "Church" in me I threaten the vitality of every church I visit. God help us all.

Merton on Barth on Mozart

I forget, sometimes, when I settle down to delve into a book by mid-twentieth-century monk Thomas Merton, that he was a man of his times. I unconsciously prepare myself for deep mysticism, the kind of extrarational, nonlinear writing that shocks you into the Spirit like Leo Dicaprio gets shocked awake in Inception. I forget that as mystical as Merton often gets, he's also a man of his times, and certain things tick him off.

For example, as a practicing Protestant with sentimental attachments to the Catholicism of my youth, I take great delight in Merton's occasional salvos against the folly of the Protestantism of his day. Particularly in his Seven Storey Mountain, a memoir of his gradual embrace of Catholicism and later his entry into monastic life, he indulges the occasional rant. I picture not a red face but rather a wry smile as he writes, enjoying the mockery he makes of these earnest evangelicals with no respect for history.

Merton wasn't a bigot, it turns out; he didn't hate Protestants, but thin theology bugged him as much as poor aesthetics and bad writing. Hand him a piece by someone who knew what he was doing, and Merton would show that Protestant some respect.

I've just begun reading Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, Merton's spiritual journals from the late 1950s. I was prepared to read about war, racism, Zen, transcendence, even whooping cranes. I wasn't quite prepared for the opening line: "Karl Barth had a dream about Mozart."

Karl Barth, one of the most important theologians ever--a contemporary of Merton, and as Protestant as they come. Mozart, the child prodigy of the Classical era who dismissed Protestantism as "all in the head."

I've been eager to read Conjectures since I first heard of it; it strikes me as Merton at his sardonic, bemused best. But clearly I didn't know what to expect; leading off with Karl Barth's dreamlife shocked me awake more than the trippiest haiku ever could.

Barth, in his dream, was appointed to examine Mozart in theology. He wanted to make the examination as favorable as possible, and in his questions he alluded pointedly to Mozart's masses.

But Mozart did not answer a word. . . .

The dream concerns his salvation, and Barth perhaps is striving to admit that he will be saved more by the Mozart in himself than by his theology. . . .

Bart says . . . that "it is a child, even a 'divine' child, who speaks in Mozart's music to us." Some, he says, considered Mozart always a child in practical affairs. . . . At the same time, Mozart, the child prodigy, "was never allowed to be a child in the literal meaning of that word." He gave his first concert at the age of six.

Yet he was always a child "in the higher meaning of that word."

Fear not, Karl Barth! Trust in the divine mercy. Though you have grown up to become a theologian, Christ remains a child in you. Your books (and mine) matter less than we might think! There is in us a Mozart who will be our salvation.

That's from page four. Page one has the title and two quotations; page two is blank. Three hundred and fifty pages to go, but I will remember throughout that Merton's books (and mine) matter less than we might think. And I will do my best throughout to trust in the divine mercy.

Lighten Up, in the Name of the Lord

More to come on National Pastors Convention, but in the meantime I came across the following in Dark Night of the Soul, which, it turns out, has nothing to do with Batman:

With respect to the fourth sin, which is spiritual gluttony, . . . such persons expend all their effort in seeking spiritual pleasure and consolation; they never tire, therefore, of reading books; and they begin, now one meditation, now another, in their pursuit of this pleasure which they desire to experience in the things of God. But God, very justly, wisely and lovingly, denies it to them, for otherwise this spiritual gluttony and inordinate appetite would breed innumerable evils. It is, therefore, very fitting that they should enter into the dark night, . . . that they may be purged from this childishness.

Funny how some of the markers of great piety in our era--voracious appetite for spiritual reading, frequent meditation on the Word of God, and so on--are here considered markers of spiritual immaturity. It explains some of the bemused comments about evangelicals I've read in books by monastic Catholics such as Thomas Merton. Begs the question: which spiritual disciplines do you suspect someone like St. John of the Cross might suggest you lay off for a while? How would you respond if a spiritual giant told you to lighten up?

On Death and New Life

Right around this time sixty-five years ago, Thomas Merton’s brother John Paul died at sea after his warplane crashed. I read of his death in Seven-Storey Mountain, the memoir of Merton’s early life. Thomas read about it in a telegram after his Lenten cloister ended at the abbey.

I knew someone died in Seven-Storey Mountain because I had flipped to the end and seen evidence of “his death”; I didn’t, however, discover the antecedent for “his” until much later. I was sad to read of it, because John Paul was, in the writing of his brother at least, innocent.

