It was 50 years ago yesterday that Thomas Merton died. After reading Mark Van Doren's personalized obit of this sometimes rebellious and often public Trappist monk, a hazy thought took on greater focus. My early fascination with the "broken saints" of music has led me into what has become a lifelong ministry of tenderness. In the beginning there were the world weary vagabonds of Dylan, Cohen, Harrison and Mitchell who sang of the still speaking God and sounded to me like spiritual direction. These initial musical mentors later led me to the other esoteric contemplative masters like Lou Reed, Tom Waits, Lucinda Williams, Bruce Springsteen, Gil Scott-Heron, Aretha Franklin, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Herbie Hancock, Frank Zappa and Bono. Artists, you see, prepared my heart to hear the wisdom of the wounded healers of traditional religion. They showed me what the words of Merton, St. Francis, Henri Nouwen, Barbara Brown Taylor, Thomas Keating, Frederick Buechner, Peter Abelard, Howard Thurman, MLK, Dorothee Soelle, Reinhold Niebuhr, Abraham Heschel, Wendell Berry, Elie Wiesel and Kathleen Norris might look like in my life. Individually and en masse these guides have prophesied like Emily Dickinson advised: "tell all the truth, but tell it slant."
Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —
Yesterday's Jesuit magazine, America, reprinted the obit that Mark Van Doren of Columbia University wrote 50 years ago about his lifelong friend and one-time student: Thomas Merton. In it you catch a whiff of the crack in everything that Leonard Cohen named as the way "the light gets in." Merton was in rare form, exhilarated at being outside the confines of the cloister, effusive about experiencing the paradox of solidarity and solitude on his way to Bangkok:
(https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2018/12/10/thomas-mertons-obituary-1969)
Merton had made peace with ending his heart-breaking but life-saving affair with a young nurse from Louisville. He knew in his flesh that he was broken. He trusted in his heart that God's grace was greater than his shame. For he had been humbled. Taken down a few pegs, too. During his healing, Merton had found a new rhythm for living a joyful life of contemplation and engagement: art, creativity, prayer, formation, critical reflection on the social dilemmas of the hour and what Matthew Fox came to call a "deep ecumenism" now nourished his spirituality. David Johnson wrote in "The Jazz Monk" that after two decades of castigating himself for a once vibrant immersion in the world, Merton began to reclaim the arts as part of the sacred presence in reality.
Merton sometimes had to travel to Louisville, about an hour’s drive from the monastery, for doctor visits and other errands, and he often took advantage of these opportunities to meet with friends and go hear jazz, especially at Eddie’s on 118 S. Washington Street–the address used for the Louisville Jazz Council (forerunner to today’s Louisville Jazz Society) that Merton had formed in 1965 with, among others, future NEA Jazz Master Jamey Aebersold... Merton seemed to sense in jazz the same thing he sought in his relationship with a spiritual power: the ability to lose oneself, and through so doing, find oneself as well. In his memoir Song For Nobody Merton’s friend Ron Seitz described their visit to Eddie’s in early 1968, on a night when saxophonist Eddie Harris’s quartet was performing. Merton was particularly impressed by the bassist, Melvin Jackson. Seitz wrote that Merton “became the music. He became the calloused thumbs of the bass player…urging the bassman on to new highs with ‘Give it! Here! Take it!'”
Merton had made peace with ending his heart-breaking but life-saving affair with a young nurse from Louisville. He knew in his flesh that he was broken. He trusted in his heart that God's grace was greater than his shame. For he had been humbled. Taken down a few pegs, too. During his healing, Merton had found a new rhythm for living a joyful life of contemplation and engagement: art, creativity, prayer, formation, critical reflection on the social dilemmas of the hour and what Matthew Fox came to call a "deep ecumenism" now nourished his spirituality. David Johnson wrote in "The Jazz Monk" that after two decades of castigating himself for a once vibrant immersion in the world, Merton began to reclaim the arts as part of the sacred presence in reality.
Merton sometimes had to travel to Louisville, about an hour’s drive from the monastery, for doctor visits and other errands, and he often took advantage of these opportunities to meet with friends and go hear jazz, especially at Eddie’s on 118 S. Washington Street–the address used for the Louisville Jazz Council (forerunner to today’s Louisville Jazz Society) that Merton had formed in 1965 with, among others, future NEA Jazz Master Jamey Aebersold... Merton seemed to sense in jazz the same thing he sought in his relationship with a spiritual power: the ability to lose oneself, and through so doing, find oneself as well. In his memoir Song For Nobody Merton’s friend Ron Seitz described their visit to Eddie’s in early 1968, on a night when saxophonist Eddie Harris’s quartet was performing. Merton was particularly impressed by the bassist, Melvin Jackson. Seitz wrote that Merton “became the music. He became the calloused thumbs of the bass player…urging the bassman on to new highs with ‘Give it! Here! Take it!'”
