The Hidden Ground of Love: Letters

by Thomas Merton, William H. Shannon (Editor)

Overview

Thomas Merton (1915-1968) is the most admired of all American Catholic writers. His journals have recently been published to wide acclaim.

The collection of Merton's letters in The Hidden Ground of Love were selected and edited by William H. Shannon.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781429966764
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	04/01/2011
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	384
File size:	989 KB

About the Author

Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk, is perhaps the foremost spiritual of the twentieth century. His diaries, social commentary, and spiritual writings continue to be widely read thirty years after his untimely death in 1968.

Thomas Merton (1915-1968) is one of the foremost spiritual thinkers of the twentieth century. Though he lived a mostly solitary existence as a Trappist monk, he had a dynamic impact on world affairs through his writing. An outspoken proponent of the antiwar and civil rights movements, he was both hailed as a prophet and castigated for his social criticism. He was also unique among religious leaders in his embrace of Eastern mysticism, positing it as complementary to the Western sacred tradition. Merton is the author of over forty books of poetry, essays, and religious writing, including Mystics and Zen Masters, and The Seven Story Mountain, for which he is best known. His work continues to be widely read to this day.
William Shannon is the author of Thomas Merton's Dark Path.  He also edited The Hidden Ground of Love, the first volume of Merton's correspondence.

Read an Excerpt

The Hidden Ground of Love

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By Thomas Merton, William H. Shannon

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Copyright © 1985 Merton Legacy Trust
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-6676-4

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CHAPTER 1

To Catherine de Hueck Doherty

Catherine de Hueck Doherty, born into a wealthy Russian family in 1900, was married at the age of fifteen to Baron Boris de Hueck. When she was twenty she and her husband were forced to flee Soviet Russia, and they arrived penniless in Canada. Her business astuteness, combined with hard work, enabled her to recoup their fortunes, and by 1930 she had become wealthy again. Wealth did not satisfy her, however, since for a long time she had been haunted by Jesus' words: "Sell all you have, give to the poor and come follow me."

In 1930 she made the decision to live among the poor, first in the slums of Toronto (where she established the first Friendship House), and then in New York City in Harlem. It was there that she met Eddie Doherty, the well-known journalist, whom she married in 1943. They founded Madonna House in Combermere, Ontario, Canada, a rural community that has become a place for the sharing of life and prayer, and a center of training for the lay apostolate.

In 1941, Thomas Merton at twenty-six was teaching English at St. Bonaventure College, Olean, New York, where Catherine had come to speak. After hearing her, Merton volunteered to help out at Friendship House in Harlem, and thus their friendship started. The letters written to her during these crucial months in his life reveal why and how he decided that his vocation was to be a Trappist monk. He arrived at Our Lady of Gethsemani monastery in Kentucky on December 10, 1941, and was received as a postulant on December 13, 1941. The first three letters here are the only ones in this book Merton wrote before becoming a monk.

St. Bonaventure College

October 6, 1941

First, thanks very much for letting me stand around Friendship House for a couple of weeks of evenings: I hope I can do that more often. I liked most of all the clothing room, but wasn't there much. I think the "cubs" are certainly very smart fine kids, and think about them a lot ...

You will be interested in this one: I have a nun in a freshman English class (one from the kitchen here — the only nun I've got in regular classes for this year), and she wrote an essay about St. Bonaventure in which she listed all the things that had impressed her since she had first come here. Baroness de Hueck was outstanding on this list: the sister was very impressed with what you said, and although she didn't go into details, evidently agrees with you. Well, I nearly gave her an A on the strength of this, but I didn't. Charity is one thing: art another. In heaven they are identical, on earth too often distinct. A for charity, B-plus for technique was what I gave the sister, only the first grade remained unspoken, and that was just as well too, because today she gave me a big argument about some obscure point of grammar.

For a couple of minutes I talked to a Quaker woman who was passing through here. She had spent the summer in Kansas working among Negro sharecroppers, not without some guarded hostility on the part of the local authorities. She had with her a lot of students from Allegheny College, Meadville. I talked of you and Friendship House and got a smarter and more enthusiastic reaction than you get from the average Catholic ...

Right now besides my work I am doing a lot of reading and studying and meditation, and a little writing but nothing systematic, just notes on what I am thinking about, when I am thinking about anything that doesn't look disgusting as soon as it gets on paper.

