THOMAS MERTON:
AN INTERVIEW WITH BROTHER PATRICK HART
This interview was conducted on December 6, 2004, by Sister Mary Margaret (Meg) Funk OSB when she was Executive Director of the North American Commission of Monastic Interreligious Dialogue. It was published in issue #74 of the Commission’s Bulletin and appears here, with permission, in a slightly revised and abridged form.
Brother Patrick Hart of the Abbey of Gethsemani in Nelson County, Kentucky, is a native of Green Bay, Wisconsin. He entered the community at Gethsemani in 1951 after having been a Brother of the Holy Cross for four years, during which time he had begun studies at the University of Notre Dame. He received a B.A. in philosophy from that university in 1966. In the summer of 1968 he was appointed secretary to Thomas Merton, with special responsibilities for looking after his publishing and correspondence as Merton prepared to travel to Asia for a meeting of monastic leaders. After Merton’s accidental death in Thailand on December 10 of that year, Brother Patrick continued in his role as secretary, editing more than a dozen of Merton’s books and overseeing the editing of Merton’s personal journals. Brother Patrick was a founding editor of the Merton Annual and served for eleven years as editor of the journal Cistercian Studies (now Cistercian Studies Quarterly). |
First of all, Patrick, I want to thank you for doing this. You have seen various “incarnations” of Thomas Merton, including his public personality as an artist and his more private life as a monk who was known to his confreres as Father Louis. What do you think was his major contribution to monasticism?
Well, I think it was his concern about getting past the rigidity and overemphasis on the ascetical and penitential character of Trappist life. He wanted to get back to a Benedictine spirit as this was spelled out so well by our Cistercian fathers in the twelfth century. Before Merton’s time, at Gethsemani at least and probably at most other Trappist monasteries, we were still living the seventeenth-century Trappist reform. Merton felt that there was more to monasticism than that. He wanted to get back to the pure sources, so he began translating the works of the Cistercian “evangelists”: Bernard of Clairvaux, Aelred of Rievaulx, Guerric of lgny, and William of Saint Thierry, as well as ones who were less well-known, like Amadeus and Isaac of Stella. And there were the women Cistercians, too, such as Lutgarde. Merton wrote a book about her, entitled What Are these Wounds? Anyway, he wanted to get beyond all the rigidity, and to do this he even went back beyond the Cistercians to the roots of the Christian monastic movement, to John Cassian and the Desert Fathers, to the works of Pachomius, Evagrius, the Gregorys, and so forth. In brief, I think his contribution was to get back to the pure sources of monasticism.
His work has been helpful to all of us. I know I’ve continued to be enlivened by reading his journals, which reflect all of that research.
Yes, they spell it out, don’t they? Or consider Merton’s exchange of letters with Jean Leclercq, recently published under the title Survival or Prophecy? In a sense, it was through Leclercq that it all began. He was visiting Gethsemani in the early 1950s, working on the critical edition of the works of Saint Bernard, and he discovered some unpublished things here in our vault of rare books and manuscripts. Now Merton had recently been made Master of Scholastics, that is, of the student monks, and his office was in the vault where all these wonderful manuscripts were housed. There were handwritten manuscripts from the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries, and then some of the first printed books from the fifteenth century, the socalled incunabula. All this was a great resource for Merton. I’m sure that his being in the presence of these manuscripts inspired him to dig into them.
Patrick you’ve edited so much of Merton’s work—his journals, books, correspondence. How would you describe his genius? What was its source?
I think it was because he had such great exposure. First of all, he was well-educated. He went to good schools in France and England, and then to Columbia University in this country. He was exposed to some of the best teachers, men like Mark Van Doren and Daniel Walsh at Columbia, and even to fellow students who were very alive intellectually. All this was a real stimulus along the way. So Merton’s real genius, I think, came from his exposure. He read so widely. He was interested in everything. You know, I was just reading recently that his first interest in Hinduism came when he was at Cambridge, or maybe even before that, when he was at Oakham. He was one of the few who were standing up for Gandhi back in the 1930s. And a bit later, at Columbia, he got to know the Hindu monk Brahmachari, who was apparently a great scholar and who became a good friend of Merton and Merton’s fellow student and friend, Bob Lax. Brahmachari wasn’t trying to convert Merton, to have him become a Hindu. He told him to go deeper into his own tradition, to read The Imitation of Christ and Saint Augustine’s Confessions. That would have been around 1937. I think it was partly because of Brahmachari’s influence that Merton became a Catholic, which is a very interesting twist.
