Snowstorm special!

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A Merton retreat for Lent!

As some of you know, I now offer online courses and retreats.

Information about the Merton retreat is here.

The home page of my professional website (really a blog acting like a website) is here.

Merton (born on this day in 1915) on the work of peace compared to the work of war

"If this task of building a peaceful world is the most important task of our time, it is also the most difficult. It will, in fact, require far more discipline, more sacrifice, more planning, more thought, more cooperation and more heroism than war ever demanded."

-Thomas Merton, who was born on this day in 1915
(died Dec. 10, 1968)

Cross-posted on Facebook.

Contemplation, winter day

This is a country whose center is everywhere
and whose circumference is nowhere.
You do not find it by traveling but by standing still.
Yet it is in this loneliness that the deepest activities begin.
It is here that you discover act without motion,
labor that is profound repose,
vision in obscurity,
and, beyond all desire,
a fulfillment whose limits extend to infinity.

Exhortation, Day, Sunday
Thomas Merton, A Book of Hours, ed. Kathleen Deignan

Christmas, a year ago

I have been reading a lot of Merton during Advent.

Coincidentally (or not), I put together this post exactly a year ago. My friend Ann Fontaine just posted the same quotation* on Facebook tonight. Friends think alike.

*Into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for Him at all, Christ has come uninvited... [More at the link "this post" above.]

With those for whom there is no room

Into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for Him at all, Christ has come uninvited. But because He cannot be at home in it, because He is out of place in it, and yet must be in it, His place is with those others for whom there is no room. His place is with those who do not belong, who are rejected by power because they are regarded as weak, those who are discredited, who are denied the status of persons, tortured, exterminated. With those for whom there is no room, Christ is present in this world. He is mysteriously present in those for whom there seems to be nothing but the world at its worst.
Thomas Merton
"The Time of the End Is the Time of No Room"
from Raids on the Unspeakable

The paragraph continues: For them, there is no escape even in imagination. They cannot identify with the power structure of a crowded humanity which seeks to project itself outward, anywhere, in a centrifugal flight into the void, to get out there where there is no God, no man, no name, no identity, no weight, no self, nothing but the bright, self-directed, perfectly obedient and infinitely expensive machine. This is part of a much longer Christmas essay of Merton's on eschatology, fear, and joy.

Thanks to Charlie Hawes, who began a Christmas sermon with this passage a few years ago and fixed it in my mind.

Photographs by Mev Puleo (1963-1996). These and other photographs by Mev visible here are available for purchase. Please contact Mark Chmiel at MarkJChmiel@gmail.com for further information.
 

Karl Barth and Thomas Merton - and Mozart

Note: I am writing this post on the weekend of December 11-13 but back-dating it to the day of the anniversary, the day I thought of it.

Karl Barth, considered by many to be the greatest Protestant theologian of the 20th century, author of the The Epistle to the Romans and the Church Dogmatics and principal author of the Barmen Declaration, and Thomas Merton, writer, Catholic convert, Trappist monk, spiritual seeker and teacher, died on the same day in 1968, December 10, and today we remember them both.

I remember them especially through the lens of Merton's short essay (from his journal) at the beginning of Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, one of two books that influenced and moved me during my conversion to Catholicism, which was also my time as an M.Div. student at Harvard Divinity School. The other book was Thoughts in Solitude. The Seven Storey Mountain never did much for me.

Here is the essay.


Karl Barth had a dream about Mozart.

Barth had always been piqued by the Catholicism of Mozart, and by Mozart's rejection of Protestantism. For Mozart said that "Protestantism was all in the head" and that "Protestants did not know the meaning of the Agnus Dei qui tollis peccata mundi."


Barth, in his dream, was appointed to examine Mozart in theology. He wanted to make the exam as favorable as possible, and in his questions he alluded pointedly to Mozart's masses.

But Mozart did not answer a word.

I was deeply moved by Barth's account of this dream and almost wanted to write him a letter about it. The dream concerns his salvation, and Barth perhaps is striving to admit that he will be saved more by the Mozart in himself than by his theology.

Each day, for years, Barth played Mozart every morning before going to work on his dogma.: unconsciously seeking to awaken, perhaps, the hidden sophianic Mozart in himself, the central wisdom that comes in tune with the divine and cosmic music and is saved by love, yes, even by eros. While the other, theological self, seemingly more concerned with love, grasps at a more stern, more cerebral agape: a love that, after all, is not in our own heart but only in God and revealed only to our head.

Barth says, also significantly, that "it is a child, even a 'divine' child, who speaks in Mozart's music to us." Some, he says, considered Mozart always a child in practical affairs (but Burckhardt "earnestly took exception" to this view). At the same time, Mozart, the child prodigy, "was never allowed to be a child in the literal meaning of that word." He gave his first concert at the age of six.

Yet he was always a child "in the higher meaning of that word."

Fear not, Karl Barth! Trust in the divine mercy. Though you have grown up to become a theologian, Christ remains a child in you. Your books (and mine) matter less than we might think! There is in us a Mozart who will be our salvation.

Thomas Merton
Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

New York: Doubleday/Image, 1965, 1966

pp. 11-12

Wisdom from Thomas Merton

Don’t set limits to the mercy of God.
Don’t believe that because you are not pleasing to yourself
you are not pleasing to God.
God does not ask for results.
God asks for love.

–Thomas Merton

Another quote I use in When in Doubt, Sing... Rediscovered it today. I don't know about you, but I need to remember this one.

"His place is with those others for whom there is no room." Merton does it again

St. Mary's House Chaplain, my friend and colleague the Rev. Kevin Matthews, began his Christmas sermon with the words below from the writings of Thomas Merton. I just poked around and found them on the Web, quoted by various preachers in various places, but I don't know the source yet (i.e. from which book or essay they are taken). Neither did Kevin, who found the quote among some notes he had. [P.S. Late Dec. 25 . I found the reference. It's from Merton's Raids on the Unspeakable.] He's sending me a copy of his sermon, but meanwhile, the heart of the matter, from our favorite monk.

The line breaks are mine, for better reading and hearing.

Into this world,
this demented inn,
in which there is absolutely no room for him at all,
Christ has come uninvited.
But because he cannot be at home in it,
because he is out of place in it,
and yet he must be in it,
his place is with those others for whom there is no room.

His place is with those who do not belong,
who are rejected by power because they are regarded as weak,
those who are discredited,
who are denied the status of persons,
tortured,
excommunicated.
With those for whom there is no room,
Christ is present in this world.

If Thomas Merton were alive today, he'd have a blog

I'm just sayin'.