The Environmental Vision of Thomas Merton

Chapter 2. Learning to See: Becoming Awake

22 Chapter 2 Learning to See Becoming Awake New eyes awaken . . . And I am drunk with the great wilderness Of the sixth day in Genesis. —Thomas Merton, “A Psalm” It’s all about seeing—not merely looking, but seeing. Seeing with new eyes. Awakening to one’s surroundings and cultivating awareness of both external and internal movements of grace. Yet the development from looking to seeing does not happen automatically; it requires conscious effort and focus—sometimes even training—and often results in a transformation of consciousness. Writers, prophets, and poets through the centuries have challenged us to develop the habit of seeing and the art of attention so that transformation might occur. Indeed, all major religions exhort their followers to engage in a process of becoming awake. Buddhism, for example, traces its origin to Siddhartha Gautama, the one who woke up and urged his followers to do the same; Hinduism , with its reliance on the Vedic path to holiness (and specifically Upanishadic thought), encourages each person to reawaken the connection with God in order to discover Absolute Truth. Islam, from the Arabic word meaning “submission,” calls believers to continual awareness of God through prayer five times a day. Judaism professes faith in the coming of Shalom, or Peace, which will inaugurate a total transformation of human life and the natural world into justice and peace—a work of God and humans as cocreators to which one must Learning to See 23 always be attentive. Christianity, Merton’s own adopted tradition, invites practitioners to awareness of God’s unconditional love by imitating Jesus, who models how to realize this divine potential. In Roman Catholic liturgy, for example, important feast days are preceded by a Vigil, which may involve a fast or special readings to encourage followers to be “vigilant,” watchful, awake; and the entire season of Advent invites Christians to become more attentive, more alert—to enter into the great Christian paradox: waiting for the One who is already here yet who is always coming to us. In centuries past, Bach and Handel captured this spirit of focused anticipation with the haunting cantata Wachet auf (Sleepers, Wake) and the soul-stirring oratorio Messiah. Becoming awake—seeing with new eyes—is never a passive event. A human being is not a tabula rasa to be imprinted with sight and insight from some external and detached source. Becoming awake is meant to be a participatory endeavor that involves a response, namely, recognition of the deeper meaning of an event. To draw an example , again from Christian tradition: Christmas is not meant to be a stand-alone celebration of gaping fondly at a baby in a manger, but a prelude to the mystery’s fulfillment, poignantly symbolized by Mary Magdalene’s recognition of the resurrected Jesus in the garden and her mission to spread the Good News. Although we frequently hear the beautiful strains of Handel’s Messiah during the Advent season and mistakenly associate it with Christmas, this great oratorio’s Easter section completes the retelling of the Christian mystery. It must be noted that the mighty and well-loved “Hallelujah Chorus” occurs not in the Christmas section, but near the celebratory end of the oratorio as a response to the great feast and feat of the Redemption of humankind.1 Becoming Awake So too, in normal human development, seeing with new eyes— becoming awake—requires us to respond with the vigor of recognition . Seeing anew, experiencing a new consciousness, is the prelude to expanded vision. This is not a completely novel notion. Literary artists and mystics in different ages have offered testimony to the power of The Environmental Vision of Thomas Merton 24 “attentive” seeing—that is, a kind of seeing that is more than mere looking. The British engraver and poet William Blake insisted that his childhood experience of seeing a tree full of angels guided him in his artistic expression and revisionist Christian theology. At the height of the American Transcendentalist movement in the 1830s and 1840s, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau urged us to see the natural world with new eyes and commit to a worldview radically different from the prevailing Calvinist attitude that regarded the wilderness as evil. Emerson’s famous lines about being alert to the spiritual world surrounding each of us immediately come to mind: “Standing on the bare ground—my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted...