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Thomas Merton, Karl Barth and the reconciling love of God

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.

11 December 2009
Thomas Merton: Warnings for careless theological bloggers

Thomas Merton on integrity and care in writing. I've broken his two paragraphs into six guidelines that should help quality assure hastily posted blogposts – or at least raise embarrassment levels amongst the pious but careless.

And in fairness to Merton, some of his strictures were directed at several of his own early overcooked spiritual writings.

"We who say we love God: why are we not anxious to be perfect in our art as we pretend we want to be in our service of God?

If we do not try to be perfect in what we write, perhaps it is because we are not writing for God after all….

It is depressing that those who serve God and love Him sometimes write so badly when those who do not believe in Him take pains to write so well.

I am not talking about grammar and syntax, but about having something to say and saying it in sentences that are not half dead….

The fact that your subject may be very important in itself does not necessarily mean that what you have written about it is important.

A bad book about the love of God remains a bad book…there are many who think that because they have written about God they have written good books." (From The Sign of Jonas, Harcourt Brace, 1979, pages 60-61)

10 December 2009
“Tiny as we are” (Jacques Maritain)

Jacques Maritain was one of the great Catholic intellectuals of the 20th Century. His book True Humanism deeply influenced Dorothy Day. Asking herself why she and ten other Catholics made a spectacle of themselves as a way of voicing opposition to war, why they made themselves "a spectacle to the world, to the angels and to men", she found the answer in her annotated personal copy of Maritain.

"We are turning towards men to speak and act among them, on the temporal plane, because, by our faith, by our baptism, by our confirmation, tiny as we are, we have the vocation of infusing into the world, wheresover we are, the sap and savor of Christianity."

Words like these transcend Christian differences, elude the grasp of categories, render traditions and denominations relative though not unimportant. These are words of Christian witness that vibrate with purpose, are born of authentic spiritual experience, sourced and resourced in Christian conviction, and as clear a statement of determined compassion as an indifferent world is likely to hear – even if it stopped long enough to listen. Maritain is both Catholic enough and Christian enough to recognise the foolishness that confounds the wise, to smile knowingly at the strength that resides in weakness as a paradox of grace, and to register a gentle defiance in that four word qualifier, "tiny as we are…"

The call to discipleship, the imperative mood of the Gospel, the uncompromising yet persuasive voice of Jesus calling us to follow faithfully after him, now, here, in our time and place – these are each implicitly present, and to be explicitly lived out in Maritain's one sentence missiology: "the vocation of infusing into the world, wheresoever we are, the sap and savor of Christianity." I am not so narrowly Baptist I don't recognise the authentic New Testament adventure of grace such vocation implies. Of course our capacity to infuse, and that which we infuse, is gift and grace, and mystery and mercy; and of course the different sacramental theology of Maritain feels like an annoying and persistent elbow in the ribs for self-respecting Baptists like myself. But I share the vocation because I hear the same voice, and it calls all God's people; I can only be the light of the world as Christ commanded, if Christ the light of the world radiates through my being; and that word savor (even with its American spelling), is a welcome if unnecessary reminder of how the function of salt is directly dependent on, well, its savor.

8 December 2009
Dorothy Day – the troublesome peacemaker peacefully making trouble

Paul Elie's book on 20th Century American Catholic writers weaves four lives together. One of them is Dorothy Day. One of the more sympathetic and thoughtful interpretations of what Day was about can be found in Volume 1 of James McClendon's Systematic Theology, subtitled Ethics.

Dorothy Day was about peacefully making trouble; and she was about guarding and protecting the vulnerable; and she was about building community using the flawed material of human lives often enough distorted through sin and suffering; and she was about hospitality as a habit of radical welcome in which each stranger is greeted as Christ.

Like many odd and hard to accommodate people, she was a Christian who inconveniently took Jesus seriously, and interpreted the Sermon on the Mount literally. As if Jesus could have actually meant, seriously intended, that his followers should love their enemies. As if turning the other cheek was any strategy for changing the world. As if forgiveness and peacemaking could be practiced with any hope of curbing brutality, converting hatred to love – as well expect people to beat their swords into ploughshares and so cultivate food instead of killing the enemy.

When Dorothy Day boarded the Greyhound bus to travel to Koinonia Farm run by Clarence Jordan, she did so for reasons of peacefully making trouble, and in doing so trying to convert trouble to peaceableness. The farm had been attacked by white supremacists and Ku Klux Klan members offended by the racial integration practiced on the farm – drive by shooting, arson, assault, vandalism, were commonplace. Dorothy Day took her place in the rota of those who stood guard overnight, in a truck parked under a light, and the truck was shot up by automatic weapon fire. She was unhurt. It seems a futile, reckless and provocative course of action, to put yourself in the line of fire. Flannery O'Connor made the astonishingly dismissive comment, "that's a mighty long way to come to get shot at, etc". There are those who would say that of Someone else – "that's a mighty long way to come to be crucified etc".

