Confirmation

“What on earth am I doing here?” Merton asked himself in a journal entry, mid-November 1957. I have answered it a million times. “I belong here” and that is no answer. In the end, there is no answer like that. Any vocation is a mystery and juggling with words does not make it any clearer.

“It is a contradiction and must remain a contradiction. I think the only hope for me is to pile contradiction upon contradiction and push myself into the middle of all contradictions. Thus it will always remain morally impossible for me simply to “conform” and to settle down and accept the official rationalization of what is going on here. On the other hand it in no way helps matters for me to replace the official statements with slightly better rationalizations of my own…. If you want to find satisfactory formulas you had better deal with things that can be fitted into a formula. The vocation to seek God is not one of them. Nor is existence. Nor is the spirit of man.”

Early in 1958, Merton was inwardly in motion. “I am obscurely convinced,” he noted in his journal, “that there is a need in the world for something I can provide, and that there is a need for me to provide it. True, someone else can do it, God does not need me. But I feel He is asking me to provide it.” This is both a declaration of independence and an acknowledgment of interdependence—of a world to which he is bound, though by a still somewhat unclear duty. He was speaking with Dom James from time to time about a South American foundation and longing to be part of any such venture. James put him off—the moment hadn’t come to think seriously about the project, though an offer of land had been received from a wealthy Colombian. We could “grow corn and frijoles,” Merton speculated. There was ever a child in him.

Everyone who cares for Merton’s life and writings is likely to remember something of his dream about a young Jewish girl who gave her name as Proverb, and likely to remember in detail his spontaneous visionary experience at “4th and Walnut” in Louisville. Proverb appeared to him one night at the end of February. “I am embraced with determined and virginal passion by a young Jewish girl,” he recorded in his journal. “She clings to me and will not let go, and I get to like the idea…. I reflect ‘She belongs to the same race as St. Anne.’ I ask her name and she says her name is Proverb…. No need to explain. It was a charming dream.” A charming dream, easily dismissed—but almost at once Merton felt drawn to write a letter and within a few days drafted it into his journal. “Dear Proverb,” he demurely began what must be his first love letter since entering the monastery in 1941,

"How grateful I am to you for loving in me something which I thought I had entirely lost, and someone who, I thought, I had long ago ceased to be. And in you, dear, though some might be tempted to say you do not even exist, there is a reality as real and as wonderful and as precious as life itself. I must be careful what I say, for words cannot explain my love for you…. I think what I most want to say is that I treasure, in you, the revelation of your virginal solitude … yet you have given your love to me, why I cannot imagine.”

His encounter with Proverb in late February-early March was renewed in the incident at 4th and Walnut two weeks later. Here again, famous ground. “Yesterday, in Louisville, at the corner of 4th and Walnut, suddenly realized that I love all the people and that none of them were, or, could be totally alien to me. As if waking from a dream—the dream of my separateness, of the ‘special’ vocation to be different…. Thank God! Thank God! I am only another member of the human race, like all the rest of them. I have the immense joy of being a man!” And he concluded the entry with a second letter to Proverb, as if they had met at 4th and Walnut.

“Only with you are these things found, dear child sent to me by God!” In a letter to the novelist Boris Pasternak later in the year he was clearer still: “I was walking alone in the crowded street and suddenly saw that everybody was Proverb and that in all of them shone her extraordinary beauty and purity and shyness, even though they did not know who they were.”

Toward the end of the year Merton was able to articulate his new insights and feelings at a moment when he was looking back over his published poetry in a measured but critical frame of mind. He could see the good in what he had written, yet he had become a different person, as fervent as ever but in a wholly new way. “The new fervor will be rooted not in asceticism but in humanism,” he wrote in his journal.

“What has begun now must grow but must never seek to become spectacular or to attract attention to itself—which is what I unconsciously did in those days, proclaiming that I was a poet and a mystic. Both are probably true, but not deep enough, because then it was too conscious. I have to write and speak not as the individual who has cut himself off from the world and wants the world to know it, but as the person who has lost himself in the service of the vast wisdom of God’s plan to reveal Himself in the world and in man. How much greater, deeper, nobler, truer and more hidden. A mysticism that no longer appears, transcendent and ordinary.”

