"Where the Grey Light Meets the Green Air": The Hermit as Pilgrim in the Franciscan Spirituality of Thomas Merton

"WHERE THE GREY LIGHT MEETS THE GREEN AIR": THE HERMIT AS PILGRIM IN THE FRANCISCAN SPIRITUALITY OF THOMAS MERTON Lift your eyes Where ihe roads dip and where the roads rise Seek only there Where thegrey lighi meels the green air The hermit's chapel, the pilgrim'sprayer. T. S. Eliot, "Usk"1 There is both a tension and a complementarity between Thomas Merton's yearning for the solitary life and his simultaneous desire to be immersed in the world. Important indications about Merton's sense of the "flow" between solitude and involvement, between the life of the hermit and the life of the pilgrim, can be found throughout his writings. Merton's reflections share many of the same concerns present in the life and writings of St. Francis of Assisi [1182-1226] and suggest a Franciscan influence. The monastic ideal of the early Desert Fathers was that of monos pros Monon: to be alone with the Alone. The earliest experience of monasticism was one which emphasized the solitary and ascetic life of contemplation. This early ideal was changed with the development of the Pachomian tradition of monastic observance which emphasized community and fraternity under obedience to an abbot, or spiritual father, and to a rule. This development led, in turn, to the medieval European model of the monastic life which cultivated an analogous relation between the monastic community and the angelic hosts whose task and joy, like that of the monks, was to spend their lives in contemplating and praising God. The monastery, then, became a heavenly Jerusalem, a new Eden, where the monks were engaged in the constant labor of adoration, worship, and praise which was modeled on the life of the 'T.S. Eliot, "Usk," in Complete Poems and Plays 1909-1950 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1971), 94. 311 Franciscan Studies, 55 (1998) 312SEAN KINSELLA angels in heaven. This view of the monastic life was one dedicated to study and to prayer and it was very consciously and deliberately separated from the outside world which was perceived as corrupt and sinful. The monastic life of chastity, individual poverty, and acts of self-mortification was designed in order to make monks more like angels in heaven. The monastery was understood to be a region of heavenly likeness and was peopled with those individuals who were most like the saints and angels in heaven. The rest of the world, on the contrary, was a region of unlikeness and separation populated by the descendants of Cain: sinful, murderous, and unworthy to offer praise and sacrifice to God as the angels do. This "angelic perspective" of medieval monasticism was shattered by the rise of the mendicant orders in the thirteenth century. The example of St. Francis and his brothers, which so transformed the medieval Church, was one which rejected the cloistered elitism of monastic isolation. In a famed scene in an early Franciscan source, the Sacrum Commercium, Lady Poverty asked to see the cloister of the brothers: "Taking her to a certain hill, they showed her the whole world, as far as she could see, and said: 'This, Lady, is our cloister."'2 For Francis the world was not evil and the world was not a region of unlikeness and distance from God because the world had been created by a God who was loving and good and, therefore, his presence was to be felt and experienced in the world and was not excluded from it. Nor were the people of the world, created in his image and likeness, unworthy to love and praise him. In fact, they were called to do so because of their very nature: created by love to love because God is love. With the rise of the mendicant orders the angelology of medieval monasticism was broken down in favor of seeing God and adoring him in the world and in those who were most like him in that they, like Christ, were suffering and outcast. In his work Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, Merton described the moment when this very insight—so movingly and eloquently Franciscan—became clear to him: 2Sacrum Commercium, 63; in Marion A. Habig, ed., St. Francis of Assisi: Writings and Early Biographies...