Margaret Tuckerman’s letter (The Merton Journal, Easter 2000) - in response to Michael Woodward’s article in the previous edition of the Journal - focused in on the notion of “linearity” or (as Margaret put it), “the ‘straight way’ which all must traverse if they seek to pray contemplatively.” I’d like to take up the invitation to join the discussion.

My own reading of Merton is inevitable filtered through the dusty lens of personal experience, whose only certain linear development is that today follows yesterday and tomorrow I wake up a day older. Even that apparent fact blurs as I recall a late adolescent era when religious zeal was enriched with mystical moments which now seem but a vague memory. I’m more inclined these days to echo the words of blessed Bob Dylan: “I was so much older then; I’m younger than that now...”

Perhaps I’ve just stopped trying so hard. Personally, that feels like growth and development. Your story, being unique, is no doubt different, but I want to set in context my unease with the troublesome notion of linear development in the spiritual life, a pervasive theme allied latterly to the Modernist impulse for Progress and a correlative quest for self-improvement. Fine goals, to be sure - and arguably more edifying (if less accurate) than the current diet of Post-modern soup. The question remains as to whether, in personal or social experience, the straight line is an adequate or helpful metaphor.

Margaret was responding to the interpretation of a specific text of Merton’s. It may be that I am spinning off at a tangent, but want to consider how, as fellow pilgrims, we receive what Merton wrote - what was true for him - as reference for our own spiritual movement. That the notion of progression runs through Merton’s general testimony and the text in question (Contemplative Prayer, DLT, 1973) is unequivocal. Ann Hunsaker Hawkins, in her excellent study on autobiographical theology, offers an angle on this:
The attitude that the spiritual life is one of continual conversion and ongoing change is characteristic of Merton at all stages of his writing. It achieves formal expression in the notion of epektesis which Merton appropriated from Gregory of Nyssa” (1)

This principle of epektesis, according to Hawkins, “embraces linear, developmental movement, but... locates this kind of change, which is by nature unending, within the context of an Absolute that does not change” (p.123). That “the Absolute does not change” is an article of faith, a choice, a grounding decision which arises from within our experience. If this was indeed Merton’s belief (and why do we still assume changelessness a necessary divine attribute?), then his conception of “the Absolute” did change radically during his monastic years: We find him, for example, on the eve of his fiftieth birthday railing against “those who think that God is a mental object and that to ‘love God alone’ is to exclude all other objects and to concentrate on this one!”

Is Merton chastising his younger self? Here is evidence of a kind of development which, whilst anchored in a fundamental assurance of God as God, dares to re-assess the very notion of an “objective” God (whatever that may mean).

If Merton’s fundamental interpretation of Reality can shift so radically, then we might anticipate shift and change in his understanding of the way into contemplation, the way of entering into or encountering that Reality. (2) So even if we arrive at some conclusive interpretation of the text in question, we can find Merton saying something different - perhaps contradictory - elsewhere in the corpus. His writing is characterised by continual revision, refining, honing - a process echoing and symbolising something of the inner journey itself. Merton’s legacy - a story of the spiralling interplay of re-membered experience, re-discovered language, insight, and integration of the fragments - testifies to a God who calls forth and graces us with the understanding we need in order to move on from moments of impasse, to “break on through to the other side” as Jim Morrison would put it. Only there is no “other side”; simply another standpoint, one of an infinite number.

This new standpoint may be experienced as clearer intuition of what was previously seen, “through a glass, darkly”, or it may come as a shock which overturns what we thought we once knew. The model which describes the coming of such a “revelation” may involve linear, progressive attention, or may equally be ebb and flow, or free-form, or explosive. One interpretation may “work” better than another, to the extent that it “makes sense” of the psychic experience, which consequently becomes part of our Reality. What seems important is that we cling not too tightly to any one pre-determined model of meaning, but dare to loosen the grip of our retentive minds and allow God to carry us into the Present, one way or another.

When a thought is done with, let go of it. When something has been written, publish it, and go on to something else. You may say the same thing again, some day, on a deeper level... All that matters is that the old be recovered on a new plane and be, itself, a new reality. This too, gets away from you. So let it get away. In other words, I have tried to learn in my writing a monastic lesson I could probably not have learned otherwise: to let go of my idea of myself, to take myself with more than one grain of salt. (3)

Merton makes clear the functional nature of writing in his spiritual practice. We need to read it that way: The texts are like cairns along the way; discarded, even, as a snake discards its old skin. “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here... ”

From the reader’s perspective we might conclude that Merton’s vocation, his life project, was a (linguistic) framing of experience, a dialectic of inner and outer discourse. Indeed, those of us who never knew the man can encounter only his narrative fiction, his “written version or interpretation of the self constructed by memory gathering together or ‘recollecting’ the disparate elements of experience.” (4) And that fictive, creative process involved a choice of interpretative schema. Merton’s pivotal choice was to embrace the rich heritage of Catholic language and symbolism, with its varied and detailed accounts of the “straight way” ratified by tradition. This in turn gave shape to and contained the form of his autobiographical self. But the wine skins of archaic form cannot always contain the fullness of new reality, of vital experience: The language explodes and both are lost.

Merton’s spiritual maturing can be read in terms of the erosion or critical breakdown of structured patterns of language and meaning, and a continual, necessary restructuring of the same. (5) The very notion of a “straight way” falls into a particular meaning-scheme, describing one interpretation of our growth in relation to Divinity, It implies perfectibility, movement through degrees of holiness, and has sound scriptural foundation. (As a Wesleyan I am particularly bound to take seriously this model). The attraction of the “straight way” and of growing in (pre-defined) holiness is that it gives us a sense of “getting somewhere”. But where? The next storey of the mountain? Perhaps there is another mountain - or valley, or ocean, or cosmos - and another map, equally valid, equally Christian: “All theology is a kind of birthday./ Each one who is born / Comes into the world as a question / For which old answers / Are not sufficient.” (6)

Merton’s appeal is to those who seek clues about life, about responding to “the more of reality” (7). The essence of what Merton sought was not in ideas, but in life. The descriptions and metaphors matter in so far as “Wrong ideas may prevent love from growing and maturing in our lives. Once we love, our love can change our thinking. But wrong thinking can inhibit love.” (8)

Merton himself experienced more than once the liberating impact of new insight and of a linguistic, symbolic world which gave meaning to experience, taking him beyond an impasse, beyond the fault line which separated the old world from the new. On the other hand, his most direct attempt to systematise an understanding of the contemplative path - in The Ascent to Truth - coincided with a bleak, depressed era. Letting go of that book, whose very title evokes linear progression towards an objective goal, symbolised his emergence from that linear-speculative framework towards a more richly existential - even absurdist - theology (9).