Merton delves into Eastern mysticism . . .
The point of his title was this: we cannot use evil means to attain a good end. Huxley’s chief argument was that we were using the means that precisely made good ends impossible to attain: war, violence, reprisals, rapacity. And he traced our impossibility to use the proper means to the fact that men were immersed in the material and animal urges of an element in their nature which was blind and crude and unspiritual.
The main problem is to fight our way free from subjection to this more or less inferior element, and to reassert the dominance of our mind and will: to vindicate for these faculties, for the spirit as a whole, the freedom of action which it must necessarily have if we are to live like anything but wild beasts, tearing each other to pieces. And the big-conclusion from all this was: we must practice prayer and asceticism.
Asceticism! The very thought of such a thing was a complete revolution in my mind. The word had so far stood for a kind of weird and ugly perversion of nature, the masochism of men who had gone crazy in a warped and unjust society. What an idea! To deny the desires of one’s flesh, and even to practice certain disciplines that punished and mortified those desires: until this day, these things had never succeeded in giving me anything but gooseflesh. But of course Huxley did not stress the physical angle of mortification and asceticism—and that was right, in so far as he was more interested in striking to the very heart of the matter, and showing the ultimate positive principle underlying the need for detachment.
He showed that this negation was not something absolute, sought for its own sake: but that it was a freeing, a vindication of our real selves, a liberation of the spirit from limits and bonds that were intolerable, suicidal —from a servitude to flesh that must ultimately destroy our whole nature and society and the world as well.
Not only that, once the spirit was freed, and returned to its own element, it was not alone there: it could find the absolute and perfect Spirit, God. It could enter into union with Him: and what is more, this union was not something vague and metaphorical, but it was a matter of real experience. What that experience amounted to, according to Huxley, might or might not have been the nirvana of the Buddhists, which is the ultimate negation of all experience and all reality whatever: but anyway, somewhere along the line, he quoted proofs that it was and could be a real and positive experience.
The speculative side of the book—its strongest—was full, no doubt, of strange doctrines by reason of its very eclecticism. And the practical element, which was weak, inspired no confidence, especially when he tried to talk about a concrete social program. Huxley seemed not to be at home with the Christian term “Love” which sounded extraordinarily vague in his contexts—and which must nevertheless be the heart and life of all true mysticism. But out of it all I took these two big concepts of a supernatural, spiritual order, and the possibility of real, experimental contact with God.
Huxley was thought, by some people, to be on the point of entering the Church, but Ends and Means was written by a man who was not at ease with Catholicism. He quoted St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila indiscriminately with less orthodox Christian writers like Meister Eckhart: and on the whole he preferred the Orient. It seems to me that in discarding his family’s tradition of materialism he had followed the old Protestant groove back into the heresies that make the material creation evil of itself, although I do not remember enough about him to accuse him of formally holding such a thing. Nevertheless, that would account for his sympathy for Buddhism, and for the nihilistic character which he preferred to give to his mysticism and even to his ethics. This also made him suspicious, as the Albigensians had been, and for the same reason, of the Sacraments and Liturgical life of the Church, and also of doctrines like the Incarnation.
With all that I was not concerned. My hatred of war and my own personal misery in my particular situation and the general crisis of the world made me accept with my whole heart this revelation of the need for a spiritual life, an interior life, including some kind of mortification. I was content to accept the latter truth purely as a matter of theory: or at least, to apply it most vociferously to one passion which was not strong in myself, and did not need to be mortified: that of anger, hatred, while neglecting the ones that really needed to be checked, like gluttony and lust.
But the most important effect of the book on me was to make me start ransacking the university library for books on Oriental mysticism.
I remember those winter days, at the end of 1937 and the beginning of 1938, peaceful days when I sat in the big living room at Douglaston, with the pale sun coming in the window by the piano, where one of my father’s water-colors of Bermuda hung on the wall.
The house was very quiet, with Pop and Bonnemaman gone from it, and John Paul away trying to pass his courses at Cornell. I sat for hours, with the big quarto volumes of the Jesuit Father Wieger’s French translations of hundreds of strange Oriental texts.
