Bishop Barron on Thomas Merton, Spiritual Master

well January 2015 marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Thomas Merton one of the really great spiritual writers of the last century and a man who had the size of influence on me when I was a young man and my journey toward priesthood I first came across them in a kind of curious way my brother and I were both working at a bookstore outside Chicago I was about 16 at the time and there was a tattered book the cover was kind of tattered and the manager decided just to get rid of it so my brother threw it to me and he said I think you'd like this it's written by a Trappist monk and I said to him in my 16 year old confidence I don't want to be a book buy some Buddhists my brother very gently said trappers are Catholics you idiot so that's how the book landed in my in my lab well the book in question was the seven storey Mountain Thomas Merton is a wonderful beguiling delightful autobiography the story of how he moved from being basically a world laying a man of the world in every sense to being a Trappist monk though at the time most of the philosophy and theology in the book was over my head I was totally caught up in the drama and romance of Merton story which is basically the story of a man falling in love with God and I got caught up in the story with all the sort of you know teenage enthusiasm the book was very well received when it came out 1948 Fulton sheen writes a blurb on the cover that says this is a contemporary version of Augustine's Confessions both evil and wall and Graham Greene - the greatest Catholic novelists of o/s century fulsomely praised it it's also responsible for interestingly for this huge revival in monastic life in America people flooded into monasteries in this post-war period and many under the influence of Burton's book so I got caught up in it in the 1970s and I was so enamored of Merton at that point that I just don't is his other work and I read through the whole corpus pie before I was 21 that raise days in my mind is a book called the sign of Jonas which is mertens monastic journal that he kept in the years just prior to ordination and a little bit after ordination it's a very funny book full of you know kind of observations of monastic life it's very smart it's very articulate but you know was for me when I was about 19 pi when I read it it was an extraordinary cultural education Merton was for a lot of people my generation the opening of a door to the Catholic intellectual and spiritual life I think of you know John of the Cross teresa of avila meister eckhart odo of clooney the Victorians to visible monsieur hans von Balthasar i would have heard of those people for the first time through Thomas Merton so it's a very heady intoxicating spiritual education to read him at that point my life what's the central theme of mertens writings I think it's pretty easy to identify it it's contemplation so he goes to get somebody to become a contemplative monk and he wrote very eloquently about contemplation and his central point was always this contemplation is not the practice of a few spiritual athletes in monasteries contemplation belongs to the very heart of the Christian spiritual life and all the baptized are called to it because what is it his famous definition is contemplation is finding the point in you where you are here and now being created by God now that's deeply classical very thomas t-thomas talks about create Co continuum my continual creation I'm here and now being brought into existence by God to be a contemplative is to get in touch with that truth to feel it to know it Meister Eckhart says very similar things and Merton was indebted to him in other writings he talks about 'nope when VA of course Merton spoke French very fluently and he borrowed that term from some of the French spiritual masters it means the virginal point and that's precisely what he was describing this point where one is being created by God to find that to access it to live out of it is to be a contemplative in his sense see that's the ground for his famous experience at the corner of 4th and walnut in Louisville Merton was in town for some business and while he was there he found himself at the corner of this busy intersection and all the people were just you know rushing past him but he said at that moment I realized how privileged they all were as members of the human race the race that God himself had joined and then he says famously there's no way to tell everybody that they're standing around shining like the Sun see what he was operating out of there was looking to prevail out of this virginal point where he realized his deep connection to everybody and there groundedness in God so it was the the breaking forth of he want of this insight about contemplation you'll find it now at a lot of mertens books the new seeds of contemplation the new man the conjectures of a guilty bystander any of his books are about contemplation now here's a kind of sad thing we talk to younger people today about Thomas Merton and there's certain reticence about him for two reasons I just want to say a quick word about each one one reason people are reticent is mertens relationship toward the end of his life with a young nurse when Merton was 51 he went to Louisville again for back surgery was in the hospital for several weeks and was cared for by a young woman by a nurse and Merton became what term you want to use infatuated with her involved with her it was almost certainly just an affair of the heart it was never a physically consummated relationship nevertheless you know for 51 year-old priest and monk to be that infatuate with a young girl is to say the least you know inappropriate but the bottom line is this that Merton worked his way through it it took him about a year read his journal the journals of Merton have all been published the big volumes there's a whole volume about that year when he he wrestled with celibacy and his priesthood and what all that meant and he came out the other end as a priest as a Trappist monk he resolved the crisis so my feeling is yes indeed that relationship was was inappropriate but not to read Merton at all because of this relationship strikes me as disproportionate the second reason people have reticence about Merton is his interest in Eastern religions especially Buddhism and maybe the last ten years of his life and Merton was indeed very interested in all event and wrote extensively on it here's the thing read the preface 'as to the books at Merton wrote on Eastern religion especially he's an he's always very clear out what he's doing what he's not doing there's no obscurity in his mind about the difference between Catholicism and Zen Zen is a kind of psychological and philosophical path Merton felt he could explore it the same way Aquinas explored the philosophical path of Aristotle but just as Thomas never fell over into total Aristotelian ISM he used it he saw connections between it and Catholicism so I would say Merton with the Eastern religions here's something else and this happened to me about 10 years ago I was down and gets M&A giving talks to the monks which is a thrill for me and to visit mertens grave and to tell the monks there are much Merton meant to me but I met brother Patrick Hart who is still alive and he was mertens secretary back in the 60s they took me out to mertens Hermitage this little simple house and lived the last couple years of his life and we were sitting on the front porch of the Hermitage and Patrick Hart said to me would you tell anyone who's interested that Thomas Merton died a priest of the Catholic Church and a monk of Gethsemane Abbey see brother paddy hurt was as annoyed as I am by the insinuation that Merton simão was moving beyond Catholicism or Merton was abandoning his monastic life don't think it'd be further from the truth Reid in fact you know the last thing he wrote the Asian journal that generally kept while he was in Asia it becomes very clear Merton was saying Mass every day you know so the insinuation that he was he was moving beyond Christianity Catholicism is is nonsense I think um you know Thomas Merton was a flawed person it probably wasn't a saint but he was a great spiritual master a great spiritual writer and someone's I say what a very decisive effect on me and I think a lot of people in my generation and and before and so maybe consider this little video as a modest birthday tribute to him

Channel: Bishop Robert Barron

Views: 214,026

Rating: 4.9068413 out of 5

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Id: 5X8fp2CvQmA

Length: 9min 32sec (572 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 23 2015

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[u/mikhael28]

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