I started a response to Rick's comment, and it turned into something too big for the comments. Anyway, hello again Rick, and I hope you don't mind me responding in a fuller post.
You know, I hadn't connected this post with the deaths on the same day of Barth and Merton, and the anniversary on Dec 10. Reading Rick's post which I appreciate, and his encounter with these two so different Christians resonates with much of my own pilgrimage. I do still read the best of Merton. His social critique of power, militarism, consumer driven culture, his later passion for human rights, and his way of connecting contemplative prayer with such issues in the search, vision, and activities of justice and peacemaking, these in our current global climate remain for me powerfully relevant.
Also like Rick, Barth remains a regular conversation partner, though he writes at times with such theological impetus it tends to make the conversation one sided. A contemplative monk with a hunger for justice and righteousness, and the Reformed Professor of Dogmatics par excellence, whose own theology was forged in resistance to immense forces of evil bent on violence; together they demonstrate a faith capable of wide divergence in experience and articulation, and yet with significant convergence in their understanding of the redemptive goals of God.
Barth's doctrines of God, creation, humanity, sin and reconciliation in Christ, are massive expositions of that transcendent mystery that for both Merton and Barth, provide the proper content of a Christian mysticism. The later Merton, whose interests moved to inter-faith dialogue and speculative connections with Eastern faith traditions, I find is less convincing as an authentic Christian response to the modern world – the scandal of Christ is not so easily dissolved. But the generous out-reaching impulse that drove Merton to the East in a quest for truth and unity for the human spirit, and the trajectory in Barth that has led many to speak of his universalism, latent or intentional, argue that these two so different Christian thinkers were pushing boundaries most of us are (righlty?) a bit scared of.
In any case – as Rick's post indicates, the contemporaneity of these two influential Christians, and the coincidence of their deaths on the same day, provide food for reflection and respectful remembering. And I'm grateful you made the connection Rick. The photos above show Merton gazing ahead and with a crucifix beside him; Barth is also looking up, maybe to that central panel of the crucifixion in the Isenheim altarpiece, "Behold the Lamb of God". And so, in proximity to the Cross, these two divergent spirits reach a point of convergence, in that one place where differences of doctrine, and dividing walls of hostility, are resolved in the reconciling love of God.
Leave a Reply