I have forgotten the titles, even the authors, and I never understood a word of what they said in the first place. I had the habit of reading fast, without stopping, or stopping only rarely to take a note, and all these mysteries would require a great deal of thought, even were a man who knew something about them to puzzle them out. And I was completely unfamiliar with anything of the kind. Consequently, the strange great jumble of myths and theories and moral aphorisms and elaborate parables made little or no real impression on my mind, except that I put the books down with the impression that mysticism was something very esoteric and complicated, and that we were all inside some huge Being in whom we were involved and out of whom we evolved, and the thing to do was to involve ourselves back in to him again by a system of elaborate disciplines subject more or less to the control of our own will. The Absolute Being was an infinite, timeless, peaceful, impersonal Nothing.
The only practical thing I got out of it was a system for going to sleep, at night, when you couldn’t sleep. You lay flat in bed, without a pillow, your arms at your sides and your legs straight out, and relaxed all your muscles, and you said to yourself:
“Now I have no feet, now I have no feet ... no feet... no legs ... no knees.”
Sometimes it really worked: you did manage to make it feel as if your feet and legs and the rest of your body had changed into air and vanished away. The only section with which it almost never worked was my head: and if I had not fallen asleep before I got that far, when I tried to wipe out my head, instantly chest and stomach and legs and feet all came back to life with a most exasperating reality and I did not get to sleep for hours. Usually, however, I managed to get to sleep quite quickly by this trick. I suppose it was a variety of auto-suggestion, a kind of hypnotism, or else simply muscular relaxation, with the help of a little work on the part of an active fancy.
Near the end of his life, Merton got himself into a lot of trouble because of his interest in Eastern religions. In fact, he died in Thailand while attending a conference on monasticism and ecumenism. While he seems more than a little skeptical here--seems even to be mocking the practice of meditation--Merton later embraced worldwide unity and universality.
I sometimes struggle with these passages in Merton that seem so lofty and removed from anything human and real. But, of course, that's how most saints and holy people come to God--through their own weaknesses and failings. Because that's really the only way light enters into dark places--through the cracks and fissures and seams.
I am probably the most human person on this planet. Every day, I fail at something important. Working. Fathering. Husbanding. Friending. Poeting. Christianing. Tonight, I am exhausted after a day of trying to be the person everyone expects me to be. Doing the things everyone expects me to do. Expectations are exhausting.
I should be in bed right now. Asleep. I have another long day of work and grading and forcing my son to do his schoolwork tomorrow. Instead, I'm sitting on my couch, watching Greta Gerwig's adaptation of Little Women. It's the fourth time I've watched it since Saturday. I guess you could call it my latest obsession.
I find something very comforting in the story of Jo March. Her messy life makes me somehow feel not quite so . . . alien. Of course, it's fiction, written over 150 years ago. A different time. A different place. The country recovering from the Civil War. Women, slave to social customs and mores. Men, expected to hold down jobs, support their families, be upstanding citizens. Expectations again.
Louisa May Alcott, and her main character, didn't really care what other people thought about them. Alcott wanted to be a successful, serious writer, and she succeeded in that ambition. Wildly succeeded. In her lifetime, she was one of the most famous writers in the United States (and the world, for that matter).
I have a lot of things I need to get done in the next week, before I can get on with the real enjoyment of the holiday season. Teaching and work stuff. Obligations I really do need to meet. I don't like disappointing anyone. Never have. In fact, I like surprising people. Doing things that actually rise above everyone's expectations.
That's a lot of pressure. And that's why I'm really tired at the moment.
Charles Dickens used to write all day long and then walk 10 or 20 miles every night. Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol in six weeks. Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women in three months. It takes me three or four hours just to pound out one, small blog post.
Dickens wasn't perfect. Alcott wasn't. I'm certainly not, either. Of course, Dickens and Alcott were geniuses. Me? I'm a father, husband, friend, teacher, poet, musician, actor, director. I make mistakes. Often. Every day. But that's okay. That's how the light gets in. How God gets in.
Saint Marty gives thanks tonight for the miracle of his failings.
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