I have never lost a loved one to war, and I’ve never witnessed war close up. That’s not the case for many in my country, those who came here to escape war, those whose loved ones engage in military service, those who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. I suppose that technically I have grieved for them on days in which we commemorate our war dead or on days when I’ve heard a compelling report of the suffering of the innocents. But I have never grieved the loss of a loved one to violence over which someone somewhere had some degree of control. I’ve never felt the direct sting of the struggle of nations. I am, I suppose you could say, a different kind of innocent—the kind that’s more naive than guiltless.

Before Merton recounted the death of his brother, he recounted his brother’s baptism, hinting that he had an inkling that the occasion of John Paul’s impromptu baptism might be their last moments together. I’m told that soldiers sometimes make serious, life-altering commitments just before shipping out, and John Paul made two: he married a girl, and he converted to Christ. Thomas wrote of the baptism with the kind of nervous excitement you imagine an older brother bringing to such an occasion for his younger brother. He crammed a years-long catechism into a couple of days. He advocated for his brother’s baptism to his superiors. He geeked out over the things that were particularly important to him though not particularly relevant to baptism. You can picture the barely-contained zeal to convert, set against the shucksy simplicity of a wet-behind-the-ears younger sibling. These two were no strangers to the vicissitudes of life, and in a real sense—judging at least from Thomas’s memoir—they didn’t have much of a life together, but in the end they acted to type as adult brothers often act: enthused, endeared, mildly paternalistic, oddly clingy.

And then John Paul was gone, only the latest loved one whom Thomas lost. I often wonder as I read this book why it created such a stir in its day—it’s so Catholic, so East Coast, so personalized, so, so, so. But even as I wonder such things I find myself envisioning the Kentucky winter that melts into spring, speaking my peace in conversations about faith, grieving the loss of a mother, a father, a brother.

Over the course of writing Deliver Us from Me-Ville I’ve taken to thinking of Thomas Merton as one of two patron saints of the Greatest Generation, the generation that persevered through World War II. Merton is the one who survived; Bonhoeffer is the one who did not. In reading Merton’s memoir I think I better understand—despite all the uniquenesses that distinguish his story from any other—my grandparents and the world they bequeathed to us.

Good Friday

From The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton:

Do you know what Love is? Here is Love, here on this Cross, here is Love, suffering these nails, these thorns, that scourge loaded with lead, smashed to pieces, bleeding to death because of your sins and bleeding to death because of people that will never know Him, and never think of Him and will never remember His Sacrifice. Learn from Him how to love God and how to love men! Learn of this Cross, this Love, how to give your life away to Him. . . .

See, see Who God is, see the glory of God, going up to Him out of this incomprehensible and infinite Sacrifice in which all history begins and ends, all individual lives begin and end, in which every story is told, and finished, and settled for joy or for sorrow: the one point of reference for all the truths that are outside of God, their center, their focus: Love! . . .

Do you know what Love is? You have never known the meaning of Love, never, you who have always drawn all things to the center of your own nothingness. Here is Love in this chalice full of Blood, Sacrifice, mactation. Do you not know that to love means to be killed for glory of the Beloved? And where is your love? Where is now your Cross, if you say you want to follow Me, if you pretend you love Me?"

Think Monastic, Act Apostolic

Thomas Merton, it's safe to say, was obsessed with the monastic life, particularly prior to his entrance into a monastic order. I'm learning this as I read ever so slowly through The Seven Storey Mountain, a memoir of his early life. But as obsessed as he was with monasticism, he was moved more by activism--and by activism I mean people living out the integrity of the calling and convictions placed on them by God.

A prime example is Catherine de Hueck, who fled Russia during the Communist revolution that gave witness to the violent death of several of her family members. She wound up working in a laundry in Depression-era Harlem, where Communism was overtaking the church in the hearts and imaginations of the residents. Merton ceded the rights to his early journals to de Hueck in support of her mission, but here he simply stands back and offers his admiration; in so doing he paints a picture of responsible lay living for people of faith:

Catherine de Hueck is a person in every way big: and the bigness is not merely physical: it comes from the Holy Ghost dwelling constantly within her, and moving her in all that she does.

