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lookforsigns

by Matthew Fox

In 2015, I was invited to speak at Bellarmine University in Louisville, Kentucky, on the occasion of the centennial anniversary of Thomas Merton’s birth. In a very auspicious decision just one year before his untimely death at fifty-three years of age, Merton chose to leave his papers and documents at Bellarmine. Merton’s death on December 10, 1968, occurred in an annus horribilis: it was the same year that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were gunned down. December 10 was also the date of Merton’s entrance, in the winter of 1941, into the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani, located just a few miles from Louisville.

The title assigned to me for my talk was “Vocation, Merton and Myself.” I added Meister Eckhart to the title, since he was so pivotal to Merton and still is to myself. I thank the organizer, Mark Steiner, along with the Thomas Merton Center, for their invitation, since it encouraged me to think more deeply about my journey with Thomas Merton — and because of Merton. Out of my Bellarmine talk, and the workshop the following day, I have developed this modest book about the connections between Merton’s journey and my own (as well as both of us with Meister Eckhart). The closer I looked at Merton’s journey, the more interesting “connections” (one of his favorite words) emerged, and I have been quite surprised (and pleasantly so) at the number of intersections where our paths have crossed. I have come to learn how deeply Merton and I shared a common break away from dualistic spiritualities to a creation-centered way of living our shared religious heritage, and so some of my own ideas and autobiography also appear in this book.

This book is in part a thank-you to Thomas Merton and an acknowledgment of my debt to him, a debt that is quite unique in some ways. I offer it also as an outreach to others, monastic or not, who may not be familiar with the Creation Spirituality tradition, which has not only marked my life and work but, I am now certain, did the same for Merton in the last decade of his life. Many times since 1968 — in the face of culture’s rapid leaps and profound evolutions — I have lamented Merton’s untimely death, asking myself the question many others have no doubt asked as well: “What would Merton say?” and “What would Merton do?”

Risking gross understatement, I dare to say that Merton’s thoughtful and deep commentary on spirituality and on cultural and historical events has been sorely missed these five decades since his death. Nor am I alone in this stance. For example, the late Michael Toms — the “Socrates of radio,” who for decades gifted the world with brilliant interviews with some of our culture’s greatest thinkers on his radio program New Dimensions — told me on more than one occasion: “I am a Thomas Merton Catholic.” By this he surely meant a thinking, critically minded, and justice-oriented Catholic. Pope Francis, in his talk to the US Congress in September 2015, invoked Thomas Merton, saying, “Merton was above all a man of prayer, a thinker who challenged the certainties of his time and opened new horizons for souls and for the Church. He was also a man of dialogue, a promoter of peace between peoples and religions.” I would maintain that much of Merton’s spiritual journey parallels the articulation of the Creation Spirituality tradition and its Four Paths, which have proven foundational in my own journey. How could this be otherwise, since Meister Eckhart was so pivotal to Merton’s journey from 1958 up to his death in 1968? Eckhart, so fully a creation-centered mystic and prophet, has been a guide to me as well — and indeed a “lifeboat,” to use Merton’s phrase.

I will confess that for decades I resisted over-associating myself with what seemed to me to be a veritable “Merton industry,” or what Merton himself called “Mertonism.” As I forged my theological and spiritual way — not only in my writings and research but in designing educational programs that would make an engaged mysticism more accessible — I shied away from institutional power trips wherever I sensed them, whether they came from religious institutions or academia. Of course, this reaction related in part to my own wounds at the hands of both. This does not mean that I neglected Merton’s genius. I hosted courses on his work, I assigned his books for reading by my students, and I included him in my writing. It’s just that I felt the need to keep my distance a bit from the “Merton machine,” which sometimes seemed to suck all the air out of the room.

With this project, however, I feel a certain reconciliation — with Thomas himself, and with Merton scholars and the institutions Merton was closely related to, including both Bellarmine University, where Merton left many of his papers, and the Trappist Order within which he lived his adult life. I praise Thomas for his fidelity to his vocation, and I praise his monastery for keeping his work alive and providing ever more resources from his rich legacy. I especially salute with a loud kudo the wisdom of the Trappist Order for taking Thomas in, first of all, and then for eventually encouraging him to write what was in his mind and heart, for giving him logistic and personnel support, and for assisting in the dissemination of his work both before and following his death. They deserve praise for being so integral a part of the deep journey of Thomas Merton, sharing their lineage with him but also being humble enough to learn from him along the way.

I have been moved in my writing of this book to rediscover my roots and intersections with Thomas Merton. Merton was born in 1915; I was born twenty-five years later, in 1940. We were obviously of different generations, but Merton and I connected at many levels and on many occasions. Merton was born in southern France, while I was “reborn” in southern France, as I was busy writing my doctoral thesis while living on a simple Basque farm. It was there one day, while sitting at my typewriter, that I said out loud to myself: “I am a writer. Because I am so happy writing and putting ideas together and in a form I can communicate with others. And I learn so much doing this.”

Merton was a very prolific writer, having written over fifty books in a period of about twenty-seven years. Writing brought Merton joy, though it could be a burden at the same time. I have experienced this same thing, and I, too, have been called prolific. However, where Merton took a vow of poverty to an institution and was spared the demands of having to make a living, much of my life and writing time has been tempered by years of administration. I designed and guided programs at Barat College, and then at the Institute of Culture and Creation Spirituality (both in Chicago and Oakland). I also launched and ran my University of Creation Spirituality with a master’s program that operated in conjunction with the Naropa Institute of Boulder, Colorado, which was founded by a friend of Merton’s, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. Yet despite our differing positions in the world, the spiritual journeys Merton and I underwent and shared with others — our vocations, therefore — ran very parallel, as this book shows.

I end the book by citing Merton’s own words about a “perfect circle.” I argue that his life was that way for him personally, but also he carried the rest of us to that new beginning by completing a full circle back to his (and our) Creation Spirituality roots. The very writing of this book has proved to be a great circle for me. I first encountered Merton when I read his autobiography as a teenager, and I have been deeply moved in writing this book at how deeply he and I have journeyed together, with Eckhart as a guide to each of us, ever since. This was happening all along without my being deeply aware of it. Deep down, though we were twenty-five years apart in age, and though I have lived longer than he by another twenty-two years, we have been traveling together on a “way to God” that I have come to call Creation Spirituality.

While Merton, as in the citation that opens this book, talks about “the way to God,” I am happy to talk about his and my journey via Creation Spirituality as being a way to God.

Matthew Fox is the author of over 30 books including Meister Eckhart, The Hidden Spirituality of Men, Christian Mystics, and most recently A Way to God. A preeminent scholar and popularizer of Western mysticism, he became an Episcopal priest after being expelled from the Dominican Order by Cardinal Ratzinger, who later became Pope Benedict XVI. You can visit him online at www.matthewfox.org.