Could you say something about Merton as a writer, an artist?
Well, he was born with great gifts. He knew how to write, but he also worked at it. You know, he kept a journal during his student years. Even at his prep school he was winning prizes for his short stories, and he would illustrate them himself. So he was indeed an artist. He was, I think, a born writer in the sense that he had to write. Just as we have to breathe, Merton had to write. He had this need to express, to articulate, to externalize it all in some way. And he liked to go back and read his journals after a year or so.
What made him such a fitting dialogue partner with so many different traditions?
Well, he was always interested in other faiths. There is no question about it. When he was Master of Scholastics and then later when he was made the Master of Novices, he took a real interest in the local people. He was telling our Guestmaster that we ought to invite Baptists and Disciples of Christ and Episcopalians to the monastery. So that’s how it began. He would invite them, people like the Baptist scholar Glenn Hinson, or Bill Paulsell of the Disciples of Christ, and many people from these different Christian traditions are still coming to the abbey after all these years. They were very much influenced by Merton and by the way he reached out to them. This was in the 1950s, before there was much talk of ecumenism. Then came Vatican II, and ecumenism was in the air. But there was also his autobiography, The Seven Story Mountain, published already in 1948. This book created a lot of interest among educated people because they saw that Merton was somebody who could write well. He wrote about his spiritual journey in a way that people could identify with. It was about his search, his constant searching. As he says at the end of that work, Sit finis libri, non finis quaerendi: Let this be the end of the book, but not of the search. I think his whole life was a search.
And that early book about his life remains his best known.
Yes. And in what follows, I think his best writing is in his autobiographical works, when he reflects about his own life, and, in his journals, when he writes about how he views things day by day, how he sees things. This shows the paradox of Merton, too. He was so honest and frank about everything. He certainly was critical about many things, but he felt he had to get them outside himself in order to see them more objectively, to see them as they really were.
Could you say more about what the paradox was?
I’d say the paradox of Merton was that he was searching for greater solitude, and yet there was another side of him, the social side. He needed people and he needed friendship. He needed to be in contact with people. Just consider the fact that he wrote so many letters, thousands of letters. We’ve published five volumes of them, but they’re just the tip of the iceberg. These letters and the journals reflect Merton’s real thinking because when you’re writing a journal or you’re writing letters, you’re not thinking of censorship.
What was that all about?
Merton was exposed to two kinds of censorship: Trappist and diocesan. The Abbot General of the Trappists appointed the censors, though it’s interesting to note that toward the last year of Merton’s life there was no longer the requirement internal of censorship. We called them readers, but ...
Yes, the whole business of the Nihil obstat and the Imprimi potest.
Right. Merton first came across this when he was still a student at Columbia, not yet a Catholic. He had picked up a book by Etienne Gilson, The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, and he didn’t want to read it once he noticed that it had undergone the process of censorship. But he did eventually read it and found it most enlightening.
Could you say some more about how his artist’s eye equipped him to be a dialogue partner with people of other traditions?
Merton was unquestionably an artist. He saw things. There is an exhibit right now at Bellarmine University in Louisville on the Zen Calligraphy and Zen Photography of Merton. Bonnie Thurston has written in one of her articles that Merton saw things in a Zen way. He really observed things. In other words, he paid attention; he became aware and mindful. Maybe his interest in Zen and in Buddhism in general was related to that. And he wanted to understand these other traditions so that he could learn from them. I recall that when he was getting ready to go to the Far East he said, ‘Tm hoping to bring back some of their wisdom, some of their techniques and their ways of praying and entering into the Silence.” It wasn’t that he wanted to change any doctrines. He wanted to learn more about their methods so that he could deepen his own monastic experience. He didn’t deny that there were differences in doctrine; he wasn’t trying to wash that away. But he felt that people like the Sufi mystics could teach you how to pray from the heart, to enter into the heart and not worry about the creeds and doctrines that divide us. On the experiential level, the level of how we experience God, Merton felt we have much in common.
I’d like to know if there was any trace of proclamation in Merton’s motivation for engaging in dialogue. As you no doubt know, there’s a big debate among people in dialogue today. Some say that dialogue should include proclamation, in the sense of inviting others to see and even embrace the truth of one’s own tradition. But I don’t see any motivation of this sort in Thomas Merton. Do you think there was any?
