Striving towards Being/The Journals of Thomas Nerton
Faggen, Robert & PRUSAK, BERNARD G.
FIVE VOLUMES & COUNTING Striving towards Being The Letters of Thomas Merton and Czeslaw Milosz Edited by Robert Faggen Farrar. S!r n amt Girnux. $21. loll pp W The Journals of Thomas...
...The first volume of the journals, Run to the Mountain: The Steiry of a Vocation (1919-41, 490 pp...
...Both volumes abound in tiresome mush ("Love carries me around...
...In this struggle Merton belonged to the spirit of the times...
...1-57075-146-6 27 2 pages S"-(H) p,rprr ORBIS BOOKS Ikpt f...
...MAN IN THE MIRROR John Howard Griffin and the Story of Black Like Me ROlil:RT })()N:\7 ] Looks at the rusts of the lxxtk that galvanized America...
...Merton notes, in 1956, the French writer "Julien Green's idea that between the lines of what you write, say, in a journal, is a prophecy for your future...
...But struggle as he did, a new "image of the world ordered by religion," such as Milosz wanted, still eluded him, just as his political activism in the 1960s brought him only grief and frustration...
...But they're also obviously the work of a well-educated young man (born 1915) with brains, passion, and discipline...
...I read between the lines of Merton's journals for prophecies not only of his future, but the future of the church...
...I imagine a reader," Milosz writes, "who...
...Leonardo Bo f Cry of the Earth Cry of the Poor EZEKIEL Vision in the Dust IJANII:1, Ii1`.RRIGAN-Aa hr Ton Lewris-Horheh ('ottthining his ostn poetic paraphrase of In eekIel's apocaI pi ic oracle...
...and Dancing in the Water of Life: Seeking Peace in the Hermitage (196365,384 pp...
...reads more like the melodrama of a vocation...
...Love, love, love lifts me around the cloister") and histrionic piety ("I do not flatter myself with a disease...
...In their letters, at once generous and scrupulous, Milosz makes exacting demands of Merton and does not hold hack from trying to provoke him: He writes, for example, that he has not yet read Merton's The Wisdom of the Desert (1960), "perhaps because I feel it is a sort of luxury-for those who [havel coped already With some basic theo logical questions...
...As he writes to himself in 1947, "Get at the root...
...monastery /world;clerical /lay...
...The first volume has its moments of both self-criticism and insight (faith is not just a deposit of opinions, but °a virtue and active habit which ...seeks what is beyond reason...
...The journals introduce us to both the density of his life-as Merton put it in 1966, "an unsolved problem"-and the depth of his faith...
...Hearkening back to "Julien Green's idea," between these lines, I think we can find much of the church today...
...As Daniel Berrigan remarked in 1973, citing Dorothy Day, he "got the word around...
...Power of the Prophet - [ unring the ttiraao 14e lltvgkal Yew . lilt x,Sa,IIrry...
...Before the question, "And what do you mean by God...
...Merton intensifies this questioning to the point that the volume's editor, Lawrence Cunningham, is moved to speak of his acedia, the monk's disgust for his place in life...
...In his early years in the monastery, his thinking fell into strict and hoary dichotomies: supernatural/natural...
...to understand and to have in myself the life and the roots and the belief and the destiny and the Orientation of the whole hemisphere," the Ubermonch wrote in 1959-he never lost his fearsome need for meaning and his "sense of meaninglessness and sin and emptiness, of pretense...
...they suffer, for this post-Vatican 11 Catholic, from an unbearable level of devotional humidity...
...If Milosz is still interested, the possibility he imagined is now here: Five volumes of Merton's journals have been published...
...Like his hero Tertullian, this was a violent man, seeking the grace of peace...
...show him undergoing "constant self-revision" in an effort to keep "Godward...
...Love sails me around the house...
...I feel myself in fact caught," Merton wrote in 1964, "between the two triumphalisms of the council," "conservatives" who wanted to reestablish old boundaries and roles and "progressives" who refused to recognize that, even as a "way of life," faith has its own rules...
...with Itut°hlfui reflections on a sociel in chars...
...dull (lists, lists, lists of what Tom likes or does not like...
...In the third volume, A Search for Solitude: Pursuing the Monk's True Life, (1952-61), 406 pp...
...During this period, Merton woke "from a dream-the dream of my separateness, of the 'special' vocation to be different...
...While not denying the mystery of salvation, however, he railed against lifeless legalisms...
...In the end, this restlessness was what most impressed me about him and made me feel that he was also talking to me...
...The fourth and fifth volumes of the journals, Turning toward the World: The Pivotal Years (1960-63,360 pp...
...I found it by turns trivial ("And now I am glad to have written something...
...Like the second volume, Eiiterii,, the Silence: Hecoliriug a Monk & Writer (1941-52, 501 pp...
