January 26: I Can't Be a Saint, Surrender to It, Wholly Weak and Fragile

 Merton learns what it takes to become a saint . . . 

I am not sure whether this conception of his necessarily implied a specific vocation, a definite and particular mission: but in any case, he assumed that it was the sort of thing that should be open to me, to Gibney, to Seymour, to Mark Van Doren, to some writers he admired, perhaps even to somebody who did not know how to talk, but could only play a trumpet or a piano. And it was open to himself also: but for himself, he was definitely waiting to be “sent.” 

In any case, although I had gone before him to the fountains of grace, Lax was much wiser than I, and had clearer vision, and was, in fact, corresponding much more truly to the grace of God than I, and he had seen what was the only important thing. I think he has told what he had to say to many people besides myself: but certainly his was one of the voices through which the insistent Spirit of God was determined to teach me the way I had to travel. 

Therefore, another one of those times that turned out to be historical, as far as my own soul is concerned, was when Lax and I were walking down Sixth Avenue, one night in the spring. The street was all torn up and trenched and banked high with dirt and marked out with red lanterns where they were digging the subway, and we picked our way along the fronts of the dark little stores, going downtown to Greenwich Village. I forget what we were arguing about, but in the end Lax suddenly turned around and asked me the question: 

“What do you want to be, anyway?” 

I could not say, “I want to be Thomas Merton the well-known writer of all those book reviews in the back pages of the Times Book Review,” or “Thomas Merton the assistant instructor of Freshman-English at the New Life Social Institute for Progress and Culture,” so I put the thing on the spiritual plane, where I knew it belonged and said: 

“I don’t know; I guess what I want is to be a good Catholic.” 

“What do you mean, you want to be a good Catholic?” 

The explanation I gave was lame enough, and expressed my confusion, and betrayed how little I had really thought about it at all. 

Lax did not accept it. 

“What you should say”—he told me—“what you should say is that you want to be a saint.” 

A saint! The thought struck me as a little weird. I said: 

“How do you expect me to become a saint?” 

“By wanting to,” said Lax, simply. 

“I can’t be a saint,” I said, “I can’t be a saint.” And my mind darkened with a confusion of realities and unrealities: the knowledge of my own sins, and the false humility which makes men say that they cannot do the things that they must do, cannot reach the level that they must reach: the cowardice that says: “I am satisfied to save my soul, to keep out of mortal sin,” but which means, by those words: “I do not want to give up my sins and my attachments.” 

But Lax said: “No. All that is necessary to be a saint is to want to be one. Don’t you believe that God will make you what He created you to be, if you will consent to let Him do it? All you have to do is desire it.” 

A long time ago, St. Thomas Aquinas had said the same thing—and it is something that is obvious to everybody who ever understood the Gospels. After Lax was gone, I thought about it, and it became obvious to me. 

The next day I told Mark Van Doren: 

“Lax is going around saying that all a man needs to be a saint is to want to be one.” 

“Of course,” said Mark. 

All these people were much better Christians than I. They understood God better than I. What was I doing? Why was I so slow, so mixed up, still, so uncertain in my directions and so insecure? 

So at great cost I bought the first volume of the Works of St. John of the Cross and sat in the room on Perry Street and turned over the first pages, underlining places here and there with a pencil. But it turned out that it would take more than that to make me a saint: because these words I underlined, although they amazed and dazzled me with their import, were all too simple for me to understand. They were too naked, too stripped of all duplicity and compromise for my complexity, perverted by many appetites. However, I am glad that I was at least able to recognize them, obscurely, as worthy of the greatest respect. 

Merton's friend, Lax, seems to have a really simple way to become a saint:  you just have to want to be one.

It's all about recognizing the desire and surrendering to it.

I wonder if everything is that simple.  All you have to do is admit a desire and then surrender to it.  By that logic, I would have dated Claire Danes a long time ago.  I'd be a Nobel Prize-winning poet and have the net-worth of Jeff Bezos.  Instead of a tiny house in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, I'd be living in a mansion on Kauai.  

Yet, here I am, sitting in a dark living room at midnight, typing a blog post that I will send out into the world in a little while, not knowing if or when or how anyone will read it.  I will never win a Nobel for my "transcendent wisdom and beauty in the ethers of the social media universe."  I teach as a contingent English professor, and am currently worrying about how I'm going to pay for the brake job on my car.

Am I a saint?  Even though I've written 4,888 posts for a blog called Saint Marty, I am no closer to being a saint than Donald Trump.  (Okay, maybe a little closer than him.)  I am too vain to be a saint.  I like dirty jokes.  Drink, on occasion, to excess.  Get angry frequently.  Depressed frequently.  Argue with God frequently.  And my Christmas decorations are still up.