No, I really don’t. I think that he wanted people to remain what they were and continue in their own beliefs. He didn’t tell people that they should become Catholic or should do this or that. They should go more deeply into their own tradition. He is very similar to the Dalai Lama in this respect. It’s what Brahmachari had once told him: go deeper into Catholicism and you’ll find a common stream with other faiths.
Merton was involved with many other faith traditions: Theravada, Tibetan, and Zen Buddhism, Hinduism, Sufism, Judaism, Taoism, Confucianism, Eastern Orthodoxy. His books and articles on these traditions are still being printed and reprinted around the world. Of them all, do you feel he was most attracted to Buddhist thought and practice?
Well, I’m a little unsure about this. He was interested in so many things. He read the Chinese classics in translation. He was fascinated by Taoism and said that the book he enjoyed writing the most was The Way of Chuang-Tzu. He didn’t know the Chinese characters, so he was working from translations—French, German, and Italian—but he checked things out with some Chinese scholars. He was very accurate. He said that Taoism was really the source of the spirit of Zen. But I think it was actually Tibetan Buddhism that he was getting more and more interested in. I picked this up from his Asian journal. Maybe this was due to his contact with the Dalai Lama in India and his meeting other Tibetan monks there. This seems to be the direction he was going towards the very end of his life. But he would read them all: Hindu authors, the Sufi mystics of Islam. He had a universal mind. He just was interested in all traditions, and he felt they all had something to contribute.
Some people feel that he was drifting away from the Catholic faith. What do you think?
No, I don’t think there was any wavering away from the Catholic faith. He was steeped in his own tradition. That’s why he was able to do all this safely. He could reach out and explore other traditions and learn from them, and then celebrate the gifts that they brought to his own tradition.
You mentioned the importance of Merton’s conversations with the Dalai Lama. He writes about these in The Asian Journal in a way that reveals his engaged intellect and his deep spirituality. Do you think Merton was an enlightened person in addition to being an intellectual and artistic genius?
I think so, I really do. For one thing, there was the experience of enlightenment or breakthrough when he stood before the great statues of the Buddha at that site in Sri Lanka. That was esthetic experience, but it was also spiritual, deeply religious. How do you distinguish the esthetic and the spiritual, the secular and the sacred? You can say what you want about that, but I think the two did merge.
Was he enlightened even before that?
I think so. I think his whole monastic life prepared him for it. I remember when I entered the monastery in 1951. All the monks would spend time sitting in meditation after Vigils, and Merton would be utterly motionless for half an hour, not even twitching an eyebrow. I’d see him sometimes sitting alone in the church where I could observe him, and I would think to myself how wonderful it was that he could sit still for so long and obviously be in prayer and meditation. And that was long before all of us monks had real training in meditative sitting. The memory of this is still fresh in my mind.
We also know that Merton was fascinated by the work of Dr. Reza Arasteh, especially his book Toward a Final Personality Integration.
Yes, but you know, I’ve never read that book. I suppose I should. I should actually read all the books that were in Merton’s library, but to read all of them would take a lifetime. A person could barely find time to read all the books that Merton himself wrote. Perhaps he wrote too much, but his works are incredibly influential. I was just speaking with the director of the Merton Archives. He told me that there have already been 250 master’s and doctoral dissertations written on Merton. They have almost all of them on the shelves of the Merton Center at Bellarmine, and there are more coming in all the time. Can you imagine? At least a dozen students are working on such dissertations right now. Nobody goes out promoting this kind of work; it’s totally unsolicited.
Let’s talk a bit about Merton and monastic renewal. Do you think he was moving toward a monasticism without form? Do you think he would have advocated a lay monasticism?
You know, I’ve been thinking about that. Without form? No, I don’t think so. I do think we had too much structure in the past, and there was a reaction against that on the part of many monks. But Merton would certainly have insisted on some kind of discipline for novices in training. I recall that after Merton’s death his former novice Ernesto Cardenal had an interview in the New York Times about the kind of monasticism called for in the future. He said that he had once discussed this with Father Louis—Merton’s monastic name—and Merton said the first rule would be that there would be no rules. Well, I can see Merton saying that with a twinkle in his eye. To be realistic, some rules will always be necessary, just to enable people to live together.
You spoke of the way Merton would sit for long periods in meditation and prayer. Could you say something about the way he described his prayer in a letter to the Sufi scholar Abdul Aziz?
