Merton and the Via Transformativa

transformation

by Matthew Fox

In 2015, preeminent theologian and bestselling author Matthew Fox was invited by the Thomas Merton Center in Louisville, KY, to give a lecture to honor the centennial year of the legendary Catholic monk and writer’s birth. In preparing for the talk, Fox re-immersed himself in Merton’s work and revisited the correspondence he had with him while he was alive. As Fox read through Merton’s journals, poetry, and religious writings, he realized that his exploration was inspiring far more than just one talk.
The result is A Way to God: Thomas Merton’s Creation Spirituality, a powerful book about Merton’s pioneering work in deep ecumenism and interfaith; about his essential teachings on mixing contemplation and action; and about how the vision of thirteenth century mystic Meister Eckhart profoundly influenced both Merton and Creation Spirituality, which Fox has long espoused and written about.
We hope you’ll enjoy this short excerpt from the book, which explore the Via Transformativa, one of Four Paths of Creation Spirituality, which is the way the way of the Holy Spirit who calls us to enact Divine compassion in the world in order to help others.
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In the conflict between law and freedom God is on the side of freedom. That is a scandalous statement! But it is the New Testament! How are we going to affirm to the modern world the scandal of the New Testament? It is here that we confront the seriousness of our prophetic as distinct from our contemplative calling. — Thomas Merton
These words from Thomas Merton frame well the biblical basis for the many positions he took on behalf of justice and freedom. He reminds us that we have both a contemplative and a prophetic calling. Merton was often controversial in his day, but he derived his passion for justice and the strength to ground his courage from the scriptures themselves. He was fully aware of the potential of our species to misuse its divine powers of creativity. Creativity does not stand alone cut off from values and priorities. We can use our creativity, after all, to build gas ovens to kill enemies more efficiently, or we can use our creativity to build community and to restore health and to heal. Creativity needs direction and parameters. Justice and compassion provide that testing ground for our creativity.
Creativity and the Prophet
There was never a prophet who was not also an artist — what I call a “social artist” or an artist at organizing and awakening the people. Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann established this in his classic work The Prophetic Imagination, writing: “Every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist. It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing alternative futures to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one.” Merton knew the prophetic tradition — in fact, he once wrote a letter to a rabbi saying that he often sat on his front porch in his hermitage and shouted the poetry of Isaiah and others into the air about him. The artist, as Rabbi Heschel says, is one who “interferes.” Merton did a lot of interfering in his life, most of it by way of his writing.
As Ross Labrie commented, “Merton saw the prophetic role of the artist as a natural one for the contemporary artist to assume amidst the decline in the authority of religion.” This is a significant observation — that Merton was attuned to the lesser role that religion was playing in contemporary culture. Merton pointed to Faulkner and Camus as two examples of prophetic artists, and he wrote to poet Nicanor Parra in 1965 that contemporary artists tended to fulfill many of the functions that were once the monopoly of monks. Thus, Labrie commented that for Merton, “a writer like Faulkner could be profoundly biblical in his work without being a churchgoer or a conventional believer. It was the artist, ‘facing the problems of life without the routine consolations of conventional religion,’ who experienced in depth the ‘existential dimensions of these problems.’”
According to Labrie, for Merton, solitude was necessary for the artist to do his or her prophetic work, which includes anticipating “the struggles and the general consciousness of later generations.” Among the artist’s important role as prophet is to, as Labrie wrote, “show finally ‘where everything connects,’ a reflection of Merton’s own passionate role as a unifier of different kinds of experience….Merton saw the artist’s creation as both analogous to the freshness of paradise and a sign of its possible recovery.” As Merton put it, “Here the world gets another chance. Here man, here the reader discovers himself getting another start in life, in hope, in imagination.”

 

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.

Excerpted from the book A Way to God: Thomas Merton’s Creative Spirituality Journey. Copyright © 2016 by Matthew Fox. Printed with permission of New World Library, Novato, CA.