When she was working in that laundry, down somewhere near Fourteenth Street, and sitting on the kerbstone eating her lunch with the other girls who worked there, the sense of her own particular vocation dawned upon her. It was the call to an apostolate, not new, but so old that it is as traditional as that of the first Christians: an apostolate of a laywoman in the world, among workers, herself a worker, and poor: an apostolate of personal contacts, of word and above all of example. There was to be nothing that savored of a religious Order, no special rule, no distinctive habit. She, and those who joined her, would simply be poor--there was no choice on that score, for they were that already--but they would embrace their poverty, and the life of the proletariat in all its misery and insecurity and dead, drab monotony. They would live and work in the slums, lose themselves in the huge anonymous mass of the forgotten and the derelict, for the only purpose of living the complete integral Christian life in that environment--loving those around them, sacrificing themselves for those around them, and spreading the Gospel and the truth of Christ most of all by being saints, by living in union with Him, by being full of His Holy Ghost, His charity.

Meme-bo No. 5

L. L. Barkat memed me:

1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people.

I don't get memed that often, and this one is among the more intriguing. So I'll bite.

1. I picked up a sufficiently pretentious book--Seven Storey Mountain--in a sufficiently pretentious edition (1948 hardback) to make me look thoughtful and classically intelligent rather than juvenile and stupid, as would have been the case if I had already gotten the giant graphic novel (a pretentious term meaning "comic book") out of my backpack.

2. Page 123 is yellowed with age, being as it is unprotected by the acid-free mandates that came to publishing much later than 1948.

3. The fifth complete sentence, appearing halfway down the page on the eighteenth line, reads as follows: "This, as I see it, was also a kind of a grace: the greatest grace in the positive order that I got out of Cambridge."

4. Though tempted to look backward and determine what antecedent is characterized here as "this," I will instead follow the rules of the meme and write forward:

All the rest were negative. They were only graces in the sense that God in His mercy was permitting me to fly as far as I coulde from His love but at the same time preparing to confront me, at the end of it all, and in the bottom of the abyss, when I thought I had gone the farthest away from Him. Si ascendero in coelum, tu illic es.

I think the Latin is a reference to Psalm 139, rendered in The Message as "If I go underground, you're there!" But I'm only guessing; coelum, according to Wikipedia, is a body cavity.

5. Your turns, Web, Elaine, Jenn, Margaret and Pete! (Margaret's The Organic God was thisclose to being my entry, by the way.)

The End Is the Beginning

I finished reading Thomas Merton's breathtaking New Seeds of Contemplation today. I ran out the ink in more than one pen underlining ideas and taking notes as I went through the book, but today I turned to the last page and read the last line:

We are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the winds and join in the general dance.

And so now I know the origins of the title of nature's most nearly perfect book: Forgetting Ourselves on Purpose by Brian Mahan. I knew that he had Merton in mind as he wrote his book, and I knew that the concept of forgetting ourselves on purpose was explicitly borrowed from Merton; what I didn't know was that the title and beginning idea of Mahan's book was the last, summary thought of one of Merton's finest works.

It strikes me that there's a great responsibility attached to the last word, at least in part because what we declare to be the last word is never really actually that. Someone inevitably picks up where we left off or--worse, we who offer last words are tempted to think--says something like "Glad that's over" and gets on with their own life, their own thoughts.

I'm sure I've written about this before, but it was such a striking conversation for me that I regularly repeat it. I was talking with a friend of mine about the dynamics that settle in when we are regularly gathered together with a small group of people. My friend observed that my impulse is to go for the "last laugh"--the joke that busts everybody up so that all conversation is overtaken by laughter. He, by contrast, intuitively goes for the "last word"--the idea that causes everyone to stroke their imaginary beard and settle into quiet contemplation.

The last word and the last laugh work against each other, since people who are settling into quiet contemplation are not generally prepared for riotous laughter, and people can get so caught up in hilarity that the last word goes unheard or unsaid. Regardless of which predominates, however, eventually our time together ends and we become re-occupied by new thoughts and new jokes. Life goes on, no matter how desperately we try to punctuate it.

That's the way it's meant to be, I think. No idea of human origin is so commanding that it says all that need be said. No joke is so uproarious that people will never find anything else funny ever again. There's a last word, but inevitably, there's a word after that.

The last word of my book Deliver Us from Me-Ville, as I think of it, will be "So be it." Then again, technically that's the last line of the "Afterword," which itself suggests that the real last word came earlier: "Give yourself to the Lord, and sleep well." But then again, again, the "Afterword" is followed by a whole host of other comments--a list of ideas for further reading, a list of acknowledgments of people who helped me develop the book, reference notes for the quoted material in the chapters, and even a quotation from Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

May God in his mercy lead us through these times, but above all, may he lead us to himself.

That's an awful lot of last words; it almost makes me laugh.

