Jon Kennedy, Nanty Glo Home Page webmaster and owner, is a former teen and campus minister. He began his journalism career as teen columnist for the Nanty Glo Journal and its sister weekly newspapers from 1957 to '62 and became the Journal's third editor in 1962 at age 20. He has edited other newspapers and magazines, and more recently, webzines, ever since. His articles have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Detroit Free Press, Cleveland Plain-Dealer, Christianity Today, and many other publications. His Jonals appear here on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

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Food for reflection from Thomas Merton

Jonal entry 1089 | February 11 2009

My case of "Home Page flu," as reported last time seems to be getting under control, so now to return to business as usual, which is getting a weekly (at least) Jonal to press, or online. But as a transition from work as frenzy to work as usual, I'm taking a relatively easy way back by sharing a collection of reflections gathered from my current reading, A Thomas Merton Reader, which I introduced here on January 22 ("Why Did We Go to All Those Movies?"). This time up I'm going to give some of Merton's thoughts with an intent to "unpack" some of them in later posts. This symbol § indicates the beginning of a new topic. The titles in some of these sections refer to the section titles in the Merton book. Please let me know any thoughts or questions you have as you ruminate through these.

On his Columbia University literature professor Mark van Doren, Merton wrote: "he would never permit himself to fall into the naive errors of those who try to read some favorite private doctrine into every poet they like of every nation or every age. And Mark abhorred the smug assurance with which second-rate left-wing critics find adumbrations of dialectical materialism in everyone who ever wrote from Homer and Shakespeare to whomever they happen to like in recent times. If the poet is to their fancy, then he is clearly seen to be preaching the class struggle. If they do not like him, then they are able to show that he was really a forefather of fascism. And all their literary heroes are revolutionary leaders, and all their favorite villains are capitalists and Nazis.

"It was a very good thing for me that I ran into someone like Mark Van Doren at that particular time, because in my new reverence for Communism, I was in danger of docilely accepting any kind of stupidity, provided I thought it was something that paved the way to the Elysian fields of classless society."

§ Heraclitus the Obscure or Heraclitus of Ephesus, ca. 535-475 B.C., whose name Merton spells "Herakleitos," is said to be referred to by other philosophers mainly in order to refute him, "But St. Justin Martyr refers to him, along with Socrates, as a 'Saint' of pre-Christian paganism. The fact that he is unknown to us except in the context which others have foisted on him makes him even more difficult to understand than he is in himself. Though the fragments which form his whole surviving work can be printed in two or three pages, long and laborious research is needed to untangle their authentic meaning and to liberate the obscure Ionian from the bias imposed on his thought by the interpretation of opponents....

"But it is true that the logos of Herakleitos seems to have much in common with the Tao of Lao-tse as well as with the Word of St. John....

"Fire for him is a dynamic, spiritual principle. It is a divine energy, the manifestation of God, the power of God. God, indeed, is for Herakleitos 'all things.' But this is probably a much more subtle statement than we might be inclined to imagine at first sight, for he says that just as fire when it burns different kinds of aromatical spices becomes a variety of perfumes, so God working in the infinite variety of beings manifests Himself in countless appearances. God, strictly speaking, is then not merely 'fire' or 'earth' or the other elements, or all of them put together. His energy works, shows itself and hides in nature. He Himself is the Logos, the Wisdom, not so much 'a work' in nature but rather 'at play' there...."

Did you know that some Fathers of the Church (defined here as in theology generally as meaning early Christian thinkers whose teachings became universal doctrines of Christendom) believed that God is both heaven and hell? For more on this, a tangent from Merton, check this website.

§ "Christians have too often forgotten the fact that Christianity found its way into Greek and Roman civilization partly by its spontaneous and creative adaptation of the pre-Christian natural values it found in that civilization. The martyrs rejected all the grossness, the cynicism and falsity of the cult of the state gods which was simply a cult of secular power, but Clement of Alexandria, Justin, and Origen believed that Herakleitos and Socrates had been precursors of Christ. They thought that while God had manifested himself to the Jews through the Law and the Prophets he had also spoken to the Gentiles through their philosophers. Christianity made its way in the world of the first century not by imposing Jewish cultural and social standards on the rest of the world, but by abandoning them, getting free of them so as to be "all things to all men." This was the great drama and the supreme lesson of the Apostolic Age. By the end of the Middle Ages that lesson had been forgotten...."

§ The Ways of Love

"The highest perfection of our nature is in the perfect operation of our highest faculties directed to their most perfect object: in two words, the highest perfection of our nature is loving God: loving Him not simply because He is our highest good, but more especially and formally because He is infinitely good in Himself. It is this pure and perfect love that is the glory God asks of us, and it is also our own highest reward, the ultimate in all happiness possible to man."

§ Love in Meditation

"The precise way in which each individual makes his meditation will depend in large measure upon his temperament and natural gifts. An intellectual and analytic mind will break down a text into its component parts, and follow the thought step by step, pausing in deep reflection upon each new idea, in order to examine it from different points of view and draw forth all its hidden implications, both speculative and practical."

§ The Time of the End Is the Time of No Room

"As the end approaches, there is no room for nature. The cities crowd it off the face of the earth.

"As the end approaches, there is no room for quiet. There is no room for solitude. There is no room for thought. There is no room for attention, for the awareness of our state.

"In the time of the ultimate end, there is no room for man."

§ Mysticism in the Nuclear Age

Merton provides a quotation from psychotherapist C. G. Jung (from Modern Man in Search of a Soul, New York, Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., p. 264):

. . . Among all my patients in the second half of my life . . . there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have given their followers and none of them has really been healed who did not regain his religious outlook.

§ "The truth man needs is not a philosophers abstraction, but God Himself. The paradox of contemplation is that God is never really known unless He is also loved. And we cannot love Him unless we do His will. This explains why modern man, who knows so much, is nevertheless ignorant. Because he is without love, modern man fails to see the only Truth that matters and on which all else depends.

"God becomes present in a very special way and manifests Himself in the world wherever He is known and loved by men. His glory shines in an ineffable manner through those whom He has united to Himself....."

—Webmaster Jon Kennedy

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