Merton: My hero for a reason

My hero, Thomas Merton, was always about the “good” fight – first fighting his hedonistic nature, and then fighting the authorities of his Order who wouldn’t give him his hermitage, or his time for solitude, or his transfer, or his freedom to protest or to stand in solidarity. If he hadn’t fought that fight, I don’t know that he’d be who he was, and he’s so beloved, you can’t help but feel he was meant to do it. Those are the things I remember when I’m up to my eyeballs in a fight…those and that he got his snippets of the life he fought for and that they were so fruitful. It makes me feel it’s worth it to keep fighting, and yet then, there are mornings like today when there’s nothing to fight for or about and it all seems a little silly…or not even that so much as that I’m feeling how hard it is to drop my arms and enjoy the respite.

What I have this morning is temporary. A brief respite. A circumstantial respite. And yet again, maybe that’s all there is. Like Merton. He’d get heavily into contemplating leaving his order and then he’d think of all the problems that would come with it and his commitment, the promise he made, and his love of the Kentucky hills, and he’d decide leaving was too awful to face or staying too lovely to leave and he’d be back with himself and trying to make things right in his life from where he stood. But it was as if he was always yelling inside about the unfairness: “There’s no good reason that I’m denied what I know will most suit me. It’s no skin off of anyone else’s nose. I want to stay, want to honor my commitment, want to be this writer/monk I’ve become – but damn – why does it have to be made so difficult??”

Then he’d think he was arrogant to feel the way he did and that he was making himself special. He went through it all. The arrogance and the doubt, the self-worth and the self-loathing. That’s why I love him; why he’s my hero. I so love him for sharing all of that with me. I can forgive him his arrogance because of his doubt. I can relate. It’s so clear to me that this is “him” – the fighting and the surrender – not a surrender to man but a surrender to God, and the fighting always about what he needed to be in that state of surrender to God – sort of unencumbered by the fight. Real paradoxical that.

But then he’d get his respite – and no matter how temporary he’d dwell there and marvel and be so grateful and let down his arms, and share from that place too – that’s the stuff most people love him for, I suppose, and maybe if you just read that stuff – the fruits, you’d think it was easy and that he was a peaceful sort all the time. That he looked at all the big questions he contemplates from some place up above them, or something, but when you read his journals you know he looked at all the big questions because he confronted them in himself, and did all that wrestling with them.

He’s my hero for a reason.