The Environmental Vision of Thomas Merton

Chapter 6. Merton’s Evolving Ecological Consciousness

126 Chapter 6 Merton’s Evolving Ecological Consciousness In a sense, a very true and solitary sense, coming to the hermitage has been a “return to the world,” not a return to the cities, but a return to direct and humble contact with God’s world, His creation, and the world of poor men who work. —Thomas Merton, Dancing in the Water of Life Merton biographers, as well as multiple Merton scholars, have clearly documented the late 1950s and early 1960s as Merton’s “turning toward the world.” His moment of epiphany in March 1958 while crossing the busy intersection of Fourth and Walnut streets in Louisville attests to the beginning of this turning. No longer does Merton believe he can “hide” in the monastery to work out his personal salvation ; no longer does he regard a monastic vocation as something separate and apart from the world; Merton now understands in a new experiential way that contemptus mundi (rejection of the world) is a flawed theology. All human beings are connected, and therefore matter matters. And as Belden Lane accurately comments about Merton ’s monastic experience, “True contemplation . . . has to reenter the world of others with its newly won freedom . . . and the exercise of a compassion whose shape is justice.”1 For Merton, John Donne’s seventeenth-century meditation “No Man Is an Island” takes on deeper meaning—even becoming the title for Merton’s mid-1950s book on community and Christian tradition;2 and the naturalist John Muir’s oft-quoted 1911 insight that each creature is “hitched to everything Merton’s Evolving Ecological Consciousness 127 else in the Universe” brings Merton to an even more mature and inclusive vision.3 These years are also a time of increased publications. Disputed Questions (September 1960), The Wisdom of the Desert (April 1961), Hagia Sophia (January 1962), The New Man (January 1962), New Seeds of Contemplation (January 1962), and Original Child Bomb (March 1962) have been occupying Merton’s thinking and writing time. Furthermore, his unpublished Working Notebooks reveal wide and eclectic reading, as he is delving into works by poets, novelists, anthropologists , philosophers, theologians, psychologists, and medieval mystics.4 Amazingly, considering the little time a monastic horarium allows for these activities, Merton is also in correspondence with James Forest and Gordon Zahn, nonviolence and peace advocates; the literary and cultural figures Boris Pasternak, Pablo Antonio Cuadra, Czesław Miłosz, Miguel Grinberg, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti; and such various religious notables as Doña Luisa Coomaraswamy, Abdul Aziz, Edward Deming Andrews, Abraham Heschel, Louis Massignon, and D. T. Suzuki .5 This wide spectrum of contacts illustrates Merton’s expanding knowledge about world events and offers him a venue for speaking out on a host of religious and social issues. Although forbidden by his Trappist superiors to publish essays against war and the proliferation of weapons, Merton creates an alternative avenue of communication about the horrors and futility of war through a series of mimeographed Cold War letters written between October 1961 and October 1962 and sent far and wide to friends around the world.6 As Victor Kramer astutely acknowledges in his introduction to volume 4 of the journals, aptly titled Turning toward the World, Merton is engaged in a “systematic drawing together and examination” of his place in and responsibility to the world, revealing a mind aware of and engaging the urgent questions facing contemporary culture. Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (1966), which is a substantial reworking of his journal ruminations and preoccupations during this opening-up period, “demonstrates Merton’s renewed energy in the early 1960s and his emergent openness to questions not just about himself, but about monastic relationships to other religious traditions, art, archi- The Environmental Vision of Thomas Merton 128 tecture, and the Church, as well as about society at large, especially issues concerning race, war, nuclear madness, and other basic threats to civilization as a whole.” Kramer accurately notes that Merton’s current interest in greater solitude coincides with “a renewed awakening to nature , the beauty of the landscape, the wonder of a particular moment.” Volume 4 of the journals reveals a “developing awe, celebration, and praise” of both humans and nature that documents Merton’s “movement from cloister toward world, from Novice Master to hermit, and from ironic critic of culture to compassionate singer of praise.”7 It should not be surprising, then, that after reading Silent Spring, Merton feels compelled to...