Lunatic in Essentials
Staying human with Thomas Merton
Words have eluded me lately. Not because there is nothing to say, but perhaps because there is too much to be said about, well, everything. And still, in the midst of it all, we somehow maintain our daily routines, our regular little rituals that help us try to feel a sense of normalcy even as the world crumbles—or threatens to crumble—around us.
Since being back in California I’ve been leaning heavily into writers that have nothing to do whatsoever with this moment in time—albeit only in the sense that they are long dead. We are so hyper-focused on current events that it can sometimes feel as though everything is a new problem that no one has ever faced before. And yes, we do have some of these “unprecedented” challenges (like…AI, a real climate emergency, etc.) but also, humans have always been both beautifully and regrettably human. Loving, selfish, silly, stupid, misguided, wise, egotistical, altruistic. We are truly a mixed bag.
For years I have turned to the words of Trappist monk Thomas Merton for sanity, comfort, enlightenment, transcendence and realignment with the path I most want to tread. In particular, I’ve been revisiting a collection of his personal journal musings. These are writings that I suspect he never expected to see the light of day, let alone be published, and I think in that way are all the more powerful. He was not writing for an audience; he was writing for himself. He was writing to make sense of things in his own inner world. Which, in turn, helps me to make sense of things both within and without.
And so, in the spirit of not having made sense of things for myself just yet, I am sharing some of Merton’s own thoughts that—to me—have relevance for this time. Please note the years in which they were written.
“Sorrow at the fabulous confusion and violence of this world, which does not understand [God’s] love—yet I am called not to interpret or condemn this misunderstanding, only to return the love which is the final ultimate truth of everything, and which seeks all [peoples’] awakening and response…
To go out and walk slowly in this wood—this is a more important and significant means to understanding, at the moment, than a lot of analysis and a lot of reporting on the things ‘of the spirit.’” — 1966
“The United States is now spending more each year on armaments than was spent in any year before 1942 for the entire national budget.
People demand that the government ‘interfere’ in nothing, just pour money into the armament industry and provide a strong police for ‘security.’ But stay out of everything else! No interference in medicine, mental health, education, etc., etc. Never was a country at once shrewder and less wise—shrewd in nonessentials and lunatic in essentials.” — 1962
“ ‘The gravest moral problems are found at the political level’ (Tresmontant). Never was this more true than in our time. Hence the importance of political decisions and of taking sides in crucial and ‘prophetic’ affairs which are moral touchstones and in which Christians are often in large numbers on the side of the unjust and the tyrant.” — 1959
Quoting Albert Einstein:
“My responsibility is to be in all reality a peacemaker in the world, an apostle, to bring people to truth, to make my whole life a true and effective witness to God’s truth…We must revolutionize our thinking, revolutionize our actions, and must have the courage to revolutionize our relations among the nations of the world.” — 1957
“I fear the ignorance and power of the United States. And the fact that it has quite suddenly become one of the most decadent societies on the face of the earth. The body of a great, dead, candied child. Yet not dead: full of immense, uncontrolled power. Crazy.
If somebody doesn’t understand the United States pretty soon—and communicate some of that understanding to the United States—the results will be terrible. It is no accident that the United States endowed the world with the Bomb.
The mixture of immaturity, size, apparent indulgence and depravity, with occasional spasms of guilt, power, self-hate, pugnacity, lapsing into wildness and then apathy, hopped up and wild-eyed, inarticulate and wanting to be popular. You need a doctor, Uncle!
The exasperation of the other nations of the world who know the United States thinks them jealous—for what they don’t want and yet fascinates them. Exasperation that such fools should be momentarily kings of the world…” — 1961
“When I am most quiet and most myself, God’s grace is clear, and then I see nothing else under the sun. What else is there for us to be tranquil and at peace in the all-enchanting wonder of God’s mercy to us?” — 1953
“Praying this morning during meditation to learn to read the meaning of events. First of all, the meaning of what I myself do and bring upon myself and then the meaning of what all mankind does and brings upon itself…
Before one knows the meaning of what happens, he must be able to see what happens. Most men do not even do that—they trust the newspapers to tell them.
My Zen is the slow swinging tops of sixteen pine trees.” — 1958
“The measure of our identity, of our being (the two are the same) is the amount of our love for God. The more we love earthly things, reputation, importance, pleasures, ease, and success, the less we love God. Our identity is dissipated among things that have no value, and we are drowned and die in trying to live in the material things we would like to possess, or in the projects we would like to complete to objectify the work of our own wills. Then, when we come to die, we find we have squandered all our love (that is, our being) on things of nothingness, and that we are nothing, we are death.” — 1941
“When you accept what you have, you see all you have received is more than enough and you are overwhelmed…I have seen what matters is to be humble enough to admit I am content with just this. Leave the rest to God.” — 1958
And with that, reader, I am wishing you enough peace of mind to live and move as a peacemaker in this wild, lunatic world.
Excerpts all taken from A Year with Thomas Merton: Daily Meditations from His Journals. Selected and Edited by Jonathan Montaldo. Published by HarperOne, 2004.