Stars of the Faith: Thomas Merton
Psalm 46
God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.
Therefore we will not fear,
though the earth should change,
though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea;
though its waters roar and foam,
though the mountains tremble with its tumult.
There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God,
the holy habitation of the Most High.
God is in the midst of the city; it shall not be moved;
God will help it when the morning dawns.
The nations are in an uproar, the kingdoms totter;
he utters his voice, the earth melts.
The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge.
Come, behold the works of the Lord;
see what desolations he has brought on the earth.
He makes wars cease to the end of the earth;
he breaks the bow, and shatters the spear;
he burns the shields with fire.
"Be still, and know that I am God!
I am exalted among the nations, I am exalted in the earth."
The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge.
Psalm 131
O Lord, my heart is not lifted up,
my eyes are not raised too high;
I do not occupy myself with things too great
and too marvelous for me.
But I have calmed and quieted my soul,
like a weaned child with its mother;
my soul is like the weaned child that is with me.
O Israel, hope in the Lord from this time on and forevermore.
Why do so many Christians only form a deep faith after going through some sort of terrible pain, loss, or struggle? It’s a theme that I see so often throughout Christian history. I see it here at Calvin Church. For example, I look out in this congregation, and I see something very different from what most people might see by looking at our congregation. I think that some people would look around and think that everyone here has it all so together. They’d look at how you are dressed, how you stand, and how you talk, and they would conclude that this is a place for perfect people, not for those who are struggling and hurting.
When I look out at you, I see something very different. I don’t see perfect people. I see wounded people trying their best to let God in, people trying to let God lead them to better ways of living. I see people who have cancer, who suffer from depression, who are going through a divorce, or who are single parents raising children. I see people who have lost their jobs or are worried they may lose their jobs. I see people who struggle with addiction, a number of whom have gone through rehab. I see people who have children who are addicted—some who’ve gone through rehab four or five times, and others whose lives are spinning out of control leaving their parents powerless to stop the decline. I see people who have done things in their lives they are neither proud of, nor are willing to share with others. I see people whose parents have died, brothers or sisters have died, spouses have died, or children have died. I see people who struggle, but have a hope that God will lead them to better ways. I’ve pretty much described about 70% of you in my last few sentences. I see this much more as a hospital for sinners than as a country club for the perfect.
In a lot of ways you all are so much like the great Christians we’ve been talking about during Lent. For example, Benedict of Nursia, who is considered the father of the monastic movement, lived during a time in which the western Roman Empire was crumbling all around him, causing everyone to struggle in poverty. Hannah Whitall Smith wrote about faith despite the fact that her husband was a constant adulterer, leaving her to raise children by herself. John Calvin’s mother died when he was six, his father was austere and overbearing, and he was ill most of his life. Hannah Hurnard struggled with a speech impediment and other ailments most of her life. And St. Francis was imprisoned for a year in a dank cell, and suffered with tuberculosis as well as hepatitis and trachoma throughout his life. All had their struggles, and all sought God throughout their lives.
When I think about our star for today, Thomas Merton, I see a man who fits this profile of people of deep faith perfectly. And he shows us that no matter how much we struggle, we can find God if we are open enough.
Thomas Merton was born in France in 1915 to a New Zealand artist father, and an American Quaker mother. They moved to France because Merton’s father wanted his art to be inspired by the places of his favorite artists, such as Monet, Manet, and Van Gogh. Thomas Merton was bright and gifted from an early age, but he also had to struggle through a tremendously unstable childhood. Due to the outbreak of World War I in 1916, his family moved to Long Island, where he lived with his grandparents. About age six his mother died. His father then left for several years to travel throughout Europe, pursuing his art, and leaving Thomas and his younger brother, John Paul, to be raised by grandparents. You can imagine that Merton grew up feeling a bit lost.
When he was ten, his father came back to get him, and they moved to France, where Thomas lived for several years. These were inspiring years in which Thomas drank in the French joie de vivre. At age thirteen, Thomas and his father moved to London, and Thomas attended school there, quickly gaining a reputation as a bright, precocious student. Then his father was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Soon afterwards, he died. Thomas was left feeling adrift.
He continued his schooling in Britain, and afterwards attended Cambridge University, one of the world’s great universities. Thomas never really settled in there. He spent as much time partying as he did studying, and after a year decided to take time off from school.
Never very religious, Thomas was pretty much an agnostic bordering on atheist. He didn’t think much about God. The seeds of change came when he spent several months in Rome, where he was exposed to some of the great churches and cathedrals. He had a special attraction to them, even if he didn’t think it was spiritual or religious. He would go into a cathedral and sit for hours, immersed in the silence and the atmosphere. He still didn’t think about God much, but he did think about the architecture and the impact it had on him, wondering why the stillness affected him so.
Soon it was decided that he would move back to the U.S. and attend Columbia University, studying literature and writing. At Columbia he had the opportunity to learn from some truly great professors, and he blossomed. It was also at this time that he secretly became a Roman Catholic. Despite his drinking and partying, he secretly attended mass every Sunday. Sometimes he would go with a hangover, but he went anyway. Then he decided to join the church, and secretly (from his friends, who were agnostics and proudly so) attended the catechism classes. Eventually he let everyone know that he had joined the church, and that the life of faith was important to him. His friends were dumbfounded. How could he, so bright and aware, be duped by the opiate of the masses? They were dumbfounded because many of them were Marxists. Merton himself became a communist for at least one party meeting. The meeting was devoted to a discussion of who didn’t attend the last meeting, and why. Merton realized that he couldn’t be a communist if this is all they cared about.
