On the last day of January 1915, under the sign of the Water Bearer, in a year of a great war, and down in the shadow of some French mountains on the borders of Spain, I came into the world. Free by nature, in the image of God, I was nevertheless the prisoner of my own violence and my own selfishness, in the image of the world into which I was born. That world was the picture of Hell, full of men like myself, loving God and yet hating Him; born to love Him, living instead in fear and hopeless self-congratulatory hungers.
Now many hundreds of miles away from the house where I was born, they were picking up the men who rotted in the rainy ditches among the dead horses and the ruined seventy-fives, in a forest of trees without branches along the river Marne.
My father and mother were captives in that world, knowing they did not belong with it or in it, and yet unable to get away from it. The were in the world and not of it--not because they were saints, but in a different way: because they were artists. The integrity of an artist lifts a man above the level of the world without delivering him from it.
My father painted like Cezanne and understood the southern French landscape the way Cezanne did. His vision of the world was sane, full of balance, full of veneration for structure, for the relations of masses and for all the circumstances that impress an individual identity on each created thing. His vision was religious and clean, and therefore his paintings were without decoration or superfluous comment, since a religious man respects the power of God's creation to bear witness for itself. My father was a very good artist.
Neither of my parents suffered from the little spooky prejudices that devour the people who know nothing but automobiles and movies and what's in the ice-box and what's in the papers and which neighbors are getting a divorce.
I inherited from my father his way of looking at things and some of his integrity and from my mother some of her dissatisfaction with the mess the world is in, and some of her versatility. From both I got capacities for work and vision and enjoyment and expression that ought to have made me some kind of a King, if the standards the world lives by were the real ones. Not that we ever had any money: but any fool knows that you don't need money to get enjoyment out of life.
If what most people take for granted were really true--if all you needed to be happy was to grab everything and see everything and investigate every experience and then talk about it, I should have been a very happy person, a spiritual millionaire, from cradle even until now.
If happiness were merely a matter of natural gifts, I would never have entered a Trappist monastery when I came to the age of a man.
Thomas Merton wrote his conversion memoir as he was studying to become a Trappist monk. Therefore, his life was a fairly regimented one--divided between prayer time and work time and contemplation time and prayer time again. The only difference between Merton and the other monks or soon-to-be monks was that Merton used writing as a source of contemplation. The written word was one of his his main methods of communicating with God. At least, that's the deal he worked out with Dom Frederic Dunne, the abbot who oversaw Merton as a postulant at the Abbey of Gethsemani. Somehow, Dom Frederic understood the importance of the writing life to Merton's spiritual growth. Thank God.
It was my intention today to write this post much earlier. Unfortunately, it didn't happen the way I planned it. I played the pipe organ for Mass this morning, and then I came back home and took a very long nap. (I got to bed at around 3:30 a.m. after celebrating on New Year's Eve. Therefore, many of my good intentions remained simply good intentions.) I try to be regimented. I like schedules. Unfortunately, my life can be unpredictable, as well. When I finally woke up from my nap, I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening helping my sister make a turkey with all the fixings for New Year's dinner. That meant peeling potatoes and stripping the turkey carcass and cooking corn and fluffing stuffing. And then, after dinner, I helped clean up. My eleven-year-old son wanted to play some board games with me, so I found myself in a contest of Trivial Pursuit with my son, wife, and sisters. Then Dictionary Dabble.
That is how I came to be typing this post at ten o'clock at night.
My takeaway from the little Merton passage above is simple: you don't need money to enjoy life. This is something that I have to remind myself about a lot. I mean, A LOT. Perhaps that's what my Merton journey in 2020 is going to be about: looking for happiness. Finding happiness in unexpected places. Realizing that happiness isn't a matter of things or people or money or fame.
Who knows? Maybe Saint Marty will end up being a Trappist monk.
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