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Thomas Merton and
Henri Nouwen were two of the most read and best loved spiritual writers of the
twentieth century. Each published a
prodigious stream of books and articles, and their readers span the ecumenical
spectrum. It is no wonder then that
they are often compared and contrasted.
Perhaps we even prefer the writings of one or the other, or make
evaluative comparisons between them.
James Finley
called Merton a walking Rorschach test in which everybody saw what they wanted
to see. The same could be said for
Nouwen. Both touched people deeply, and
each became something of a guru.
I remember how
profoundly significant Finley’s classic, Merton’s Palace of Nowhere was
for me years ago. I enjoyed Merton, and
I also struggled with some of what seemed harsh and unfeeling. Then, I discovered that he fell in love with
a nurse and had to struggle with his passion and choices. He was not superhuman after all!
I also remember
being touched deeply by Nouwen’s writings.
He helped me accept my own wounds as part of my gift. Then before a new outpouring of writing
after his move to L’Arche, I began to wonder whether he actually had new
material or whether his publishers just repackaged the same old stuff. My own Rorschach test results!
In this article, I
want to bring these two writers together.
I will not provide an evaluative or analytical comparison of their
merits and strengths. Rather, I will
suggest a framework for attending to both by offering a way to look at two
Gospel writers as a template for appreciating difference and complexity in
spiritual writing. Second, I will look
at the two writers in a way that helps us let go of labelling and evaluating so
that we can accept the value of each writer in calling us to contemplative
compassion in our world. Finally, I
will invite you to include both in your growth toward wholeness.
Part One: Two Gospel Writers
I believe that we can see in St. Luke and St. John (setting aside questions of
authorship) a similar kind of resonance and dissonance that we experience with
Nouwen and Merton. This is not
evaluative, and I do not wish to identify either of the Gospel writers with
either Nouwen or Merton. But seeing
this kind of depth within diversity in an accepted canon provides a more
nuanced response to Merton and Nouwen.
a. Some comparisons are easy
We can say that:
•
Both Luke and John were interested in
presenting the crux of their spiritual life – the story of God’s action in
Jesus.
•
Both told the story from a sympathetic
point of view.
•
Both offered a clear statement of why
they were attempting to write their narrative, (Luke 1:1-4 and John 20:30-31), and
•
Both wanted to call their readers to
confident trust in Jesus.
b. Some differences
I suspect that
most of us read Luke and John as one writer because they are lumped together in
the Bible. However, if they had written
in the twentieth century, we might have seen them quite differently and been
more comparative and evaluative.
•
We might, for example have noticed
significant differences in their writing style. This isn’t so obvious reading a translation, but any first-year
Greek student will say that John is the author students cut their teeth
on. Luke is another matter
altogether! Luke’s Greek is
sophisticated – his vocabulary and writing style are elegant and intellectually
appealing. John’s writing, by contrast,
is simple. His sentences are mostly short,
his style is direct, and his vocabulary almost elementary.
•
We might see, also, that Luke’s
concern seems to be broader than John’s.
Material unique to Luke shows that Luke is interested especially in
those people who lived at the margins of society – women, tax collectors and
Gentiles. John has very little to say
about these. In terms of social
analysis, John is particularly interested in Jesus’ invitation to intimacy with
his friends, and beyond that, he is concerned with the conflict between Jesus
and the religious leaders. So concerned
that he has, in our day, been accused of anti-Semitism.
•
Scholars suggest that Luke’s audience
was probably Roman intelligentsia who were considering the claims of the
Way. The Johannine community, out of
which the Gospel comes, was faced with conflict from many sides and John’s tone
reveals a certain polemic against conflicting pressures.
•
The major resurrection story unique to
Luke has two disciples walking to Emmaus.
Jesus sneaks up on them and discusses with them the interpretation of
the Jewish Scriptures. John’s unique
stories include Mary weeping at the tomb and recognizing Jesus when he said,
“Mary.”
c. And yet…
For all their
differences in writing style and breadth of content, who is to judge the value of
the differences between the two writers?