Yes. That’s so beautiful. That’s a wonderful correspondence. I recommend it to everybody to read because it’s the only time when he talked about how he himself prayed.
And you think that was his daily practice?
Yes, I think so.
And that was why he could teach others to pray. But who was his teacher?
I was recently talking with my confrere, Father Jim Conner, about that. He said Merton didn’t have any single teacher. I think it was his whole dialogue with the East that was his teacher, but also his own tradition. Look at the desert tradition of early Christian monasticism. Merton drew deeply from that.
Let’s talk a bit more about monastic renewal. Do you think Merton thought of reformed monasticism as one that would place less emphasis on the observance of rules and more on religious practice, spiritual experience, and engagement with world issues?
I’m sure that he helped promote that view. He was one of those in the forefront of renewal, but he didn’t do it singlehandedly. There were other people, you know. In Europe there was André Louf and also Jean Leclercq, plus Garcia Colombás from Montserrat—all sorts of people in that early renewal in the mid-60s. In this country, too. I think you know Armand Veilleux; his studies on Pachomius were very important. But Merton was probably the best-known of them all because he published so much.
And did he lead the bandwagon to get others more engaged with all of the issues?
Yes, he did. That’s why he had so many things going at the same time. It was almost impossible to try to keep up with him. You might think that it would be only ecumenism and that this would be sufficient, like reaching out toward the Orthodox, the Eastern Christians. But there was also his interest in the early Celtic monasticism of the sixth century. He was digging into that, teaching himself early Irish so he could translate their poetry. He had an inquisitive mind that just knew no bounds. He was a kind of universal person. There’s no one quite like him. Never in my life have I met anyone with such a variety of interests, so many. And he could see connections among them all. That was the thing; he was always bringing out the connections. He could also read the German poet Rilke and was giving talks on him. All this was happening just shortly before he got interested in issues of social justice. The plight of the Blacks in this country became a real issue with him. We were beginning to have Blacks join the community and he knew that they were not being treated as equals. This too was something that had to be addressed. And then John Howard Griffin was filling him in with information about what was going on about race in the rest of the country. So he was getting interested in social issues. This was right before the nuclear threat. And then, of course, he came out very strongly against the war in Vietnam.
Let’s move on for a while to some questions about your own experience. You’ve been an editor, a collaborator with so many scholars and publishers. Did you expect this to happen to you?
Not at all. It was the biggest surprise of my life. I had been appointed Merton’s secretary shortly before his trip to Asia, and then he died. That was thirty-six years ago. The abbot said that he hoped I would continue on, doing things like answering any letters that came in, since the abbot wasn’t a letter writer. But I had no idea of what lay ahead. Of course, Merton had set up a trust, and then we also discovered all the unpublished manuscripts that were lying around. It was very helpful that there were a couple publishers on the board of trustees who were interested in producing the books based on these manuscripts and on ones that other people wanted to write about Merton. There was no soliciting of manuscripts. People were just volunteering for it. There was also a lot of interest at universities, students wanting to write master’s and doctoral dissertations. These started appearing, about a dozen each year. All this took a great deal of time, which is why it was a wise decision to set up the Merton Center at Bellarmine to handle all the archival requests that came in.
Who were some of the people on the board of trustees?
Especially helpful were Naomi Burton Stone and Jay Laughlin. They were both in the publishing world, so they knew what was out there and what needed to be published. They also had a feel for the pulse of the reading public. They knew what would be of interest. While he was alive, Merton would listen to Naomi and Jay, even though he had ideas of his own that they didn’t always agree with. They published many of his writings. Whenever he got an inspiration to do something they could say whether or not he should go ahead.
How did Merton come to start writing once he had entered the monastery?
The abbot at the time was Dom Frederic Dunne. He told Merton that he wanted him to write. He said something like, “Just write of the beauties of the monastic life. Let people know that we exist.” That was the beginning. So Merton started writing these little pious lives of the saints, the holy monks and nuns of the so-called Golden Age of Cistercian monasticism. Not all of these works have yet been published. We’re still finding some of them hidden in the archives. But such writing showed that he had a gift, and he was exercising his skills as a writer, doing it every day.
How did he do it? All by himself, or did he have help?
He did it pretty much single-handedly. He would have typists, some of the young monks. I once asked one of them if he was really serving as an editor, and he said, “No, we were just typists.” You didn’t have to change anything Merton wrote. Naomi Burton, who was an editor at Curtis Brown, likewise said that she didn’t have to change very much at all. It’s true that Bob Giroux made some changes in the opening pages of The Seven Storey Mountain. Merton had started out with a pious homily, and Giroux said that that could come later. What they settled on was a perfect beginning, about his being born in the foothills of the Pyrenees at the time of the Great War. It was a good opener.
