For me, the experience of being Christian has been an experience of deep friendship, of a liturgical and narrative rhythm to my life, of being immersed in an intellectual view that explains the insights of all other worldviews without reduction and exceeds them. Above all, though, my experience of being Christian is an experience of the intensification of desire. To be a Christian is to long for the One beyond all things, the One present in Jesus Christ, “the fairest of the sons of men” (Psalm 45:2).
My experience of the provoking of this longing is, for me, inseparable from my experience of encountering many of my kindred spirits. I talked before about how, in this Substack, I want to introduce you to many of these literary and spiritual friends. At the beginning of my committed Christian life, I encountered some of these people, including the monk and writer Thomas Merton. Sometime in the middle of high school—I don’t remember when exactly—I read his autobiographical conversion story, The Seven Storey Mountain. Since then, he has been my fairly constant companion. His depiction of his conversion displayed a range of literary, intellectual, romantic, contemplative, and spiritual longings that exactly matched (and further inflamed) my own. I’ve now read most of his poetry, his spiritual writings like No Man is an Island and New Seeds of Contemplation, his passionate and bitter works of literary and social criticism and activism like Raids on the Unspeakable, his remarkable engagements with the religious and philosophical traditions of Asia like Mystics and Zen Masters and The Way of Chuang Tzu, and many, many other books and articles. I carry a copy of his prose poem “Hagia Sophia” with me at almost all times.
One text of his I had never read is his journals. Earlier this year, I began reading them, and just in the last couple of weeks finished the first volume, Run to the Mountain, and began the second, Entering the Silence. The first volume concludes just before Merton entered the Trappist Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky on December 13, 1941.
I want to present three texts of his, which are found toward the end of the first volume. I present these three texts because they display the Merton who is my kindred spirit, who is so much like me: suffused with longing for God—a longing that is deeply intellectual but also romantic to an almost adolescent degree, with the intensity and honesty, but also the naivete and self-absorption, found in adolescent love—a longing that enables him to see a similar longing wherever it can be found: in saints, in Buddhists, in pagan poets.
This last semester, I’ve been teaching a Natural Theology course to seminarians and an introduction to Catholic philosophy to candidates for the permanent diaconate. I offer these comments on three texts of Merton’s as a post-semester reflection: in light of my look back at my kindred spirits, this is what I have been thinking about as I teach a philosophical approach to God.
I
“Saint Theresa of Lisieux […] never, according to the world or to nature, did anything; who died; and who was inexplicably hailed right after her death by Catholics in every part of the world for her great saintliness […] She was a totally extraordinary saint, more extraordinary than even Saint John of the Cross or Saint Theresa of Avila, who rejoice in heaven in her, their little sister’s immense simplicity and love which includes also their love and their wisdom, because all their love and wisdom came from God and was all His. […] Not only was she not one whose religion was mawkish, or sentimental, or sloppy, or a luxury of polite and sensuous ecstasies, not even consolations at all—only the terrors of the abyss and the Dark Night, and in the midst of this she continually renounced, over and over, the benefits of all her prayers, rejected consolation, offered herself as a total sacrifice—allowed herself to be totally annihilated for Christ, in favor of sinners—with no reward, no recompense, not even heaven, which she would sacrifice to “faire du bien sur la terre.”” (Run to the Mountain, pages 431-433, entry for October 8, 1941)
In my junior year of high school, around the time I first read Merton, my Spanish teacher, a third-order Carmelite, introduced me to St. John of the Cross and his books The Ascent of Mount Carmel and The Dark Night of the Soul. Soon after that, my spiritual director at the time introduced me to the one I now regard as the greatest of the doctors of the Church, little St. Thérèse of Lisieux, and her incomparable The Story of a Soul.
Thérèse helps us see that to long for God is something really existentially weighty. It’s a matter of life and death. It’s a longing to be one with God—with the One Who is an infinite act of goodness, an infinite act of giving Himself for others. At the heart of reality is an infinite act of self-sacrifice: the Persons of the Trinity pour themselves out totally for one another—and they are not anything apart from their relations of giving themselves to each other. To long for God is, really, to long to be one with this self-sacrifice: to long to be a sacrifice for others.
Properly understood, Christian desire isn’t just a longing to be able to follow all the moral and spiritual rules. It isn’t just a longing for special knowledge or insights, or personal, private, subjective satisfaction (what the tradition calls “consolations.”) To long for God isn’t an economic proposition, such that I sacrifice myself now, so that I can have lots of personal pleasure later on, in heaven.