From Proverb by night and the streets of Louisville by day to his new sense of purpose there is little distance; those encounters gave rise to it. Merton wrote into his journal paragraphs from Buber that he described as “among the wisest religious truths written in our century.” Buber was drawing out an implication of his fundamental insight:

“Meeting with God does not come to man in order that he may concern himself with God, but in order that he may confirm that there is meaning in the world… All revelation is summons and sending…. God remains present to you when you have been sent forth; he who goes on a mission has always God before him: the truer the fulfillment the stronger and more constant his nearness. He cannot concern himself directly with God but he can converse with Him.”

Responding to this passage, Merton continued, “Ten years ago I would have been perplexed and scandalized by [these thoughts], but in the depths of my heart I realize how true they are. And I realize how monumentally we fail, in this monastery, to understand this!”

In early June 1964 Merton received a letter from D. T. Suzuki’s secretary telling him that, were he able to come to New York City a little later in the month, Dr. Suzuki would be extremely happy to meet him. Not long before, Merton had been examining the consequences—yet again—of the absolute travel restriction imposed on him. “As I go on,” he wrote in his journal,

“the ways of escape are progressively closed, renounced, or otherwise abandoned. I know now that I am really committed to stability here, and that even the thought of temporary travel is useless and vain. I know that my contacts with others of like mind by mail, etc. are relatively meaningless, though they may have some raison d’être. I know that my writing solves nothing for me personally and that it has created some problems which are still unresolved…. That my position is definitively ambiguous and my job is to accept this with the smallest possible amount of bad faith.” Along this familiar path of thought, he had reached a familiar destination, though cloaked in darker light than usual: the resolve to accept his circumstances in the monastic spirit of obedience, with a minimum of what the Rule of St. Benedict, a document for the centuries, calls “murmuring.”

Some days after this journal entry, the letter arrived. “I thought about it,” he wrote, “and since it is probably the only chance I will ever have to speak to [Suzuki], I thought it important enough to ask Dom James’ permission. I certainly did not think he would give it, but, somewhat reluctantly, he did, and a flight is booked for me next Monday 15th.” What was Dom James thinking? Unknown. It seems very unlikely that he had time to consult with his superior, the abbot general; the decision must have been his own.

Replying promptly to Dr. Suzuki, Merton expressed his grateful acceptance of the invitation and alluded to the conditions set by his abbot:

“I must ask you not to let this be too widely known…. It should not become generally known around New York as this would cause difficulties…. I hope to see you in the best of health and spirits.” Merton was to come and go with a sole focus. Living in a dormitory at Columbia University, his alma mater, saying Mass at the nearby church where he converted, eating in local restaurants many of which hadn’t changed since he knew them, he willingly accepted the anonymity James had asked of him.

It goes nearly without saying that as soon as he reached New York—even from the air as he approached—he was altogether happy; no further anxiety. The recognition we need here is that he met in Dr. Suzuki, at last, a living spiritual father—an abbot in all but name with whom he felt instinctively at home. Merton was once a Columbia graduate student exploring the poetry of William Blake, the nineteenth-century poet, graphic artist, and mystic. “Damn braces: Bless relaxes,” Blake had memorably written. The conversations of Merton and Suzuki were in that spirit. There are several homages to Suzuki in Merton’s writings, among them this:

"One had to meet this man in order to fully appreciate him. He seemed to me to embody all the indefinable qualities of the “Superior Man” of the ancient Asian, Taoist, Confucian, and Buddhist traditions. Or rather in meeting him one seemed to meet that “True Man of No Title” that Chuang Tzu and the Zen Masters speak of. And of course this is the man one really wants to meet. Who else is there? In meeting Dr. Suzuki and drinking a cup of tea with him I felt I had met this one man. It was like finally arriving at one’s own home. A very happy experience, to say the least…. I did feel that I was speaking to someone who, in a tradition completely different from my own, had matured, had become complete, and had found his way.”

“The tea, the joy,” he wrote in his journal after the first of two visits with Suzuki. One joy, “profoundly important to me,” was “to experience the fact that there really is a deep understanding between myself and this extraordinary and simple man.” Another was to feel so magically at home with him and with his secretary, Mihoko Okamura. “For once in a long time felt as if I had spent a moment in my own family.” Both experiences were crucial. In dialogue with Dr. Suzuki he could measure how far he had come through his years and struggles and strivings in the monastery—so much farther than he thought. A confirmation of this order would occur just once more, but few are needed: in conversation with the Dalai Lama in the fall of 1968. As for feeling profoundly at home with the ancient sage and his young companion, this too was a confirmation: that the orphaned child, the monastic misfit, remained undamaged. His heart was intact.”

~ James Fox, Make Peace Before the Sun Goes Down: The Long Encounter of Thomas Merton and His Abbot