...Milosz urges Mer ton again and again "not only Itol understand and deplore the modern gnashing of teeth, but to have some complicity with it"-like Pascal, to pay attention to the atheists and perhaps the atheist in himself...
...But he quickly came to question the "opposition between contemplation and activity when they are properiv ordered," with consequences for his whole way of looking at things...
...But did Merton have such an overarching vision...
...Our ghetto is so truly refined, it is veritably a paradise...
...Against those who rejoice in every dogmatic definition as a new limitation which restricts the meaning of such and such a dogma," Merton sought "some grasp o f the reality expressed in the propositions...
...I.57 5-f i5.,~ 1N1,%inar,1 144 pa.ee.+ Silt IX) paper At ho.okstores or direct Stf'I51s t I-FAKI-258.5838 SHARING: THE WORI) THROUGH THE LITURGICAL YEAR (it SI'AVU(IUTI1.RRI'.y (htlierre, shares the wisdom of a pastor in opening up the riches of S; rlpture throughout the liturgical year_ entphasl/Ing Ihemes of llher,ii on, Iove, and the challenge of laitltfulncss in our time...
...As the poet Robert Lax wrote in these pages in 1984, "When I was traveling, I'd meet theological students and people like that who had just encountered his books for the first time, and they'd always say, 'He was talking as though he was talking inside of me...
...S15 iphk...
...His ongoing conversion and autobiographical writings about it made him, as not a few commentators have noted, a symbol for a generation of American Catholics...
...1-57075-13N.2 ?.0pa,gee 520-00 peper LOAVES AND FISHES DO ROI I I Y DAY F,re strntl In Ihr»t.r., .11r rY,rn- lrrrnulrroIiurr br 1{nhrrr ('r,1r.t "[Juroihy Day's soul presses close upon us still: in the 'work+' she helped inspire--.and no less in her words, so luminous and passionaues so wedded to those of Christ Hunseli...
...The journey is lung (over 2,600 pages), but by midway through I got into the rhythm of Merton's days and the pattemsof his thinking, found him credible and sympathetic, and found myself reading between the lines...
...and anachronistic ("If [the Franciscans] were tonsured..., it would be a fine Order...
...he was scandalized by "the shoddiness, the laziness of my response...
...and why it retains its astonishing impact- "A beautiful and stirring portrait.' - JONATHAN KOZOL 1-5707.5-118-S Photos 2U5 pages 514•(X) paper Commonweal 37 September 12,1997...
...loll pp W The Journals of Thomas Merton Volumes 1-5 Edited by Patrick Hart, Jonathan Montaldo, Lawrence S. Cunningham, Vincent A. Kramer, and Robert E. Daggy HarlxrSariFrrrnci.'.co...
...He was just as prickly and relentless with himself, struggling to go "beyond the surface to have full confidence in the deep action of God's laws and his will...
...From these journals, which testify to the profundity, dynamism, and scope of the church's tradition, I took renewed hope for the possibility of belief...
...Merton first wrote to Milosz in 195(3, and they cor responded until Merton's sudden death a decade later...
...As most readers will know, Merton's most successful book, The S{vei: Storey Mountain (1948), was also autobiographical, the story of his conversion...
...For my own part," Merton wrote in 1965, "the gift [of Christian faith] has been too great to be trifled with...
...But his writing in these journals is rawer and more ambiguous and, for me, richer and more persuasive...
...El Bernard G. Prusak, Commonweal's editorial assistant, is a first-year graduate student in philosophy at Boston University...
...the first volume is also clogged by a textboxok piety that made nit: shud der at the thought of having to read another 1,2M pages to write this review...
...would be ready to follow Iyoul in five volumes through a vision of the world redeemed by Christ...
...He turned scathing (and funny) against monastic rigorism and skeptical of American Catholic culture: "But Father...
...To Corn+ro mwrrel 36 ,cplerulrrr 12, 1997 think there are still people Catholicswho can talk [like Chesterton, with whom "everything is 'of course,"quite obviously,' etc., etc...
...l-errIgan stakes the prophet speak it) us anew...
...530 (cloth) Bernard Go Prusak riling to Thomas Merton in %0, the poet Czeslaw Mi ~s'rM reflected that we mo d orns "lack an image of the vrdo•r'd by religion...
...RIHI:RT ('01.15 1-17075-150-0 2 5 poses S1300 -paper CRY OF THE EARTH, CRY OF THE POOR I-t[)N ARII() Bt)1-I Boll-links the spirit o! Iiheration thenln_gs 5, tilt the urgent challenge of ecolo<c\ to proside a new, earth-e in hrtictng %ision of faith...
...the second volume has flashes of the older Merton's twinkling, self-deprecatory wit and attests to his increasing disquietude with "the rosy picture I have painted of our life...
...and imagine they know the answers...
...Though such exaltation occasionally got to Merton's head-"My vocation is...
...Milosz was that reader, and he wanted to learn what was Merton's "image of the world...
Vol. 124 • September 1997 • No. 15