Rather, the desire that Christ gives us—the desire that reading people like John and Thérèse and Merton intensifies—is a desire to be a total sacrifice, both now and forever. Even heaven is to be “spent doing good on earth.” God, being simple, without parts, just is the act of eternally giving Himself to in creation, and, so, to be one with Him just is to be one with that act of doing good on earth. The proper, ordinary state of the Christian, both here and hereafter, is “a condition of complete simplity/(Costing not less than everything).” The reward one gains in seeking union with God just is a greater share in that self-emptying simplicity. “Well, thou good servant: because thou hast been faithful in a very little, have thou authority over ten cities” (Luke 19:17)—that is, have responsibility for them, care for them, be a total servant to them, die for them. To seek just is to find; to do the beatitudes is to already have one’s reward.
Merton saw that, early in her life, little Thérèse seemed to have a merely bourgeois, middle class, and self-satisfied life. The devotions to her continue to often look that way—gauche plaster statues, sickly sweet prayers. But under these exteriors, Merton found the most intense spiritual life. That intense spiritual life is a longing to get out of grasping after subjective satisfaction and to get away from thinking of myself as having nice neat borders, within which I have privacy, separation from others. The life of a saint is a life of entirely being a gift for others. That’s what it means to totally entrust oneself to God. That’s the life of living in both the dark night that comes when one’s longing for extrinsic rewards is shattered, and the joyful light that comes from being one with the One who lives entirely as a gift.
St. John of the Cross describes that “night”—that condition of entirely going out of oneself, of losing one’s images and concepts so that one can see reality and its true importance, of getting free of one’s narcissistic, egotistical self with its petty consolations, of losing oneself in love—in his remarkable poem “The Dark Night of the Soul”. The night of losing all motivation by subjective satisfaction, is both the most painful and the most joyful of nights. It’s the night in which one finally gets out of one’s petty self and achieves the freedom that comes when one is really, deeply, passionately united with one’s beloved, not for the sake of privately enjoying that union, but for the sake of the sheer goodness, beauty, and importance of the beloved. That is the night more loving than the rising sun!
Just as St. Thérèse’s life might look petty or superficial, so likewise when one looks at the Church, one often just sees, on the surface, political wrangling and factionalism, scandal and outrage, fussing over rules, boring and badly done events, half-baked programs. But under that absurd exterior, one finds the lives of the saints, the ones who have been drawn into the intense, divine life of love, that most abyssal darkness, that most brilliant of light. Finding that interior is like being given those rare moments in prayer when the chatter of thoughts and feelings and temptations keeps going on the surface of the mind, but Jesus leads you into that interior place, and you can look back at the turmoil on the surface without worry because with Jesus, you have sunk down to that place of loving confidence and peace, deep below that surface. So, likewise, in the Church: underneath all the political wrangling and scandal and banality, there is the burning heart of love, the earnest desire, the peace that really does pass all understanding.
Of course, I live all of this hardly at all! But how I long for that condition of faith, of being one with the total sacrifice that is God! And that’s why I say my experience of Christianity is fundamentally one of intense desire. Even if one isn’t living a life that exhibits deification much, one longs for it deeply!
II
“[God] alone is worthy of the highest love, since He is the pure Actuality which alone can satisfy our love of actuality and of Being. Our life is to love Him, and unless we do, we are lost in unhappiness and confusion. […] Supposing you see God in this way, and can conceive, then, that our life must be devoted to the striving to come to know Him as fully as possible. The Buddhists purify their intellects and wills so as to sink to a knowledge of Him where He awaits them in a kind of terrific passivity of nothingness, and Christian purify all their acts of will or of knowing, and are lifted, by His help, to the participation in His infinite actuality, where the most perfect and complete of all acts is to receive the vision of His actuality, “pure working.” This is the end of all our striving. Supposing we had reached that end: no activity of ours, no matter how “perfect” according to all our notions of charity, the perfection of moral action, would be anything but imperfect, not to say sinful, if we abandoned the highest of all acts—that of being lost in the contemplation of God’s pure actuality. Mariam meliorem partem elegit.” (Run to the Mountain, pages 424-425, entry for October 3, 1941)
In Christian philosophy, even the most abstract of formulations is shot through with mystical intensity. To call God pure actuality is to compare God to all the actual features of things that we can observe here and now. To call God pure actuality is to say that all the actualities—all the activities, all the perfections, all the good and real qualities of things here in the finite world—are always already first there in God, but in a unified way, with no mixture of imperfection. To call God pure actuality is to say that all the activities and perfections of this world are icons, showing us, in little glimpses, Who God is. To call God pure actuality is to say that God is the most intense of activities—which is self-giving, self-sacrificing love.