Mostly it has something to do, in general, with the question of lay vocations, both in an academic sense and in a personal one too. The academic sense is maybe more interesting. There is one problem about lay vocations that interests me a lot, and it is obviously very important to Friendship House too: except that you probably have it all doped out to your satisfaction. I haven't yet. The problem is this: where does Catholic Action stop and politics begin?

First of all, it seems to me that you yourself illustrate the proper balance between them. That is: Catholic Action, which is another word for Charity, that is Love, means, for one thing, feeding the poor, clothing the needy, and after that, saving souls. A person who is really interested in that must also necessarily be interested in certain political movements which tend to help feed the poor, clothe the needy, etc. Also, a person who is charitable, and really loves the poor, realizes just how little pure political action, without any charity behind it, really means.

If you make laws to provide the nation with old age pensions and the nation is populated by people who beat up their grandmothers, your old age pension law doesn't mean much.

If you make a law (and this time nobody is being funny) providing the unemployed with unemployment insurance, and then refuse to employ certain classes, or types, or races of people in any decent job, your law is never going to eliminate unemployment ...

When you get down to it, Catholic Action means not voting for anybody but going out and being a saint, not writing editorials in magazines, even, but first of all being a saint.

I said it was a problem. In any place where people are engaged in doing things, as you are at Friendship House, for the love of the poor and, through them, God, there isn't much of a problem. Where it comes in with me is trying to explain guys like Franco, or some of the Medieval Popes, in whom Catholic Action (or what they imagined to be that) got totally submerged in a completely materialistic and political struggle between certain social and political groups. The problem I am getting at is, is it possible for there to be a completely Catholic government? Is there any point in these Catholic political parties, like the ones that used to exist in Germany and Italy? and so on.

If a Catholic gets into a position of power in a country where the political atmosphere is made up of struggles between a lot of irreligious and frankly selfish minorities, how can he ever do anything at all except by compromising with religious principles, or, worse than that, fooling himself that he is leading a crusade, and then turning the country upside down in the name of religion, the way Franco did, or the way the Third and Fourth Crusades did to Europe. I think the Reformation was a divine punishment for the Fourth Crusade, in which the businessmen of Venice inveigled the whole army of Crusaders (recruited with promises of plenary indulgences if they died in battle) to conquer, for Venetian business, the Christian empire at Constantinople!

On the other hand, I believe there is only one free and just state in the world, and that is the Vatican City: but that is less a state than a glorified monastery. Now assuming all the people in a given country were good Catholics, it might be possible for that country to be ruled the way the Vatican City is ruled: that is, politics would be, all down the line, subordinated to salvation, and ordered to the salvation of souls as its ultimate end. Then you would have real freedom, real justice, and everything else.

Which brings us back to the same conclusion: the first thing to do is to feed the poor and save the souls of men, and in this sense, feeding the poor means feeding them not by law (which doesn't do a damn bit of good), but first of all at the cost of our own appetites, and with our own hands, and for the love of God. In that case, feeding the poor and saving them are all part of the same thing, the love of our neighbor ... And when it comes to saving souls, once again writing and talking and teaching come after works of love and sanctity and charity, not before. And the first thing of all is our own sanctification, which was the lesson I got out of my retreat at the Trappists, and keep finding out over and over again every day ...

If I can only make myself little enough to gain graces to work out my sanctification, enough to keep out of hell and make up for everything unpleasant, in time, the lay vocation, as far as I'm concerned, presents no further problems, because I trust God will put in my way ten million occasions for doing acts of charity and if I am smart maybe I can catch seventeen of them, in a lifetime, before they get past my big dumb face.

At this point I realize that this letter is disordered and obscure and badly written and probably extremely uninteresting to everybody. But even if it doesn't make sense, the very fact that I used up so many words talking about lay vocations and writing means that I think I am finding out something about writing and about the lay vocation for me: which is that my vocation is probably to go on finding out this same thing about writing over and over as long as I live: when you are writing about God, or talking about Him, you are doing something you were created to do, even if you don't feel like a prince every minute you are doing it, in the end it turns out to be right: but when you are writing or talking about some matter or pride or envy to advance your own self, you feel lousy while you are doing it and worse afterwards and ten times worse when you read the stuff over a week later ...

