There were many ruined monasteries in those mountains. My mind goes back with great reverence to the thought of those clean, ancient stone cloisters, those low and mighty rounded arches hewn and set in place by monks who have perhaps prayed me where I now am. St. Martin and St. Michael the Archangel, the great patron of monks, had churches in those mountains. Saint Martin-du-Canigon; Saint Michel-de-Cuxa. Is it any wonder I should have a friendly feeling about those places?
One of them, stone by stone, followed me across the Atlantic a score of years later, and got itself set up within convenient reach of me when I most needed to see what a cloister looked like, and what kind of place a man might live in, to live according to his rational nature, and not like a stray dog. St. Michel-de-Cuxa is all fixed up in a special and considerably tidy little museum in an uptown park, in New York, overlooking the Hudson River, in such a way that you don't recall what kind of a city you are in. It is called The Cloisters. Synthetic as it is, it still preserves enough of its own reality to be a reproach to everything else around it, except the trees and the Palisades.
But when the friends of my father and mother came to Prades, they brought the newspapers, rolled up in their coat pockets, and they had many postcards carrying patriotic cartoons, representing the Allies overcoming the Germans. My grandparents--that is, my mother's father and mother in America--were worried about her being in a land at war, and it was evident that we could not stay much longer at Prades.
I was barely a year old. I remember nothing about the journey, as we went to Bordeaux, to take the boat that had a gun mounted on the foredeck. I remember nothing about the crossing of the sea, nothing of the anxiety about U-boats, or the arrival in New York, and in the land where there was no war. But I can easily reconstruct the first encounter between my American grandparents and their new son-in-law and their grandson.
For Pop, as my American grandfather was called in the family, was a buoyant and excitable man who, on docks, boats, trains, in stations, in elevators, on buses, in hotels, in restaurants, used to get keyed up and start ordering everybody around, making new arrangements, and changing them on the spur of the moment. My grandmother, whom we called Bonnemaman, was just the opposite, and her natural deliberateness and hesitancy and hatred of activity always seemed to increase in proportion to Pop's excesses in the opposite direction. The more active Pop became and the more he shouted and gave directions, the more hesitant and doubtful and finally inert was my grandmother. But perhaps this obscure and innocent and wholly subconscious conflict had not yet developed, in 1916, to the full pitch of complication which it was to attain some fifteen years later.
This little passage from The Seven Storey Mountain seems, for me, to embody some of the conflicts that exist in Thomas Merton as a person. He was a man of the world (like his parents and grandparents--full of excitements and passions and hesitance) and a man trying to transcend the world (hence, his affinity for the monasteries and The Cloisters in New York). I think he, for most of his life, searched for ways to slough off all his human failings. He was a human caterpillar trying to become a butterfly, if that makes sense.
In a way, I think that describes most people. I've spent most of my life trying to find happiness and contentment, through relationships and jobs and writing and religion. Very few people are able to reach the butterfly stage--the human condition that's closest to divine. Jesus Christ. Mahatma Gandhi. Joan of Arc. Abraham Lincoln. Martin Luther King. Dorothy Day. You will note that, in this list of people, most of them ended up being assassinated. Caterpillar humans have a hard time with butterfly humans for some reason. I think it has something to do with the fact that imperfect people resent and sometimes hate those who physically embody the best we can be. It's why so many saints end up being martyred.
Don't get me wrong. Gandhi and Lincoln and Martin Luther King and Dorothy Day were not perfect, by any means. They struggled with their humanity, like everyone else. Gandhi harbored racist notions against black South Africans. Lincoln suffered from severe depression. Martin Luther King purportedly had extramarital affairs (although this claim has been refuted by many sources). Dorothy Day lived with at least two men, and ended up having an abortion. My point is that human beings, even those who reach the level of public and popular beatification, are deeply flawed, as well. However, their accomplishments on behalf of humanity (the independence of India from British rule, emancipation of slaves in the United States, equal rights for African Americans, housing and food for the homeless) are felt as a threat to people who haven't quite reached the butterfly stage in development.
There is a movement to beatify Thomas Merton. There is also a movement, backed by many Catholic leaders and thinkers, to insure this doesn't happen. Some 50 years after his death, Merton is still seen as a threat by Catholics who prefer the status quo, who don't see faith as a living, breathing entity that needs to adapt and change in order to survive.
I like to think of myself as a more evolved caterpillar. Not completely caterpillar. Not completely butterfly. That's where I prefer to exist. I'm striving to be the best I can be, like anyone else on this planet. I try to be kind to everyone (and don't always succeed). I try to accept everyone for who they are (and don't always succeed). I try not to be judgmental (and REALLY fail at this). In short, I am seriously flawed.
But people like Gandhi and Lincoln and Martin Luther King and Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton (despite their flaws) make me believe that I can do better. Be better.
Saint Marty is always a work in progress. A caterpillar in search of his wings.
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