All the other activities, all the perfections in things, anything good and beautiful in creatures exists to reveal that pure actuality that God is. To long for anything is to long for God—and yet, all of the activities we can do or observe here are impure, shot through with decay and loss and imperfection. God is in all things but also beyond all things. To long for God is to long to leave behind creaturely things and just do that divine activity, that activity God is, of giving oneself away entirely in love. One can only do this activity if one receives it—I can’t make myself God. Only God can make me God. Only God can lead me into that interior place where He gives me all of his perfections and takes all that is mine upon Himself.
What Merton is able to see is that it’s not just Christians who share in this activity. Others—like Buddhists—do this too. One encounters God everywhere: in the reception of vision, in the nothingness of enlightenment. God is like nothingness because the activity He is, is an activity of entirely giving oneself away. To be is to give oneself away. When I don’t give myself away, when I hold onto myself or believe myself to be something that exists entirely on my own, I fail to fully be what I am. I can only be myself in losing myself, in giving myself away, in letting myself become one with the One Who entirely gives Himself away. The traditional Western images for this are not enough; we need the vision of the Buddhist lovers of wisdom too, images like how all things stand in a relation of dependent arising to one another, and how nothing exists apart from these relations of receiving oneself and immediately being given away.
III
“All of a sudden, I come across a couple [of lines of poetry] that not only do not make me laugh, but knock me right off my chair, I find them so impressive and excellent. “And Branwen looked toward Ireland, and toward the isle of the Mighty, to see if she could descry them. ‘Alas,’ said she, ‘that ever I was born; two islands have been destroyed because of me.’ Then she gave a great groan and there broke her heart. And they made her a four-sided grave and buried her on the banks of the Alaw.” […] This was out of the Mabinogion, which I had always avoided and laughed at. What is being talked about in the Mabinogion is more like Homer than Keats or Hugo, and therefore it is Romantic in a very different sense than Endymion. It has a sense of desolation, but desolation like that of the Old Testament prophets. It is the Religious desolation of real myth, and experience, and not the sentimental desolation of a fake myth and a vicarious experience—which is all the regular romantics, mostly, achieved.” (Run to the Mountain, page 435, entry for October 10, 1941)
To know God in Himself, we must rid ourselves of images. (Similarly, to relate to my friends, to my wife, to any person, as they are in themselves, I must rid myself of the images I have formed of them, and let them reveal themselves to me, as they really are.) And yet, normally, God also uses images to reveal Himself to me.
Like the young C.S. Lewis, Merton’s heart was kindled by “northern” myth, here, by the legends of the Welsh Mabinogion. These Celtic myths are full of the cries of the gulls on the shore and rocky crags, of desperate charges in battle and terrible defeats worthy of song. Like both Merton and Lewis, I spent my high school listening to a lot of Celtic music and reading a lot of Arthurian and other medieval legends. Those books are full of moments of theophanic desolation. Just the other day, I was reading to my children Howard Pyle’s telling of when Sir Percival comes to the castle of the Fisher King, and his heart is first seized by rapture at seeing the sea for the first time, and then desolation at discovering that the woman he has loved from afar for years is dead.
The world is full of desolation and heartbreak—and, raised into myth, even those aspects of the world are shown to be bearers of a terrible beauty, a beauty that awakens our longing for union with the One Who was crucified, and Who thereby made all suffering a means to union with Him. Romance and heartbreak, images and dark nights, fasting and feasting, the cataphatic and the apophatic: this is the Way to reach Him.
To be a committed Christian is to train one’s perception to see the world in a deeper way. (In some sense, the same is true of the committed Buddhist, Celtic pagan, and so on.) Ideally, this gives one a knack for seeing when a piece of writing or speaking reveals that the writer or speaker has really seen something about deep reality, and when he or she has not. Certain pieces of writing “ring true”; others do not. One finds one’s kindred spirits when their writing rings true, when it shows an image that does not obscure, but iconically reveals, the One beyond all images.