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.
