Contemplation in a World of Action by Thomas Merton

Author:Thomas Merton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
Published: 2017-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

VIII

Is the World a Problem?*

Is the world a problem? I type the question. I am tempted to type it over again, with asterisks between the letters, the way H*y*m*a*n K*a*p*l*a*n used to type his name in The New Yorker thirty years ago. And as far as I am concerned that would dispose of the question. But the issue is doubtless too serious for a blank page with “Is the world a problem” running down the middle, full of asterisks. So I have to be serious too and develop it.

Maybe I can spell this question out politely, admitting that there are still cogent reasons why it should be asked and answered. Perhaps, too, I am personally involved in the absurdity of the question; due to a book I wrote thirty years ago, I have myself become a sort of stereotype of the world-denying contemplative—the man who spurned New York, spat on Chicago, and tromped on Louisville, heading for the woods with Thoreau in one pocket, John of the Cross in another, and holding the Bible open at the Apocalypse. This personal stereotype is probably my own fault, and it is something I have to try to demolish on occasion. This is one of the occasions.

Now that we are all concerned about the Church and the World, the Secular City, and the values of secular society, it was to be expected that someone would turn quizzically to me and ask: “What about you, Father Merton? What do you think?”—and then duck as if I were St. Jerome with a rock in my fist.

First of all, the whole question of the world, the secular world, has become extremely ambiguous. It becomes even more ambiguous when it is set up over against another entity, the world of the sacred. The old duality of time-eternity, matter-spirit, natural-supernatural and so on (which makes sense in a very limited and definite context) is suddenly transposed into a totally different context in which it creates nothing but confusion. This confusion is certainly a problem. Whether or not “the world” is a problem, a confused idea of what the world might possibly be is quite definitely a problem, and it is that confusion I want to talk about. I want to make clear that I speak not as the author of The Seven Storey Mountain, which seemingly a lot of people have read, but as the author of more recent essays and poems which apparently very few people have read. This is not the official voice of Trappist silence, the monk with his hood up and his back to the camera, brooding over the waters of an artificial lake. This is not the petulant and uncanonizable modern Jerome who never got over the fact that he could give up beer. (I drink beer whenever I can lay my hands on any. I love beer and, by that very fact, the world.) This is simply the voice of a self-questioning human person who, like all his brothers, struggles to cope

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