It's a short book. The first half is Nouwen's description of his life and ideas, and the second half is quotations from Merton's work that illustrate the description.
Merton could be contradictory--saying one thing one time and the apparent opposite another.
His personal journey looking for solitude left him with a more expansive idea of how to achieve it, and the conviction that solitude made him more part of the community.
He flirted with notions from Zen, noting commonalities in practice of meditation, but was alive to the radical difference between that and Christianity.
He held a "we're all sinners" approach. The quotations from My Argument with the Gestapo are less than compelling literature. I hate to say it, but Merton sounded holier-than-thou. He grew sorry for some of his earlier attitudes, perhaps this was among them.
His writing on the early civil rights movement dug in hard into the importance of white repentance and being taught and transformed by the prophetic vision of the oppressed blacks. Some of it sounds very weird over 60 years later. The intervening years haven't been kind to the nice binary he worked from.
Merton wanted to be a hermit; he sought a union with God he thought was only possible in solitude. His attitude towards solitude changed with time, but he always seemed to have the conviction that the contemplative life was superior.
I'm not sure that's quite accurate. It seems to prefer "dis-incarnation", looking behind everything in creation to find God in "pure" form. But although some contemplation seems important to keep us from getting distracted by the superficial, it isn't obvious that it is a good ultimate goal. If we were to empty ourselves of all acts and thoughts and try to apprend God in as unmediated a way as possible, we would still be as limited by our own nature as if we were singing hymns in the choir.
I've tried to puzzle through aspects of incarnation, although not to my complete satisfaction, and my tentative opinion is that God knew what He was doing when He gave us bodies and announced that it wasn't good for man to be alone. Not all the time, anyway--Jesus went off away from His friends to pray alone, so some alone time is important.
1 comment:
I can't remember what it was that I scanned of Merton's when I was a young man, but I was put off. I will now pretend that it was for these well-thought out reasons, rather than the impulsive arrogance it more likely was.
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