The picture of Dorothy Day shows the face of a troublesome peacemaker peacefully making trouble for the power holders, disturbing the peace of the status quo, a sharp fragment of gravel inside the boots of the troopers. The photo is a powerful Advent image. A poster sized copy is up on Stuart's study wall at the College – it is reproduced in Elie's book, and I think it is a stunning image of Christian resistance. Mess with the rest but don't mess with the best, huh?

8 December 2009
Hopkins, Hubble and Advent when “all is a prize”.

The image is the Hubble ultra image deep field. Now and then, well oftener than that, I go looking for Hubble images, clues not so much to the how of creation, but glimpses of the pure artistry of God. The beauty of space, where no matter how much we magnify and zoom, there is still the sense of infinite distance, unthinkable scale, not so much the final frontier as that which renders all frontiers relative. Sometimes image and poem coincide. Reading Hopkins I came across the poem below, The Starlight Night. Of course another of my favourite paintings is Van Gogh's Starry Night, and I like Don MacLean's rendering of Starry Starry Night as well.

Anyway. Advent. A time when stargazers saw something that changed the way they saw everything else. A time to have our frontiers rendered relative. A time when, as Hopkins says, all is a prize, and thus a time for prayer, patience, aims, vows.

The Starlight Night

Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies!

O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!

The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!

Down in dim woods the diamond delves! the elves’-eyes!

The grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold lies!

Wind-beat whitebeam! airy abeles set on a flare!

Flake-doves sent floating forth at a farmyard scare!—

Ah
well! it is all a purchase, all is a prize.

Buy then! bid then!—What?—Prayer, patience, aims, vows.

Look, look: a May-mess, like on orchard boughs!

Look! March-bloom, like on mealed-with-yellow sallows!

These are indeed the barn; within doors house

The shocks. This piece-bright paling shuts the spouse

Christ home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows.

7 December 2009
Miscellaneous fragments of experience – or noticing the spirituality of the present moment

Tea Break Haiku

Two dunked ginger snaps,

Whittard's cinnamon chai tea;

nearly Nirvana!

…

A half sentence in Dorthy Day's Journal,

"How to lift the heart to God,

our first beginning

and last end…"

…

Shortest book review ever, of Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain.

Not a bad summary of Christian witness either:

"The way to seek God is firsthand,

through religious experience.

So I have done.

Here is the story.

Now go, and do likewise."

…

At the end of Merton's autobiography a Latin motto;

SIT FINIS LIBRI, NON FINIS QAERENDI –

Let this be the end of the book,

not the end of the search.

Good motto for theologians who read their way towards God, and who believe much of the finding is in the seeking.

…

At church this morning we exchanged the peace.

An elderly member couldn't remember if she and I had already done it.

We had, but I suggested we do it again.

So we did – our own wee peace dividend.

…

The wrong prayers for the right

reason? The flesh craves

what the intelligence

renounces. Concede

the Amens. With the end

nowhere, the travelling

all, how better to get

there than on one's knees?

R S Thomas

…

The above miscellaneous thoughts come from the book I'm reading, the tea I'm drinking and odd moments of ordinary life. Spirituality is about all this kind of stuff – a good book, a favourite drink, the wish for peace, and for me as a reader and writer, those connections between thought written, read and lived in the flow of moments which accumulate into a life. Feeling wistful and uncertain today – and that's OK, I'm nervous about undisturbed certainty.

,

6 December 2009
Doughnut despise the day of small things :))

Grey morning mizzle,

forecast more of the same.

Leisurely drive to Largs on a mission

that proved fruitless.

Until….

Refuge in Nardini's

for a humanising pot of tea,

And a doughnut…..

A freshly made,

just tossed in lemon infused sugar,

3 inch radius and one inch deep,

crunchy crusted doughnut.

Our original mission forgotten.

For Mario the doughnut maker

mission accomplished….

two customers still smiling,

glowing all the way home.

5 December 2009
“Glory makes it possible to see glory.”

"Perhaps in no area of theology is it more improtant to keep in mind than in Trinitarian theology, that the object upon which we reflect is another 'subject' or 'self', namely, the God who relentlessly pursues us to become partners in communion.God who is Love chooses to be known by love, thus theological knowledge is personal knowledge.

Theological knowledge is as much a matter of 'being grasped by God' as 'grasping God', of 'being conceived by God' as conceiving God.

God can only be apprehnded, not comprehended, in the union of love that surpasses all words and concepts…to see God is to see with God's eyes. Glory makes it possible to see glory."

Catherine Mowry Lacugna, God For Us. The Trinity and Christian Life (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1991), page 332)

Hey, we had a fire drill the other day. In a few seconds I found myself outside having left my working library upstairs in my study and never gave a thought to that cliche question, "If there was a fire, which few books would you make sure you saved?" But if I had thought about it, one of them might have been my hardback copy of this book. I'm on my third re-read.