After graduation he got a job teaching literature at St. Bonaventure University in Olean, New York. While there he slowly sensed a calling to join a religious order—to become a monk or a friar. He even went so far as to approach the Franciscans at St. Bonaventure about entering the novitiate (a training program for monks-to-be). They initially accepted him. Then he got cold feet, worrying that he hadn’t come completely clean about his previous life. So he went back to the abbot and told him in detail everything about his life. You know the old joke about the man who gave his confession, and it turned the priest hair white? I think Merton’s story had that effect on the abbot. The abbot got back to Merton and told him that they no longer had space for him. Merton was crushed.
Speaking to friends, he was told about a Trappist monastery (part of the Cistercian order) in Gethsemane, Kentucky. So on December 10, 1941, three days after Pearl Harbor, and exactly 27 years before his death, Merton joined the Abbey of Gethsemane, becoming a novice, and then a monk.
In the monastery, Merton thrived. His abbot saw in him a unique gift for writing, and so encouraged Merton to write about his own spiritual life and insights. The first book he wrote was Seven Story Mountain, a memoir of his early life until his conversion. When it came out in the last 1940s, it changed many lives. This wasn’t the story of a saint. It was the story of an all-too-human man who lived as much of us have, yet who chose a life devoted to God. Over the course of 27 years, Merton wrote close to fifty books, many of which transformed Christianity. He was a monk who lived in silence in a small hermitage, spending his days praying, worshiping, and writing, and from a small abbey in Kentucky, Merton changed the Christian world.
During this time, churches of all denominations had become very functional. The focus had become on doing good deeds for Christ, going to church out of obligation, doing all the right things and looking like the right kind of people. Merton changed this by writing about the spiritual life—the importance of solitude, silence, prayer, personal reflection, discernment, and commitment to a life of spiritual growth. Many people have written about these things over the years, including me. But Merton was the first to really recover this focus on prayer and spirituality. He not only influenced other monks, nuns, friars, and sisters, but he influenced Protestants, Eastern Orthodox, and Evangelicals. And he did it simply—by writing about his own personal struggles, while also sharing basic insights into life gleaned from time spent in prayer and contemplation.
Some of his greatest books are books such as The Wisdom of the Desert, Thoughts in Solitude, New Seeds of Contemplation, and Life and Holiness. He was criticized by many Protestants for being merely a “person of prayer” who wasn’t on the front lines of ministry. Yet his writings allowed those same Protestants to reconnect spiritually with God in the midst of ministries that they had pushed God out of.
Thomas Merton made his own life a spiritual laboratory of prayer, and out of that he shared with others what he had learned. Let me close out this sermon by sharing with you two of the greatest gifts he gave back to Christianity. He led Christians back to meditation and contemplative prayer.
What is meditation? For Christians it is reading scripture or spiritual writings in a slow, prayerful, reflective, and open way that opens us to what God has to say to us through them. When we meditate on a piece of writing (we can also meditate on nature, life, and events, but often Merton’s focus was on scripture) we read it slowly, and then mull it over, reflecting prayerfully on what it says to us about life, God, and ourselves. We think about what the writing means, how it calls us to change our lives, and how we are to apply these insights into our lives.
Contemplative prayer is different (it is similar to what the Buddhists call “meditation”). Contemplation means sitting in silence with God as we let go of thoughts, agendas, emotions, insights, concerns, anxieties, and everything else. We simply sit with God in openness and stillness. It is the embodiment of our passages for this morning, where we hear,
Be still, and know that I am God!...
But I have calmed and quieted my soul,
like a weaned child with its mother;
my soul is like the weaned child that is with me.
Merton believed that it was in solitude and silence that we hear God most clearly. He believed that our lives developed a deeper connection with God when we stilled, calmed, and quieted our souls. What I want to do for the rest of this morning is to introduce you to some of his thoughts, and in the process lead you into meditation and contemplation. First, I want to share with you this quote, and I’d like you to meditate on it. It’s from his book, Thoughts in Solitude. Read it slowly and then spend time reflecting on what God is saying to you through it about your life:
To keep ourselves spiritually alive we must constantly renew our faith. We are like pilots of fog-bound steamers, peering into the gloom in front of us, listening for the sounds of other ships, and we can only reach our harbor if we keep alert. The spiritual life is, then, first of all a matter of keeping awake. We must not lose our sensitivity to spiritual inspirations. We must always be able to respond to the slightest warnings that speak, as though by hidden instinct, in the depth of the soul that is spiritually alive.
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Finally, I’d like you to experience a bit of contemplative prayer. Sit in a comfortable place with both feet on the floor, hands in lap, and everything else put aside. Let go of your thoughts, worries, and agendas. Let go of everything, including the need to experience God in this time. Just sit with God. Create space just to be with God and to let God in. Close out this sermon just sitting in silence, and as thoughts come, let them go. Close this sermon out just by being with God. Do it for just two minutes, and see what being still can do.
Amen.