Who can imagine a more beautifully simple yet profound story than Luke’s
energetic story of the Prodigal Son? By
the same token, who can imagine a more elegant and sophisticated poem than the
prologue to John’s Gospel, especially in the light of its simple vocabulary?
Would we want to
judge Luke as being more relevant than John because he includes women in his
story? Or would we want to be critical
of Luke because he doesn’t include something as personal and intimate as the
Upper Room Discourse?
And who wouldn’t
want to be on the road to Emmaus listening to Jesus’ analysis of the Jewish
Scriptures or to be Mary hearing her own name spoken with love in the garden of
her grief?
What becomes
obvious, when we take the time to notice, is that depth is not determined by
style. Nor is personal appeal
determined by simplicity. Both Luke and
John are powerful writers because of what they each point to in their own
unique way. They do not conform to the
standards of a critical readership but write true to their own
storytelling. Rather than pick sides or
choose preferences, we, the readers, are urged to discover the gifts of each
writer and thereby get a richer and more well-rounded experience of Jesus.
Part Two: Thomas Merton and Henri Nouwen
a. Some comparisons are easy
•
Both were brought up in privileged
homes with a European flavour and an appreciation of art and learning.
•
Both were acknowledged by those around
them as intellectually brilliant.
•
Both were incredibly energetic and
restless.
•
Both published personal journals and
yet neither wrote much about how they dealt with their family of origin issues
and even less about their sexuality.
•
Both were committed to living their
faith fully, and each had a deep love of the Eucharist.
b. Some things to keep in mind
As it is important to read each biblical writer on their own terms,
it is also important to read these two writers on their own terms. We will each have our own understanding of
those terms, but here are some of the things that seem important to me as I
seek to celebrate the differences.
•
Nouwen lived the struggle of solitude
by facing the challenge of being alone.
He was a classic extrovert, delighting in activity, conversation, and
phoning his friends at all hours of the night.
It was a painful discipline for him to be at home in the silence of
prayer or to stay put at the Genesee monastery.
Merton lived the struggle of solitude by facing the noise of his
daily routine. Merton entered
Gethsemani to find silence and his personality pulled him naturally to long for
silence and solitude. The messiness of
everyday life in a monastery, terribly overcrowded with recent postulants and
the demands of writing, were the problems that he struggled with.
•
Merton wrote from the seclusion of a
rooted home. Even though for a time he
struggled with the desire to become a Carthusian with an even more cloistered
rule, Merton found home near the beginning of his spiritual journey within the
Trappist monastery. It was, for him, a
place of submission and peace.
Nouwen wrote from the chaos of his homelessness. He did not find a sense of home until the
last ten years of his life when he went to live in a L’Arche community for
people with mental disability.
•
Merton died in 1968, in the burgeoning
of the counter-culture movement that radiated out from the hippies of Greenwich
Village. The dominant sensibility of
the time was free-thinking, revolution and possibility symbolized by Woodstock
in 1969. By the time Nouwen died in
1996, the mood had changed dramatically.
Hippies had become the yuppies of the ‘80’s; solipsism and greed were
the soup du jour.[i] Cynicism and a greater sense of
disintegration and despair were evident.
•
Merton’s access to socio-political
involvement was through his pen. He
seldom left Gethsemani. Yet in his own
words, he wrote as he prayed – with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in
the other. His letters and several
books reveal his profound awareness of and commitment to expose the illusions
that fuel the evils of society.
Nouwen was freer to travel and be involved. His own commitment to social justice prodded
him to participate in the march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965 and to go on
many trips to Latin America, including a trip to Peru and Bolivia to test
whether he was called to live and work among the poor in Latin America. Ultimately his call to L’Arche and to the
simplicity of living with Adam, a man with some of the most severe disabilities,
was an expression of his downward mobility toward community with the poor and
the marginalized.
•
Neither Merton nor Nouwen could be
persuaded to join a cause. Merton was
clear: “God save me from causes.” Both
saw that causes, even for peace and freedom and justice, carried on without the
hard work of inner transformation, end up just as oppressive as the regime they
seek to change.
c. Different Approaches to a Common Goal
Nouwen did not
speak so much structurally as personally.