Catherine Lacugna died far too young. A promising and gifted theologian whose theologising was conducted as a literary form of doxology. This is, whatever the adjective means, a "great" book. C S Lewis once decried devotional writing and opted instead for the kind of theology you read with a pipe gripped in your teeth. With apologies to Lacugna for commending her book on the back of comments made by an Oxford Don whose paternalism and patriarchal tendencies are all too apparent, and who thought hard intellectual work required such a masculine symbolic aid to concentration as a chewed pipe, but I know what Lewis meant. Lacugna's book is theology as doxology, passionate thought meticulously researched, written out of personal conviction and an inner vision of the glory and beauty and goodness and truth that constitutes the essence of the Triune God, personal holy love in mutual relation.

She was one of the more conciliatory and authoritative feminist theologians, unwilling to assume hostility in those from whom she strongly differed in theological emphases. Her relational understanding of God provides a foundation for an entire systematics that sadly she did not live to write. And maybe she wouldn't have 'done' a systematic theology – systems are about control, constraint, predictability and management of ideas. Lacugna's theology does not lack rigour – but it breathes the spirit of intuition, privileges relational wisdom, expresses a fearlessly constructive urge, exudes contagious living urgency.

This book is on any reading list I prepare for a study of contemporary thought on the Trinity. Like the best of T F Torrance's work, from which it deeply differs, this is the tue theologian who prays, whose inner life is responsive to the truth she seeks in the inner life of the Triune God. It is not theologically flawless, but as theology offered in the spirit of doxology, it is exemplary. And an important companion in my early morning Advent reading – has anyone ever come across a Trinitarian take on Advent……., hmmm?

5 December 2009
Short story writers and people who don’t get out much…..

Short stories are an acquired taste. Sheila enjoys them. I have to persevere.

Book reviews can be hacked out blurb, or carefully crafted appreciation which is neither gushing nor keen to put down.

Books and Culture is one of my favourite sources of advice and warning about what's what and what's good on the book front.

So if you go to Books and Culture here you'll find a carefully crafted appreciation of the most recent volume of The Best American Short Stories.

This
is a book review as it should be – makes me want to read the book.
Encourages me to go against the grain of what I usually like reading.
Invites me to persevere.

Wouldn't
you, once you are drawn in by the first few sentences of this review,
written by someone who clearly knows a thing or two about the
cruciality of story?

"Fiction writers, people who by definition have chosen
as their life's work to sit at home, alone—often in their jammies—and
make things up. The world, as seen by people who don't get out much.

But the facts are all there on the evening news (or
we'd like to think at least they once were). We are awash in
information. What we need is understanding, some way of puzzling the
whole thing out, deciding what to make of all the goings-on.

Enter the short story writer—in a bathrobe—with a cup
of coffee, a compass, a thermometer, a flashlight, a spyglass, a
decoder ring."

4 December 2009
The uneasy relationship between mystical philosophy and the Incarnation…..

Paul Elie's book The Life You Save May Be Your Own (see the sidebar), combines literary crticism and biography. It is an account of the life and thought of four mid 20th Century American Catholic writers and activists, (Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy). He weaves four lives together in a spiritual narrative that explores the dynamic sources of energy in the spirituality of these four very different people.

Here is Elie commenting on a decisive moment in Thomas Merton's conversion, his discovery of God as necessarily beyond the conceptual controls of human thought. While reading The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy by Etienne Gilson,

Merton found a conception of God that he thought plausible and appealing. This God was not a Jehovah or a divine lawgiver, not a plague-sending potentate or a scourge of prophets, not the heavenly Father of Jesus Christ or the stern Judge waiting just past the gate at the end of time, but the vital animating principle of reality – 'pure act,' being itelf or per se, existence in perfection, outside of space and time, transcending all human imagery, calmly steadily, eternally being. "What a relief it was for me now to dsicover not only that no idea of ours, let alone any image, could adequately represent God, but also that we should not allow ourselves to be satisfied with any such knowledge of Him."

Two things about this – first this was the kind of reconfiguration of the inner life of intellect and devotion, that developed in Merton into theological humility, and therefore spiritual integrity.

But second, there is serious thought to be given to Merton's overstated but still valid warning, "we should not allow ourselves to be satisfied with any such knowledge of Him." The abstract and near impersonal conception of God articulated in classic mystical thought, can construe God as the Beyond in the Beyond and thereby render God remote and inaccessible. This is not necessarily an improvement on simplistic reductionist conceptions, even distortions, clung to by those desperate to make God more graspable.

Elie's comment above includes amongst reductionist claims, "the heavenly Father of Jesus Christ". It is precisely the Incarnation which creates in Christian thought the meeting place of the beyond and the now, the divine and the human, the incomprehensible and the revealed.

"Being itself begins to be" as Charles Wesley's nativity hymn so succinctly puts it. "In Him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell….the Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us….God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself…."

Advent – the liturgical Alpha point of the Christian Year, the four week journey into the mystery of knowing the love of God….that passes knowledge.

3 December 2009