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COMMENTARY
THOMAS MERTON ON ECCLESIAL REFORM AND RENEWAL
By Rev. Patrick W. Collins, Ph.D.
[This installment is the first of three. The full
text is available on the VOTF Ohio website at
. Fr. Collins’s website.]
INTRODUCTION
The Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) called for Church
renewal and reform. Renewal is interior, reform external.
As a first generation post-Vatican II priest, I recall
the enthusiasm with which we went about implementing
the insights and decrees of that Council. New winds
were blowing and it was refreshing and exciting for
us agents of change. At my 20th anniversary of ordination,
I recall making a television program based upon what
I considered to have been the principal energy of
those two decades: Change in the Church.
Now, 42 years after my ordination and in the first
year of my retirement, I look back and sense a missing
piece. Or perhaps better said, the wrong ordering of
things. We went about the external reforms but perhaps
we neglected to some extent the interior spiritual
renewal from which the external reforms should have
flowed. We turned altars around and ordered congregants
to active participation in the liturgy. We summoned
laity into sharing in church governance and ordained
permanent deacons. We questioned many church teachings
and pressed for new theological insights. All well
and good, but was all of this as well grounded as it
should have been? I wonder.
SPIRITUAL RENEWAL AS THE BASIS OF ECCLESIASTICAL REFORM
Vatican II is often described as a theologians’ council
since they had such strong input in showing the bishops
fresh ways to be the Church of Jesus the Christ. An
ancient dictum of our Catholic Traditions says that
a theologian is one who prays and one who prays is
a theologian. One person whose life affirms this aphorism
is the American Cistercian monk, Thomas Merton. Merton’s
thoughts about the Church and its reform and renewal,
born of his contemplative living and praying, can be
instructive for those of us who are still striving
to pursue the vision of Vatican II. His struggle to
remain faithful to The Journey of Faith both in and
with the Church both challenges us and gives us hope
- or perhaps I should say Hope. He invites us to continue
to go deeper - beyond external reforms toward interior
renewal. This may have been a missing piece during
the early post-conciliar years. And those continuing
to pursue external reforms can learn a great deal from
listening to Merton’s thoughts and hopes.
Near the end of his life he wrote: “The contemplative
mind is, in fact, not normally ultra-conservative;
but neither is it necessarily radical. It transcends
both of these extremes in order to remain in living
contact with that which is genuinely true in any traditional
movement.” Therefore he believed that contemplatives “will
not normally be associated too firmly or too definitely
with any ‘movement’ whether political,
religious, liturgical, artistic, philosophical or what
have you. The contemplative stays clear of movements,
not because they confuse him, but simply because he
does not need them and can go father by himself than
he can in their formalized and often fanatical ranks.”
Contemplatives, Merton contends, “will instinctively
avoid becoming enmeshed in conceptual systems.” Such
persons become able to live within themselves, at home
with their own thoughts and to an ever greater degree
independent of exterior supports. Satisfaction is derived
more and more from spiritual creativeness. “He
derives strength not from what he gets out of things
and people, but from giving himself to life and to
others. He discovers the secret of life in the creative
energy of love.” (The Inner Experience, 290-291)
Well, if all of this is true for Merton, what does
it mean today to affiliate with the Roman Catholic
Church in its interior renewal and external reforms?
I would suggest that it means, first of all, to see
Church from the contemplative perspective. In 1963
Merton professed that “The Church is fortunately
a mystery that is beyond the reach of bureaucracy,
though sometimes one is tempted to doubt it” (Courage
for Truth, 82). For him Church reform was not primarily
a political endeavor of power sharing or power grabbing.
For monk Merton spiritual renewal was always primary
and the reform of Church structures was to flow from
that on-going interior transformation. As he wrote
in 1963, “There is no question that the mystics
are the ones who have kept Christianity going, if anyone
has” (Hidden Ground of Love, 583). This is true
because the Church for Merton was the Holy Spirit dwelling
in and acting in and through the Mystical Christ.
When Merton became a convert to the Roman Catholic
Church in 1939, his life was in a chaotic state. Early
on he had been afraid of Catholicism even though he
admired it. But after some serious Catholic reading,
he found the Church with its clarity and certitude
to be a kind of life raft in a sea of the world’s
and his own confusion. After his baptism he said that
he had “entered into the everlasting movement
of that gravitation which is the very life and spirit
of God: God’s own gravitation toward the depths
of His own infinite nature, His goodness without end.
And God, that center Who is everywhere, and whose circumference
is nowhere, finding me, through incorporation with
Christ, incorporated into this immense and tremendous
gravitational movement which is love, which is the
Holy Spirit, loved me.” (Seven Storey Mountain,
246) Throughout Merton’s life the Church as The
Mystical Body of Christ was the principal image and
metaphor energizing his ecclesial faith.
Years later, in a letter to theologian Rosemary Radford
Ruether, the monk described his conversion as “marked
by a pretty strong and dazzled belief in the Christ
of the Nicene Creed. One reason for this was a strong
reaction against the fogginess and subjectivity and
messed-up-ness of the ideas about Christ that I had
met with up and down in various types of Protestantism.
I was tired of a Christ who had evaporated” (At
Home in the World, 22).
This initial enthusiasm for the Church was tempered
over the years by experience and study. Life in the
Church was not about security stemming from the right
questions and answers. It was about flowing in the
stream of life’s complexities with ever maturing
faith and a certain detachment from the institutional
Church. In 1959 he realized the purity of the Gospel
often involved an admixture of error and wrong attitudes
in the Church. He told a friend: “We cannot demand
that our Christianity be absolutely pure... There is
inevitably plenty of prejudice and cant wherever there
is a religion.” Quoting Jesus, he said that in
the Church the weeds and the wheat grow together until
the harvest. The temptation is to think that the Church
is without such “cockle.” Our task is to
make distinctions between the good and the bad and
to adjust to the reality ourselves “in order
to make sure that we ourselves are wheat and not cockle.
And of course the thing is that one never can tell.
Because we are not the ones appointed to do the judging.
To look for an absolute assurance that one is pure
wheat is to fall, after all, into the same old pharisaism.” (HGL,
387)
To D.T. Suzuki, the Buddhism scholar, Merton admitted
that the Church could become a prisoner of its own
formulas, laws and structures. Writing things down
about the Christian faith is “fraught with ludicrous
and overwhelming difficulties,” he wrote. “No
one cares for fresh, direct and sincere intuitions
of the Living Truth. Everyone is preoccupied with formulas.” HGL
564) He was particularly critical of the bureaucratic
ways of the Vatican, claiming that, while “the
Church itself is a permanent miracle witnessed to her
own divine origin by her manifestly divine qualities,” the “Roman
Curia does not always bear this out, unless the eternity
of God is conceived as a vacuum without activity in
it” (HGL, 397).
Merton’s sense of Church was much more than
a matter of signing up with a group called religion
as if mere gregariousness brought one closer to God.
He decried such ecclesiastical gregariousness as a
kind of “huddling together against God rather
than adoration of His true transcendent holiness.” (HGL,
43) In 1961 the monk wrote about the Church as “the
Mother of Truth.” Yet he asserted that truth
cannot be equated with ecclesiastical formulas or rules
nor any single school of theological thought. The Church
mothers Truth by being open to all truth: “We
must go straight to the truth without wanting to glance
backward and without caring about what school of theology
it represents.” He contended that one must seek “to
find the truth of love instead of the truth of formulas
... of laws, of programs, of projects ...” (HGL,
560).
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