Another look at Merton's eclectic musical insights, Robert Hudson's recent The Monk's Record Player: Merton, Dylan and the Perilous Summer of 1966, notes that as Merton was coming to terms with his "feet of clay," Dylan was joining the heavens with the body electric and Coltrane was mastering the art of musical mysticism. Hudson writes that, "Merton (came to) realize that silence and music are entwined, fellow travelers." Contemplation and the creative arts were one, not two. Think "Favorite Things" or "Just Like Tom Thumbs Blues."
Merton even made a "jazz meditation" recording at the Gethsemani monastery mixing Jeremiah 31 with Jimmy Smith's recording of Muddy Water's song, "Hootchie Coochie Man." This unity of body, heart and mind is exactly how Fr. Thomas Keating articulated the essence of the spiritual life.
Whenever your heart space, your mind space, and your body space are
all present and accounted for at the same time, you can experience pure presence,a moment of deep inner connection with the pure, gratuitous Being of anything and everything. It will often be experienced as a quiet leap of joy in the heart. Contemplation is an exercise in openness, in keeping all three spaces open long enough for you to notice other hidden material. When you can do that, you are content with the present moment and can then wait upon futures you know will be given by grace. This is “full-access knowing”—not irrational, but intuitive, rational, and trans-rational all at once.The supreme work of spirituality, which makes presence possible, is keeping the heart space open (which is the result of conscious love), keeping a “right mind” (which is the work of contemplation or meditation), and keeping the body alive with contentment and without attachment to its past woundings (which is often the work of healing). In that state, you are neither resisting nor clinging, and you can experience something genuinely new. (Center for Action and Contemplation, 12/10/18)
Merton even made a "jazz meditation" recording at the Gethsemani monastery mixing Jeremiah 31 with Jimmy Smith's recording of Muddy Water's song, "Hootchie Coochie Man." This unity of body, heart and mind is exactly how Fr. Thomas Keating articulated the essence of the spiritual life.
Whenever your heart space, your mind space, and your body space are
For the past week these thoughts have been swimming around inside me. They wake me up at 3 AM for deeper consideration. They pop into consciousness while wandering in the woods. They cry out for appreciation in my prayers. Or while I am preparing bread to bake. Today's meditation in the morning was shaped by the words of Isaiah 40: comfort, comfort ye my people... and cry out! What shall I cry out, the prophet asks? And the Lord replies: Cry out that all of creation and culture comes and goes - the grass whithers, the flowers fade - but the Word of the Lord - the unity of love, justice and compassion in our heart, mind and flesh - lasts forever. And that's when my fog lifted. I realized that my journey through brokenness, like the wilderness of Merton and Dylan and Cohen, etc. is how my eyes were opened and God's peace brought me a measure of healing. It is, indeed, the source and the path of what I come to know as my calling: a spirituality of tenderness. It wouldn't have become clear without the wounds. Or the music. Or the broken healers.
Sometime last week, when I least expected it, someone asked me how I spent my days now that I am retired. "Writing, playing music, reading, trying to be tender to the people I meet in Wal-mart and coming up to L'Arche once a month," I replied. The follow-up question took a left turn. "Why not give more time to the church now that you are retired? After all, Scripture
tells us we should give ourselves to the saints in fellowship, so why don't you do more of that?" "Isn't that what I'm doing at L'Arche?" I said wondering what text was guiding this interview. The dissatisfied expression to my words made it clear I was still not getting it right. So I added, "these days I just seem to find Jesus more outside the church than inside." This didn't help either. So, because neither of us had enough time to go deeper in that moment, polite piety had to suffice. I asked God's blessing on us both and we went our separate ways.
What I wanted to say in the nicest way possible was, "To tell you the truth, right now I'm bored with the traditional church. I just find people in coffee houses and brew pubs waaay more interesting. And honest. My hunch is that I need to be in those unlikely places outside the church with a bit of quiet tenderness because that's where real people are hurting." I wanted to say that when Jesus began his ministry he told some of the well-intentioned teachers of that day that they needed to rethink what God meant by the saying: I desire compassion not sacrifice. Tenderness not just ritual. Presence and patience in the most ordinary places rather than just institutional obeisance. St. Leonard Cohen taught us well in words everyone can comprehend: Forget about your perfect offering, just be real, and give thanks for that crack, the crack that's in everyt hing because that's how the light gets in.
credits:
+ David Mah @ http://www.explorefaith.org/saints/merton.html
+ Laurie Justus Pace @ http://contemporaryartistsoftexas.blogspot.com/2014/01/isaiah-4031-contemporary.html
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