Of all the people you know, people who knew and worked with Merton, who is the most interesting?
Well, the one that I knew and enjoyed the most was Jean Leclercq. He often came to Gethsemani, and then I would meet him also at Kalamazoo, the headquarters of Cistercian Publications. He wore his scholarship very lightly, and he was interested in everything, including ecumenism, so he was a kindred spirit for Merton. Merton appreciated him, although Leclercq was very outgoing and much more optimistic. Merton tended to be more pessimistic about the future, so Leclercq would cheer him up, tell him that things were getting better, not worse.
Through his journals Merton gave us a method for reflecting on experience. Do you feel that he became a resource for persons striving to be contemplatives? In other words, was he a prototype for contemplatives?
I would say so. First of all, he didn’t feel that the contemplative experience was simply for monks and nuns in their cloisters or hermitages. It was for everyone, for Christians everywhere and for all people. No one was barred from that. He popularized the whole idea of contemplative life in his book The Climate of Monastic Prayer, which later came out under the title Contemplative Prayer. He wanted to show that it’s basically something for everyone, not just limited to certain kinds of people who are enclosed, living a certain lifestyle. So I think that he did reach out. But also monks and nuns who were especially interested in the contemplative life could identify with his search.
How did he get started doing journals? Was that something he had always done?
He did it from the time he was a young boy. We don’t have the earliest ones; they were apparently destroyed a long time ago, although there are some distant relatives in New York who claim to have some of his early journals. But he kept journals at the monastery, and we discovered those. Of course, when I was general editor of all the journals I was trying to get to the early ones, like the Cuban journal and the one from the time he taught at Saint Bonaventure College. They had been given to Mark Van Doren. They were all just handwritten. When he left Saint Bonaventure for Gethsemani, he gave some away and these were passed down to friends. Eventually they all came back either to Gethsemani or to the archives at Saint Bonaventure, so we were able to use material from some of them when we published the collected journals.
Do you see an evolution in his journals, any major changes in outlook?
Yes, yes. Certainly he was always able to write well and he had a fantastic memory to recall things clearly from the past. But his style improved over the years, no question about it. He was aware of this himself. He was criticized a few times for being too world-negating, especially in his early book Seeds of Contemplation. So he revised it and the whole thing came out as New Seeds of Contemplation. It was much more world-affirming. So he did listen to his critics. One of them was Dom Aelred Graham. They became very good friends, and Graham helped him arrange his trip to the Far East.
Has your experience of being a monk and working so many years in the shadow of Merton been difficult, or has it been harmonious and compatible with being a monk yourself?
Well, I’d say both. The work has had its ups and downs. There were decisions that had to be made, some of them agonizing, such as whether we should publish all the journals or start editing them, cleaning them up. Merton himself had said in one place that the journals could be published either whole or in part. The trustees felt that if we were going to publish the journals, we shouldn’t be taking things out or editing them, trying to improve on them. So we decided to publish them just as they were. That was a decision that I had to struggle with. We had to reveal certain things that I probably wouldn’t have revealed if it had been entirely up to me. Merton was so forthright and honest about his foibles and his failures as well as his successes.
I’m sure you got criticized for doing that.
Well, there were a few people who objected, but a lot of people are grateful that we decided to publish everything from the journals, including many priests who said, “If only I had seen these years ago.” But there were some difficult periods along the way. Of course, I myself was not a trustee, so I had to follow the directives of the Merton Legacy Trust. But I’ve always been encouraged by the men who were my abbots. Both Abbot Flavian Burns and Abbot Timothy Kelly were very supportive throughout the entire period. In fact, Timothy was here just recently from Rome and said he was glad we had gone ahead and published the journals just as they are. He said, “It’s the honest account, and I’m glad they were published in that way.”
Of course, Merton himself had a public, didn’t he? But he didn’t shield himself from anything or anyone, right? That is just who he was, isn’t it?
Yes, he was just very transparent. I think his emphasis was that he wanted people to know him just as he was, with all the foolishness as well as the so-called successes.
Let me ask a broad but basic question. In a nutshell, what do you think is Merton’s legacy for monasticism? What does it bring monks and nuns today?