Meanwhile, I hope you will come up here again and make some more speeches. The seminarians could do with some ideas about Harlem. I understand the clerics (who have now long ago returned to Washington) are still in a ferment. I'm going to write to one of them and find out, anyway. By the time I get to writing to him, I will probably have thought up another dull and complicated treatise instead of a letter!

But I think a lot of Harlem, and I'll tell you the one reason why: because Harlem is the one place where I have ever been within three feet of anyone who is authentically said to have seen visions — what was the old lady's name? I have forgotten. But believe me when the angels and saints appear among us they don't appear in rich men's houses, and the place I want to be is somewhere where the angels are not only present but even sometimes visible: that is slums, or Trappist monasteries, or where there are children, or where there is one guy starving himself in a desert for sorrow and shame at the sins and injustice of the world. In comparison with all these, St. Bonaventure occasionally takes on the aspects of a respectable golf club, but then again I won't say that either, because the place is, in spite of everything, holy, and when you live under the same roof as the Blessed Sacrament there is no need to go outside looking for anything ...

This letter is being written not according to plan, but according to the clock, and now it is time for me to wind up and turn in. Maybe you are lucky. But anyway, God bless everybody in Friendship House and in Harlem and hear all your prayers, and please pray sometimes for us here ...

November 10, 1941

... I feel rather astonished, to begin with, at the subtle way you interpreted the big fanfare of speculation that came along with each one of those two letters I sent to Canada, because, when I wrote them, I was deliberately steering clear of anything that might be interpreted as having anything to do with vocation ... So when you started out, in the car, while we were riding back from Buffalo, by saying that any person who asked all those questions probably wanted to be a priest, you (1) surprised me, (2) woke me up to the fact that maybe I am very bad at being abstract about anything, (3) you scared me. The priest business is something I am supposed to be all through and done with. I nearly entered the Franciscans. There was a very good reason why I didn't, and now I am convinced that Order is not for me and never was. So that settles that vocation.

Meanwhile, about being at St. Bonaventure: that's easy. I cannot even give myself half an argument that this is the place for me to stay. From the moment I first came here, I have always believed nothing about the place except that, for me, it was strictly temporary. It is not enough. There is something lacking, for me. I have plenty of time to write, and that has been nice, I am sure. The teaching is like a sort of harmless hobby: about on the plane of stamp collecting. In any visible results it may have, as regards the Kingdom of God, it is just about as valuable as stamp collecting, too. But of course this is only my second year. And besides, visible results aren't much, and it is a kind of weakness to strain your eyes looking for the results that men are capable of seeing on earth ...

I don't know what it is that will help me to serve God better: but whatever it is, it doesn't seem to be here. Something is missing. Whenever I read about the young rich man in the Gospels, who asked the Lord what he should do, beyond keeping the Commandments, and turned away, sad, "because he had great possessions," I feel terrible. I haven't got great possessions, but I have a job, and this ease here, this safety, and some money in the bank and a pile of books and some small stocks my grandfather left me, nothing that the average housemaid or A & P clerk doesn't have, in good times. But I don't feel comfortable at all when I think of that sentence in the Bible. I can't read that and sit still. It makes me very unquiet.

And then when I am filled with that unquietness, I have learned at last that the only thing that will take it away again is to go down into the church and try to tell God that everything I have, I give up to Him, and beg Him to show me how He wants me to give it to Him, in what way, through whom?

Just before you came down here, and I wasn't really thinking of Friendship House at all, I had been saying that prayer and finally started a novena to find out how to give God what He was asking of me: thinking all the time of possessions: maybe some poor person would be brought to my knowledge and I could give him something of what I have received through God's goodness.

So then you turned up. If you are surprised that I gave you one feeble argument and then shut up, that is why. Not that I wouldn't, in ordinary circumstances, be so full of arguments I couldn't even see straight. But in this case it was altogether too clear for argument, nor have I been able to work up even the slightest interest in any argument against leaving here since you have left ...

However, at least by God's grace I know what to pray for harder and harder every day. Nothing but the strength of His Love, to make me love to deny my fears every time they come up. A nice high ideal. The very thought of how I have always been, under difficulties, makes me so ashamed there is nothing more to do but shut up.

Also, there is this.