Do I want to be a saint?  Well, I want to make the world a better place.  I want the polar icecap to stop melting.  Want the entire planet to have the COVID-19 vaccine.  Homelessness and hunger to be eradicated.  A World Poet Laureate would be nice.  How about doing away with racism and sexism and misogyny and homophobia and xenophobia and Islamophobia?  Clean water and renewable energy sources all over the globe.  My son to do his homework.  

I want all of that.  Surrender to it.  Does that make me a saint?  A dreamer?  A fool?  

I'm imperfect, like any human being.  I accept that truth.  Embrace it.  As a Christian, I believe that God became human once.  Took on skin and muscle and bone.  Got hungry.  Sick.  Maybe fell in love with a person who didn't love him back.  Some people thought he was a prophet.  Some, the messiah.  Others thought he was a dreamer and fool.  A heretic and enemy.  In the gospel narratives, he is wholly weak and fragile.  And wholly divine.

That tells me that, even with all my flaws and failings (and there are MANY), I can still be an agent for good in the universe.  Can make a difference.  

I surrender to that.

Maybe Marty is on his way to canonization, after all.

December 11: Saints to Send, Warming Center, George Bailey

 Merton meets a Hindu mystic . . . 

It was the end of the school year, June 1938, when Lax and Seymour already had a huge box in the middle of the room, which they were beginning to pack with books, when we heard Bramachari was again coming to New York. 

I went down to meet him at Grand Central with Seymour, and it was not without a certain suppressed excitement that I did so, for Seymour had me all primed with a superb selection of lies about Bramachari’s ability to float in the air and walk on water. It was a long time before we found him in the crowd, although you would think that a Hindu in a turban and a white robe and a pair of Keds would have been a rather memorable sight. But all the people we asked, concerning such a one, had no idea of having seen him. 

We had been looking around for ten or fifteen minutes, when a cat came walking cautiously through the crowd, and passed us by with a kind of a look, and disappeared. 

“That’s him,” said Seymour. “He changed himself into a cat. Doesn’t like to attract attention. Looking the place over. Now he knows we’re here.” 

Almost at once, while Seymour was asking a porter if he had seen anything like Bramachari, and the porter was saying no, Bramachari came up behind us. 

I saw Seymour swing around and say, in his rare, suave manner: 

“Ah, Bramachari, how are you!” 

There stood a shy little man, very happy, with a huge smile, all teeth, in the midst of his brown face. And on the top of his head was a yellow turban with Hindu prayers written all over it in red. And, on his feet, sure enough: sneakers. 

I shook hands with him, still worrying lest he give me some kind of an electric shock. But he didn’t. We rode up to Columbia in the subway, with all the people goggling at us, and I was asking Bramachari about all the colleges he had been visiting. Did he like Smith, did he like Harvard? When we were coming out into the air at 116th Street, I asked him which one he liked best, and he told me that they were all the same to him: it had never occurred to him that one might have any special preference in such things. 

I lapsed into a reverent silence and pondered on this thought. 

I was now twenty-three years old and, indeed, I was more mature than that in some respects. Surely by now it ought to have dawned on me that places did not especially matter. But no, I was very much attached to places, and had very definite likes and dislikes for localities as such, especially colleges, since I was always thinking of finding one that was altogether pleasant to live and teach in. 

After that, I became very fond of Bramachari, and he of me. We got along very well together, especially since he sensed that I was trying to feel my way into a settled religious conviction, and into some kind of a life that was centered, as his was, on God. 

The thing that strikes me now is that he never attempted to explain his own religious beliefs to me—except some of the externals of the cult, and that was later on. He would no doubt have told me all I wanted to know, if I had asked him, but I was not curious enough. What was most valuable to me was to hear his evaluation of the society and religious beliefs he had come across in America: and to put all that down on paper would require another book. 

He was never sarcastic, never ironical or unkind in his criticisms: in fact he did not make many judgements at all, especially adverse ones. He would simply make statements of fact, and then burst out laughing—his laughter was quiet and ingenuous, and it expressed his complete amazement at the very possibility that people should live the way he saw them living all around him. 

He was beyond laughing at the noise and violence of American city life and all the obvious lunacies like radio-programs and billboard advertising. It was some of the well-meaning idealisms that he came across that struck him as funny. And one of the things that struck him as funniest of all was the eagerness with which Protestant ministers used to come up and ask him if India was by now nearly converted to Protestantism. He used to tell us how far India was from conversion to Protestantism—or Catholicism for that matter. One of the chief reasons he gave for the failure of any Christian missionaries to really strike deep into the tremendous populations of Asia was the fact that they maintained themselves on a social level that was too far above the natives. The Church of England, indeed, thought they would convert the Indians by maintaining a strict separation—white men in one church, natives in a different church: both of them listening to sermons on brotherly love and unity. 