Maybe that you have to trust your inner life, your innermost self, as you appear before God. Merton was always very strong on this idea of living from the deepest self, the true self, rather than the empirical ego or the external self, the social self. This means that you live as you stand naked before God. I think that’s what he would say. He would tell us to listen from the heart and to live a simple, honest life, united to God and one another.
Do you think that the monastic world, monks and nuns, “caught” the fire of Merton as well as did the outside world? Or do you think that the laity caught it better than we did?
I really don’t have a way of answering that with certainty. I do know that in each monastery there’s a little group of Merton devotees. He doesn’t attract everybody. There are only certain people who gravitate towards Merton. Perhaps he does have more of a following among dedicated lay persons. We Cistercians have lay associates, people who gravitate around the retreat houses of our monasteries and try to live the contemplative life as well as they can, in their own state of life as they go about their work in the world. They have a way of incarnating the monastic values into their lives, especially lectio divina. I know they’re very faithful about reserving time both morning and evening for this kind of prayerful, meditative reading. I think this is a great blessing. These are perhaps the people whom Merton affects most.
Which book by Merton has been the most satisfying to you in all your years of working with his writings?
Well, if a person comes in and asks, “What of Merton should I read or learn from?” I always say, “Read Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander.” That’s the one where I think the full range of his ecumenical interests comes through most clearly. Here’s a powerful passage from that book: “If I can unite in myself the thought and the devotion of Eastern and Western Christendom, the Greek and the Latin Fathers, the Russians with the Spanish mystics, I can prepare in myself the reunion of divided Christians. From that secret and unspoken unity in myself can eventually come a visible and manifest unity of all Christians.” That’s from page 12 of that book and is a passage I use a lot. Later on, of course, he was getting interested in the Far East. Some people have criticized him, saying that he had given up the Christian faith and become a Buddhist, but that’s not so. When he was in Calcutta he said, “I speak as a Western monk who is preeminently concerned with his own monastic calling and dedication.” He also said that he had left his monastery to travel to Asia not just as a research scholar or even as an author, which he happened to be, but as a pilgrim anxious to obtain not only information or facts but to drink from the ancient sources of monastic vision and experience. That shows he was interested in deepening his own Christian commitment as a monk and learning as much as he could from others. I think he succeeded in that.
I think so too. Could you say what by Merton is not already discovered or recovered or available?
Well, I was recently appointed general editor of a new series, the Monastic Wisdom series. Cistercian Publications and the Liturgical Press have formed an alliance, and the first volume in our joint venture is going to be Merton’s Cassian and the Fathers. This will be from his lecture notes for the classes he was giving to our novices in the 1960s. Patrick O’Connell has edited them. They’re a wonderful resource, again showing Merton’s roots, his love of the early Christian monastic movement. There’s also much that he wrote on the Rule of Saint Benedict. I’m very glad that all this is going to be published.
Patrick, do you think Merton himself would be pleased with all his legacy?
Well, he’d be embarrassed by it, but secretly happy. But you have to be able to see all sides of him. Some of the people in the peace movement thought that we were not sufficiently portraying Merton as a peace activist. He was that, but there was a whole other side to the man, as in the book that I most enjoyed editing, The School of Charity. This dealt with the life that he considered the most important and that he was closest to, the monastic. His letters on the monastic experience and on spiritual direction are the main themes of that book. And another volume of his letters, The Hidden Ground of Love, is also very good. It’s a big one and contains his letters to Abdul Aziz that I talked about earlier. I think if Merton had had a choice of a spiritual director in the Sufi tradition, it would have been Abdul Aziz.
Is there some part of Merton’s story that no one has asked you about and that you would like to share? Sometimes we interviewers don’t ask the obvious.
What I really wish is that he had lived longer, long enough to have been able to absorb his whole Asian experience. The Asian Journal would then be a different book from what we have. We editors had to make a book out of it, Naomi Burton, Jay Laughlin, and myself, but it would have been a different book had Merton lived to flesh it out some. All we had were some jottings here and there. After all, he was on a trip and was moving very fast. To get a full appreciation of what he was doing he would have needed a couple of years to look back on it, to reflect on it and see the real value of it. For the same reason, perhaps The Seven Storey Mountain came out too soon.
That wasn’t a very ecumenical book either, as he later admitted.