I don't know if you are concerned about the past of people who come to work for you. I am bringing this up because it might possibly be important. I got in some trouble once, which I don't particularly want to tell anybody about. If you absolutely want to know, I will tell you, but otherwise I can say in good conscience that I don't believe, myself, that it would disqualify me from working in Friendship House, or bring any scandal to be connected with FH in any way, or reflect on you or anybody else, nor is it anything that makes me in any way different from anybody else, but once I did get in some trouble, enough for it to be an impediment to my becoming a priest. I repeat, to the best of my knowledge it does not in any way affect my fitness to work at Friendship House. On the other hand, it is something that definitely demands a whole life of penance and absolute self-sacrifice: so that if I thought the Trappists would take me, I think I would want to go to them. But I have to do penance, and if Harlem won't have me, then where may I turn?

If I had never mentioned this, I am sure that it never would have come up in any other way, and I am sure it could not possibly be dragged up out of the past, because it remains only something between me and God and the other persons involved, with whom I have unfortunately lost all contact: or so it seems. Maybe it would have been better to have ignored the whole thing.

However, it came up and spoiled my last "vocation" [see SSM, pp. 296 — 98], and I don't want to leave anything in the background to spoil this one. I assure you that it is something which, if the president of this college knew, I don't think he would fire me for. I just got a sudden attack of scruples, maybe, when I brought it up.

But if you have any doubts at all, say so, and I will tell you the whole story, in which I am no white-haired hero, no model of self- sacrifice or of holiness either.

The general burden of this letter is to let you know that, in me, you are getting no bargain, and I feel I should especially tell you this, because you have done me an inestimably great honor, far above my own worthlessness, in asking me to come to FH, even before I got around to asking it myself. I believe that, since with God all things are possible, with His help I can some day be a Saint, if I pray without ceasing and give myself totally to Him. In all this, I depend on a miracle: but His grace is always a miracle. Apart from that miracle, however, there is the present fact that I am not only not a Saint but just a weak, proud, self-centered little guy, interested in writing, who wants to belong to God, and who, incidentally, was once in a scandal that can be called public, since it involved lawyers. So that's the dirt. Never forget me in your prayers!

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Hidden Ground of Love by Thomas Merton, William H. Shannon. Copyright © 1985 Merton Legacy Trust. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Title Page,
Preface,
Introduction,
To Catherine de Hueck Doherty,
To A. M. Allchin,
To Edward Deming Andrews,
To Mrs. Edward Deming Andrews,
To Reza Arasteh,
To Abdul Aziz,
To James Baker,
To Daniel J. Berrigan,
To Philip Berrigan,
To Sergius Bolshakoff,
To Cameron Borton,
To Jeanne Burdick,
To Dom Helder Camara,
To Amiya Chakravarty,
To Richard S. Y. Chi,
Dona Luisa Coomaraswamy,
To Jean Danielou,
To Dorothy Day,
To Dom Francis Decroix,
To James Douglass,
To William Du Bay,
To Heinrich Dumoulin,
To John Tracy Ellis,
To Sister M. Emmanuel,
To W. H. Ferry,
To George Bernard Flahiff,
To James Forest,
To Erich Fromm,
To Jean and Hildegard Goss-Mayr,
To Philip Griggs,
To Etta Gullick,
To Shinzo Hamai,
To Thich Nhat Hanh,
To Bernard Haring,
To John Harris,
To John C. Heidbrink,
To Abraham Heschel,
To Aldous Huxley,
To Lyndon Baines Johnson,
To William Johnston,
To Ethel Kennedy,
To Jacqueline Kennedy,
To Ripu Daman Lama,
To Martin Lings,
To Martin E. Marty,
To Hiromu Morishita,
To Christopher Mwoleka,
To Marco Pallis,
To Sister Penelope Lawson,
To Pope John XXIII,
To Pope Paul VI,
To Raymond H. Prince,
To Karl Rahner,
To Rosemary Radford Ruether,
To Linda (Parsons) Sabbath,
To Zalman Schachter,
To Bruno Paul Schlesinger,
To Lawrence Shehan,
To Paul Sih,
To Carleton Smith,
To Archimandrite Sophrony,
To Daisetz T. Suzuki,
To Charles S . Thompson,
To Paul Tillich,
To E. I. Watkin,
To R. J. Zwi Werblowsky,
To Robert Lawrence Williams,
To John J. Wright,
To John C. H. Wu,
To June J. Yungblut,
To Gordon Zahn,
Acknowledgments,
Correspondents,
List of Cold War Letters,
Index,
Notes,
Copyright Page,