Soul Searching: The Journey of Thomas Merton (review)

Independent filmmaker Morgan Atkinson has given us a moving and sometimes provocative new meditation on the life of Thomas Merton. Much like Paul Wilkes' 1986 "Film Biography" of Merton, Soul Searching is more "meditation" than documentary, evoking the elusive shades of Merton's life through a rich mosaic of images, words, music, and silences. As in the Wilkes production, Atkinson's storytelling shines most when it lingers with those who knew Merton best, that is, who knew him not as a famous writer, porcelain saint, or mystical pioneer, but as "an ordinary guy who drank too much beer" (poet Ron Seitz), as the meticulously prepared and often quite funny teacher of novices (Br. Maurice Flood), or as the celibate hermit whose carefully tended solitude was broken open ecstatically and painfully by a love affair with a young nurse (Dr. Anthony Padovano).

Indeed, both in narrative substance and in style the film takes a number of welcome risks that distinguish it markedly, if not always favorably, from the Wilkes production. The use of free-form jazz as soundtrack largely succeeds in underscoring the restlessness and creativity of Merton's life, a major theme of Soul Searching. The use of actors to dramatize turning points, as in the aforementioned affair, works well when employed with minimalism (as in Merton's encounter with Gilson's The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy), but distracts when it tries too hard for dramatic effect (I confess that the hospital scenes with the nurse, while not gratuitous, struck me initially as slightly weird, even comical; repeated viewings warmed me considerably.) But most striking is the skill with which Atkinson, through haunting cinematography and daring editing, draws us into the tensive paradoxes and apparent contradictions of Merton's (and thus our own) inescapably human journey. I say "apparent" because, if Merton's life illustrates anything, it is the relationship in authentic Christian spirituality between friendship with God (mysticism) and love for the world of human beings (prophecy). With soft-spoken guidance from several of Merton's former novices (Abbots Flavian Burns and John Eudes Bamberger), Atkinson probes Merton's twin calls to both solitude and solidarity, helping us to understand why, at least for Merton and his brother monks at Gethsemani, this pairing is no contradiction.

Nowhere is the "attunement of opposite tensions" (or sapientia, the way of wisdom) more perfectly realized for me than in the film's treatment of Merton as "pastor of the peace movement" in the 1960s, those years in which, as Lawrence Cunningham remembers, "we were having a collective nervous breakdown in this country." In what for me is the film's most arresting sequence, Atkinson juxtaposes newsreel footage of the fire-hosing of civil rights demonstrators with scathing excerpts from Merton's "Letters to a White Liberal"; moments later, a still shot of the hermitage transfigured in dawn light is set against footage of a nuclear blast ripping through the natural landscape, like so much dust. "When I pray for peace," intones Merton's narrated voice, "I pray not only that the enemies of my own country will cease to want war, but above all that my own country will cease to do things that make war inevitable. . . . If you love peace, then hate injustice, hate tyranny, hate greed, but hate these things in yourself, not another."

Merton had indeed become, as Jesuit John Dear observes, a "dangerous" figure for Catholics who much preferred the pious persona and faith-world dualism of The Seven Storey Mountain. An aged Daniel Berrigan—whose moments on the screen merit the price of the DVD—remembers from the perspective of Catholic activists like himself and Dorothy Day: "It was a long, hard road, and we needed help along the way, and he gave it, he gave it. He was very important to all of us." That sentiment may be truer today than it was even five decades ago. Merton's Peace in the Post-Christian Era, quashed by his superiors in 1962...