The 20th Century theologian philosopher and
Trappist monk Thomas Merton explored what it meant for each of us to be called
to become saints. The following
excerpts from the official biography of Thomas Merton, The Seven Mountains
of Thomas Merton, illustrate Merton’s, and through extension our own,
spiritual journey to become saints.
“According to Robert Lax, nobody argued with Merton about
his being a Catholic – neither did they argue about the Spanish Civil War or
Pope Joan with Merton. Merton [in his autobiography]
lists more arguments that usual for those years, but only two with Lax, the
debate over mortification, and the one on November 30, 1939. . . .On the night
in November when [the reasons for Merton’s lack of success with his published
article writing] became too heated, Lax tried to get Merton to focus on his
real aims. Did he want to be a poet, a
novelist, an essayist, a critic? “What
do you want to do anyway?”
The
question threw Merton back on the inner debate he had pursued since his baptism
the November before. He struggled now
with his priorities. The answer he gave
was that he wanted 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 though
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 become 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.
Lax had not said “by trying to become one.” By wanting to become a saint you could
become one, just as sufficient faith moved mountains. The idea Lax had planted was not to go away. For the time Merton turned to reading the
lives of the saints, not into himself.
it dismayed him to find both Lax and [Professor] Mark Van Doren closer
to an understanding of what it mean to lead a holy life than he was. He listed all the things that stood between
him and the way of poverty. Then he
decided the very lists were another distraction.” THE SEVEN MOUNTAINS OF THOMAS MERTON, p. 140, (internal quotation
marks omitted)
“By 1941,
Merton’s vocation was clear. It was not
to be a priest, not to enter a religious order, not to be a secular priest in
social work for the Church. These were
possible ways, not the end. The end he
sought was to be a saint. As Leon Bloy
had said: “The greatest sandess was not being a saint.”
This was
close to the aim Lax had set, with one important difference. Merton sought sainthood in struggle, not in
acceptance; in becoming, not in being.
All this is referred to obliquely in the journals. The reason is easy enough to
understand. The day-to-day struggle to
become a saint provided a dangerous opportunity for the very thing he was
avoiding. It had to be an almost
unspoken goal for Merton himself: it
would be disastrous to speak of it to others.
In the
Catholic Church perhaps the very process of canonization had caused the
greatest confusion. For the Protestant
sects of the seventeenth century, a saint was simply a believer. For Catholics, a saint was, at least in one
aspect, a show. In the case of a
“finished” saint this aspect made little difference.
Something
of a comparison could be drawn with Merton’s other vocation. There were complications in claiming you
were trying to become a poet. Often it
was s sure sign that a writer of verse was not a poet if he or she
insisted on this public recognition. To
an even great degree this was true of a saint.
One who claimed to be a saint was, by this very claim, shown to be
wanting in what is needed most for sainthood, humility. . . .
Just,
watchful, and secret. The man or woman
trying to be a saint hid any beginning of saintliness. There was no “show” in this; exactly the
opposite. St. Francis of Assisi, Merton
wrote, had hidden his stigmata in wrappings of old rags.
Merton
praised “Kierkegaard’s remarkable intuition that the greatest and most perfect
saints are those whose saintliness cannot be contained except beneath
some exterior that appears totally mediocre and normal, because it is an
incommunicable secret.”
Whether
Thomas Merton ever became a saint is thus totally irrelevant here – and henceforth
in these pages. That his vocation was
to be a saint is clear from 1941. In
terms of his true vocation, then, he had to decide which circumstances would be
enable him to become what he sought to become.
He had already talked of this, admittedly rather superficially, when he
compared the opportunities for sainthood in the two parishes in Miami.
Long after,
when visitors to the hermitage tried to chide him into admitting that he was
not “a true hermit,” Merton would ask, “What’s your idea of a hermit?” If the question gave him an easy out, it
also threw the visitor back on his or her own preconceptions of what a hermit
ought to be in order to be a “real one.”
What’s your idea of a saint?” THE
SEVEN MOUNTAINS OF THOMAS MERTON, pp. 186-87.