The hope of really any author, particularly authors of nonfiction and especially those writing about spirituality, is that the end of their book will be the beginning of someone else's new journey. That journey, it's implicitly understood, does have an ending that stretches beyond each of us along the way. God, suggests Bonhoeffer, is leading us through these times, but one day we'll reach our destination when God leads us to himself.

As he approaches the Shire at the end of his adventure in The Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins observes, "Roads go ever on." It's a nice thing to remember as we come to the end of a particular journey: the ultimate journey is ongoing. Samwise Gamgee, however, offers a nice counterpoint to the notion when he takes the last word in The Lord of the Rings: "Well, I'm back." To which J. R. R. Tolkien offers the literary equivalent of an "amen":

The end.

The Steady Dismantling of My Private Mythology, Part One

I've been reading a lot by Thomas Merton lately, mostly to inform my writing in Deliver Us from Me-Ville. In the process I've gotten firsthand exposure to the vast expanse between his intellect and mine, his depth of spirit and mine. It's enough to give a guy a complex.

In other news--related only by the cognitive stretch I'm about to make, so pay attention--yesterday a coworker of mine delivered to me, with compliments from my publisher (read here and here for my neuroses concerning just such a meeting), a mockup of Me-Ville so I could see how the over will ultimately look on a book. It's exciting and wildly distracting; I keep picking it up and looking at it, weighing it, scrutinizing it, flipping through it. That's where the trouble starts, because in flipping through it I see that beyond the cover lies nothing--blank pages, substancelessness.

That's my fear, that ultimately what I write will amount to nothing more than the taking up of shelf space and the killing of trees. I console myself in those moments of self-doubt or self-awareness--still figuring out which is closer to the mark--with the thought that through what I've written some people will be exposed to some truly great thinking, some truly deep intuition about where our selves lie in relation to the Truth.

So today I thought I'd give you a little gift by quoting Merton from his New Seeds of Contemplation. Here he is being simutaneously witty and refreshingly jaded, on the one hand, and profound and insightful into the paradoxical human need for encounter with God and right relations with fellow humanity, and the sin that so easily entangles:

The contemplative life certainly does not demand a self-righteous contempt for the habits and diversions of ordinary people. But nevertheless, no man who seeks liberation and light in solitude, no man who seeks spiritual freedom, can afford to yield passively to all the appeals of a society of salesmen, advertisers and consumers. There is no doubt that life cannot be lived on a human level without certain legitimate pleasures. But to say that all the pleasures which offer themselves to us as necessities are now "legitimate" is quite another story. . . .

Just because he can buy one brand of whisky rather than another, this man deludes himself that he is making a choice; but the fact is that he is a devout servant of a tyrannical ritual. He must reverently buy the bottle, take it home, unwrap it, pour it out for his friends, watch TV, "feel good," talk his silly uninhibited head off, get angry, shout, fight and go to bed in disgust with himself and the world. This becomes a kind of religious compulsion without which he cannot convince himself that he is really alive, really "fulfilling his personality." He is not "sinning" but simply makes an ass of himself, deluding himself that he is real when his compulsions have reduced him to a shadow of a genuine person.

The Cost of Ownership

As I work on my draft manuscript for Deliver Us from Me-Ville I find myself turning a lot to Thomas Merton, an American Trappist monk from the mid-twentieth century. I'm reminded again how volatile the times were before I was born, and how comparatively we've not had to deal with much in our day. Sure, we've seen the evolution of the i-Phone and on-demand television programming, but Merton and his contemporaries sat through a great depression, a world war, a cold war, two American wars in Asia and the civil rights movement. Still, I suspect he wrote the following (in his Secular Journals)not so much for his generation as for ours:

I am scared to take a proprietary interest in anything, for fear that my love of what I own may be killing somebody somewhere.

Merton and Dietrich Bonhoeffer are proving to be my main teachers as I write this book. Merton is the spiritual director; Bonhoeffer the theologian. His Cost of Discipleship, written in the same era as Merton's Secular Journals, looks at what Christ calls us to lay down in our pursuit of a life with him. Meanwhile, Merton hints at this idea that what a consumerist, materialist culture calls us to take on makes us complicit in what that culture does to the world we inhabit. That's the hidden cost of ownership: we don't only own what we buy, we own the just and unjust business practices that secured the production of what we buy, we own the environmental degradation that such production causes, we own the hoarding of intellectual property that makes luxury items out of life-saving medication. We own all sorts of things alongside the things we invest in or buy.

Read my friend Chris Heuertz's article "Breaking Her Back to Clothe Mine" for a good up-close look at the cost of ownership and some ways of mitigating it.