But all Christian missionaries, according to him, suffered from this big drawback: they lived too well, too comfortably. They took care of themselves in a way that simply made it impossible for the Hindus to regard them as holy—let alone the fact that they ate meat, which made them repugnant to the natives.

I don’t know anything about missionaries: but I am sure that, by our own standards of living, their life is an arduous and difficult one, and certainly not one that could be regarded as comfortable. And by comparison with life in Europe and America it represents a tremendous sacrifice. Yet I suppose it would literally endanger their lives if they tried to subsist on the standard of living with which the vast majority of Asiatics have to be content. It seems hard to expect them to go around barefoot and sleep on mats and live in huts. But one thing is certain: the pagans have their own notions of holiness, and it is one that includes a prominent element of asceticism. According to Bramachari, the prevailing impression among the Hindus seems to be that Christians don’t know what asceticism means. Of course, he was talking principally of Protestant missionaries, but I suppose it would apply to anyone coming to a tropical climate from one of the so-called “civilized” countries. 

For my own part, I see no reason for discouragement. Bramachari was simply saying something that has long since been familiar to readers of the Gospels. Unless the grain of wheat, falling in the ground, die, itself remaineth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. The Hindus are not looking for us to send them men who will build schools and hospitals, although those things are good and useful in themselves—and perhaps very badly needed in India: they want to know if we have any saints to send them. 

Bramachari appears first in this passage as a cat.  A little magical realism on the part of Thomas Merton.  Then Bramachari materializes and teaches Merton a few things.  While Merton seems to mock Hinduism (calling it a "cult"), he also touches upon some hard truths about Christians--that they are kind-hearted, well-intentioned, but dedicated to maintaining social status and class.  Feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, caring for the sick--that's all well and good, as long as you can go home at night, eat your pot roast, and watch a little TV.  It's not about giving your all.  It's about giving what's left over.

I'm just as guilty as the next person on this account.  I don't live ascetically.  Sure, I struggle to pay bills all the time.  I worry about paychecks and my next contract to teach at the university.  Sometimes, I fall behind on payments.  Since the pandemic began, I have been playing a shell game with my money.  Robbing Peter to pay Paul, as my dad used to say.  

I'm not exactly middle class.  (I'm not sure a middle class exists in the United States anymore.)  Just like most Americans, I'm one or two paychecks away from losing my car or house.  One health crisis away from bankruptcy.  Those are the realities of living in the United States today, unless you are Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, or a Congressperson.  

Yet, I have a roof over my head.  Warm clothes.  A really cute puppy.  I'm not sitting on my couch worrying about how I'm going to feed my kids tomorrow.  And when I'm done typing this post, there's a warm bed waiting for me.  

This afternoon, on my way home from work, I drove by the Warming Center.  (If we were living during the Great Depression, I suppose the Warming Center would be called a soup kitchen.)  It was crowded with men and women.  In early December, in the middle of a pandemic, with local hospitals overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients, homelessness is surging, too.  People are cold and hungry and sick.

My favorite Christmas movie is It's a Wonderful Life.  For some reason, the story of George Bailey moves me deeply.  It's dark, filled with suicide and drinking and despair.  I, myself, have been on that bridge with George on more than one occasion.  Yet, like George, I'm reminded that I have friends who care a lot about me.  At the end of the film, George returns home, manically happy.  A sheriff is there with an arrest warrant for him.  George's response is one of my favorite lines:  "Isn't it wonderful?  I'm going to jail!"

Asceticism is about avoiding indulgence.  Living simply, sometimes in seclusion.  It's about relying on grace to take care of you.  Trusting in it.  Embracing struggle with open arms.  And being happy.  That's what Merton learns from Bramachari.  It's what I learn from George Bailey.  Every time.

Yes, I'm only teaching one class next semester.  That's a loss of around $6000 in income.  My daughter usually gets a tuition waiver because of my teaching.  That won't be available to her.  So she's going to have to take out a large student loan to pay for her classes.  But all of my contingent friends at the university have no classes to teach.  Their kids are going to have to take on even more debt than my daughter in order to attend classes this winter.  

From now until next September, I am going to be living a pretty ascetic existence.  Paycheck to paycheck.  I'm sure there will be moments when I will be on the bridge, contemplating the dark water below.  But, I have a lot of Clarences in my life to remind me of this important lesson:  ". . . [N]o man is a failure who has friends."

Saint Marty is thankful for the miracle of struggle and the blessings of angels.