I have been reading Thomas Merton’s journal – my bedtime reading – the one written at the time of his affair with M. What I find really interesting is not what he has to say, but what he does not say. It is full of the events of his daily life – the books he is reading, what he is writing, life in the monastery, his comings and goings and mainly his relationship with M. Sometimes he talks about enjoying the peace and silence of his hermitage. But he does not talk about his prayer, nor about his relationship with God. OK, perhaps that is understandable at a time when he is having an intense relationship with a woman, a relationship with an important sexual dimension. For a celibate monk who had hardly spoken to a woman for years this must have been completely bouleversant. (Sometimes the French word is so much more appropriate.) How could such a thing happen to a monk/hermit after years of prayer, ascetical living and solitude? And happen so easily and quickly, with him rationalising it and seeking to justify it as loving God in and through her. The obvious thought is that for some time before this his prayer and his sense of his relationship with God must have been very stark and empty. He was finding little, or no emotional solace in it. (I haven’t read the previous journal to this so I don’t know. I guessing.) But this is to be expected and he, of all people, knew this. After the initial honeymoon period there comes the long journey into an increasingly arid and empty desert. This was his chosen way to God. He could have chosen love and family life, but that is a journey through a different landscape with its own difficulties. He chose the starkness and simplicity of abandoning everything in pursuit of the All. In fact, he did not abandon everything. He had quite a privileged position for a monk, a life of writing and research with access to pretty well anything he wanted to read and to a wide circle of people. Nor did he deny himself little trips out with friends and visits to restaurants and bars. All understandable and no doubt it kept him a rounded person. But it meant that instead of striking out into the desert he hovered on the fringes still a way to go to the inner mountain.
I think too that after a long time in what Belden Lane called the fierce landscape of the inner desert the expectation of arrival any time soon diminished. The journey was going to go on and on. Little consolations along the way, instead of being seen as distractions, or diversions, were welcomed and savoured. And this is where I think he got sidetracked. One has to give up all thoughts of arrival. The goal is not a goal. One has to give up all thoughts that one makes this journey in order to arrive at a terminus. There is no goal, no terminus. There is only the dark and empty desert. This is how Lane puts it –
In the practice of contemplation, one comes eventually to embrace an apophatic anthropology, letting go of everything one might have imagined as constituting the self – one’s thoughts, one’s desires, all one’s compulsive needs. Joined in the silence of prayer to a God beyond knowing, I no longer have to scramble to sustain a fragile ego, but discern instead the source and ground of my being in the fierce landscape of God alone. One’s self is ever a tenuous thing, discovered only in relinquishment. I recognise it finally as a vast, empty expanse opening out onto the incomparable desert of God. [Belden C. Lane, The Consolation of Fierce Landscapes, OUP, New York 1998 p. 11]