True Self, False Self by M. Basil Pennington

Author:M. Basil Pennington
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0824518454
Publisher: The Crossroad Publishing Company

SIX

A Living Heritage

The Lord gives the word

to the bearers of good tidings.

— Psalm 67

Every great wisdom tradition has flowed forth from the experience of a particular person or persons. Some of these sages are completely wrapped in myth: Krishna, Ram. Others have been able to preserve their historical identity even as life-giving myth enfolded them: Buddha, Abraham, Moses. The great Rabbi, Jesus the Christ, Incarnate Wisdom in the flesh, brought the richness of his Jewish heritage to a new fullness in the way of transcending and transforming love. When this heritage was in danger of being engulfed by a patronizing world, after the conversion of Constantine the Great in the fourth century, many of it greatest teachers took refuge in the deserts. And true seekers flocked to these fathers and mothers of the desert and brought their wisdom back, weaving it into the living fabric of the Church, especially through the monastic orders.

This rich heritage has lived on and finds its expression in one of the great spiritual masters of our century, Father M. Louis of Gethsemani, Thomas Merton. When he received a call from the Lord and responded to it to enter into the Cistercian way, with his exceptional genius, Father Louis opened himself to the master of the Cistercian school, Bernard of Clairvaux. He drew from Bernard this master’s insightful teaching on the false and true self. In his first published volume, The Spirit of Simplicity, Father Louis brought together what is Bernard’s final and fullest expression of his teaching on this.

Merton lived in the context of a very defensive and rationalistic post-Tridentine Church. Spiritual teaching had become encased in programs that can all too easily become projects of the false self. So-called spiritual directors guided disciples step by step up the mountain or through the rooms of the interior castle. Progress was clearly mapped. It became a skilled undertaking. Nonetheless the true masters, the great spiritual fathers and mothers, were still able to share their wisdom in transcendent poetry and the intuitions of homey details.

The poet in Father Louis responded to and was enlivened by these great poetic endeavors. He tried also to submit to the straits of the projects. This resulted in a period of writer’s block, if not a full-scale nervous breakdown. He passed beyond this, and, inspirited by the wisdom of Bernard, he was able to produce his own finest theological expression of the richness of this tradition in his book The New Man. He himself had become a new man.

Years before, as a lively and very gifted young man, Merton bought into the false self quite fully. He rose from a crash at Cambridge to become the big man around campus at Columbia University, New York. But he had too much insight and God-given grace not to see the hollowness of this. He searched for something more, for an authenticity, a trueness that would correspond to and fulfill his deepest instincts.

At this early stage in his life he saw the possibility of living an authentic life in two different ways which for him were standing in an excluding opposition.

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