Right. If written later on, I think it would have been a much more ecumenical book. And he then could have brought his life up to date, or revealed some of his mid-life crises and some problems that he went through, things that people often ask about. That would have made a wonderful book, one that would show people what it was like to have lived through all the changes. It’s one thing to die young in a monastery. So many of our monks that are being beatified died at about thirty-five years of age. I’d like to see some of the beati live to be eighty and eighty-five.
What would he say to the Vatican today? What do you think?
I don’t know for sure. But he and Pope John Paul definitely agree on one thing: both of them criticize capitalism as well as communism. In other words, it isn’t just communism that’s the problem. The evil is in our own hearts and in our consumer society. We have plenty of things to be critical of in the capitalistic world. In fact, one of our monks was with a group visiting the Holy Father recently, and an attendant told the pope that this man was a monk of Gethsemani. “Oh,” said John Paul, “that’s Merton’s monastery. I just quoted him last week.” I wish that monk had had the presence of mind to ask the Holy Father where he had quoted Merton, but he didn’t. But the pope had long known about Merton because of the Polish connection. They were publishing Merton’s books underground in Poland during the communist regime. And they continue to bring out his books in Polish, all seven volumes of the journals, for example. The Germans and the Poles are the ones bringing out the whole story in translations. And the one-volume abridgement of the journals, The Intimate Merton, has been very popular. That’s a manageable book, giving the whole story in one volume. It has been picked up and translated into many languages: Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, etc. It’s used a lot in schools.
I’d like to conclude this interview with a cluster of questions about dialogue. Having known Merton from the inside and all the dialogue work he did, what advice do you have for those of us active in Monastic lnterreligious Dialogue?
Well, you should continue the good work you have begun. It’s important to let other people know about the beauties of the Asian traditions so that we can learn to work together, especially for peace and a sound ecology. There are all sorts of areas where we can be united, including friendship, encouragement, and especially the life of prayer. There’s no reason why people can’t pray together. You know that from your own contacts.
I do. But I think Merton is the one who moved the conversation out of the realm of dogma and into a focus on experience, especially the experience of prayer.
That’s what I would say. That is the thing. The differences in doctrine, the things that separate us, will always be there, but let’s concentrate on what unites us as human beings so we can come to some breakthrough and see things as one. I don’t think a full breakthrough will come about in our lifetime. We have to be realistic. First, let’s learn to live together in joy, peace, and happiness.
Why do you think interreligious dialogue might be especially appropriate for monastics and contemplatives?
I think it’s because we go below the surface. We may not be that hung up in the externals of liturgy and dogmas and so forth. We at least try to live on the level of lived experience. If you’re Roman Catholic you certainly subscribe to the dogmas, but without articulating them at every possible moment.
You were present as a monk there at Gethsemani when we held two major Buddhist-Christian dialogues at your monastery, and I know other people come there for similar activities. How does that feel from the inside?
Well, I came to the monastery and was trained in “the School of Silence.” I believe that people of different religious traditions can sit together in silence. There’s a way of communicating just by silence, not always by speaking. There’s much talk nowadays about how we’re supposed to be dialogical communities. Well, at Gethsemani we were steeped in a different tradition. It was a pretty silent community when I entered half a century ago. Only after I had been there about fifteen years was much speaking permitted, so it was very quiet. But you had lots of time for prayer and reflection and reading, and dialogue cuts into the time for those things. You have just so much time. I think of all the books that are in our library that I would love to read someday, and I know I’m not going to get to them. We have just so much time in our short lives and should concentrate on the essentials. I think that Merton, from his perspective, would have stressed the essentials.
And would have urged us not to stray from the silence but to dialogue through the silence, right?
Yes. Brother David Steindl-Rast once put it so well. He said you speak out of silence, until dialogue itself comes out of the silence, flows from it. I think that may have been the secret of Merton’s success too, because he had long, long periods of silence. Although some people seem to think he was having one social gathering after another, there really weren’t that many, and especially not in the earlier years. I think that’s why he was able to write so well about silence and reflection.
Well, Patrick, if you had the time and energy to write a book (although listening to you now, I think you probably just want to read a book!), what would be the topic, the title, and the audience?
Well, if I really had the gift to write a book, I’d like to write one around the theme of changing our own lives to become more God-centered, more Christ-centered, but also more people-centered. I don’t believe in making a big distinction between the two. They go together. Living the Christian life and the monastic life means reaching out toward others rather than just doing it in isolation. There was some saint, perhaps Saint Catherine, who said we go to heaven together or not at all. I agree with that. We do it together.