In vulnerably laying bare the fears and illusions that lurked inside his
own heart and that drove him to overwork and exhaustion, he exposed the roots
of violence that shape our world. “The
agenda of our world – the issues and items that fill newspapers and newscasts –
is an agenda of fear and power. It is
amazing, yes frightening to see how easily that agenda becomes ours.”[ii] In another place he says that the voices of
competition and fear “reach into those inner places where I question my own
goodness and doubt my self-worth…Without realizing it, I find myself brooding
about someone else’s success, my own loneliness, and the way the world abuses
me.”[iii] In Nouwen’s relentless and honest exposure
of his own fear and anxiety, he invited each of us to face the ways our
possessive clinging to popularity, power, and position are part of the evil
inherent in the structural expressions of injustice.
As a cloistered monk, Merton knew that the
cloister was not an escape. The mere
automatic ‘rejection’ of the world, he writes, “is in fact not a choice but the
evasion of choice. The man who pretends that he can turn his back [whether as a
monk or an individualist]* on Auschwitz or Viet Nam and act as if they were not
there is simply bluffing.”[iv]
By addressing the
structural issues of dehumanization and violence, he showed how contemplation
and action could be part of one whole.
His “Letters to a White Liberal” found in Seeds of Destruction
illustrate the point. “The purpose of
this suffering [brought on by non-violent protest]*, freely sought and accepted
in the spirit of Christ is the liberation of the Negro and the redemption of
the white man, blinded by his endemic sin of injustice…The purpose of
non-violent protest, in its deepest and most spiritual dimension is then to
awaken the conscience of the white man to the awful reality of his injustice
and his sin, so that he will be able to see that the Negro problem is really a White
problem.”[v]
By analyzing the
evils of the racial injustice, the self-delusions of white liberals, the value
and limitations of Marxism, and the non-violence of Gandhi, Merton called us to
discover the illusions of our own hearts so that our action in the world can
come from a transparent heart. “He who
attempts to act and to do things for others or for the world without deepening
his own self-understanding, freedom, integrity and capacity to love will not
have anything to give to others. He
will communicate to them nothing but the contagions of his own obsessions, his
aggressiveness, his ego-centred ambitions, his delusions about means and ends,
his doctrinaire prejudices and ideas.”[vi]
Part Three: An Invitation
In his book, Invitation
to a Journey, Robert Mulholland says, “Left to ourselves in the development
of our spiritual practices, we will generally gravitate to those spiritual
activities that nurture our preferred pattern of being and doing.”[vii] He suggests that while we find nurture
there, for the sake of wholeness we also need to cultivate practices that are
not preferred. I think the principle is
true here as well. We may have a natural
affinity for one or the other writer.
But we can find a deeper integration if we are willing to face the less
preferred and see what is there for us.
For
example, rooted in simplicity, Nouwen’s approach could be criticized and
dismissed if one wishes to avoid personal transformation and stay within the
safety of intellectual complexity.
Conversely, it may invite us by its bare testimony, if we let it, to
quit avoiding and face the truth of our own hearts. In the honesty of our own confession we can find the goodness of
our identity as the “Beloved child” and can face our world free of fear and
create a home for love and forgiveness.
Rooted
in the power of his prayerful analysis, Merton’s approach could be dismissed as
overly conceptual and impersonal by those who wish to avoid engagement and stay
in their own private pursuit of spiritual consolations. Conversely, it can invite us, if we let it,
to come out from an individualistic piety and choose to act in our world with
courage and compassion.
*
Contents within the brackets are my own summaries.
[i] Nouwen was deeply indebted
to Merton as evidenced by the book he published on Merton 4 years after
Merton’s death, Thomas Merton: Contemplative Critic. 1972 (Originally
published as Pray to Live). This
book has just now been revised and reissued by Crossroad as Encounters With
Merton.
[ii] Nouwen. Lifesigns.
1986. 16.
[iii] Nouwen. The Return of
the Prodigal Son. 1992. 37.
[iv] Merton. Contemplation in
a World of Action. 1965. 165.
[v] Merton. Seeds of
Destruction. 1961. 43-46.
[vi] CWA. 178-9.
[vii] Mulholland. Invitation
to a Journey. 1993. 57.
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