by Richard Rohr
Thomas Merton, the Cistercian monk, who died tragically in 1968, has been a primary teacher and inspiration to me since I first read his book Sign of Jonah in a high school seminary library soon after it was written in 1958. I did my first full hermitage at Gethsemani, his Kentucky monastery, during the Easter season in 1985, at the kind invitation of the abbot. I saw Merton once for just a moment, as he walked in front of me while I was visiting the monastery with my parents in early June of 1961, the day I had graduated from high school in Cincinnati. Little did I think he would soon die, or did I imagine the ongoing influence he would have on so many people around the world and on me.
I believe Thomas Merton is probably the most significant American Catholic of the twentieth century, along with Dorothy Day. His whole life is a parable and a paradox, like all of ours are; but he had an uncanny ability to describe his inner life with God for the rest of us. His best-selling Seven Storey Mountain is a first-half-of-life statement, which has never gone out of print since 1948. It is brilliant in its passion, poetry, discovery, and newly found ecstasy, yet it is still rather dualistic. The following poem, “When in the Soul of the Serene Disciple,” written ten years later, shows all the signs of a man in an early second half of life, although he was only in his midforties. I offer it as an appropriate closing for our journey together. The freedom illustrated here might be exactly where the further journey is going to lead you. I hope so.
When in the Soul of the Serene Disciple
When in the soul of the serene disciple
With no more Fathers to imitate
Poverty is a success,
It is a small thing to say the roof is gone:
He has not even a house.
Stars, as well as friends,
Are angry with the noble ruin.
Saints depart in several directions.
Be still:
There is no longer any need of comment.
It was a lucky wind
That blew away his halo with his cares,
A lucky sea that drowned his reputation.
Here you will find
Neither a proverb nor a memorandum.
There are no ways,
No methods to admire
Where poverty is no achievement.
His God lives in his emptiness like an affliction.
What choice remains?
Well, to be ordinary is not a choice:
It is the usual freedom
Of men without visions.1
This poem has spoken to me from the first time I read it in his hermitage in 1985, and I offer it to you as a simple meditation that you can return to again and again to summarize where this journey has led us.
When in the soul of the serene disciple
At the soul level, and with the peacefulness of time
With no more Fathers to imitate
When you have moved beyond the “authoritative,” the collective, and the imitative, and you have to be your True Self
Poverty is a success,
It is a small thing to say the roof is gone:
He has not even a house.
When you have made it all the way to the bottom of who you think you are, or need to be, when your humiliating shadow work never stops, and when your securities and protective boundaries mean less and less, and your “salvation project” has failed you
Stars, as well as friends,
Are angry with the noble ruin,
Saints depart in several directions.
When you have faced the hurt and the immense self-doubt brought on by good people, family, and even friends who do not understand you, who criticize you, or even delight at your wrongness
Be still:
There is no longer any need of comment.
The inner life of quiet, solitude, and contemplation is the only way to find your ground and purpose now. Go nowhere else for sustenance.
It was a lucky wind
That blew away his halo with his cares,
A lucky sea that drowned his reputation.
This is the necessary stumbling stone that makes you loosen your grip on the first half of life and takes away any remaining superior self-image. (Merton is calling this crossover point “lucky” and surely sees it as part of necessary and good suffering that the soul needs in order to mature.)
Here you will find
Neither a proverb nor a memorandum.
There are no ways,
No methods to admire
Don't look forward or backward in your mind for explanations or consolations; don't try to hide behind any secret special way that you have practiced and now can recommend to all! (As we preachy types always feel we must do.) Few certitudes now, just naked faith.
Where poverty is no achievement.
His God lives in his emptiness like an affliction.
This is nothing you have come to or crawled down to by effort or insight. You were taken there, and your “there” is precisely nothing. (That is, it is “everything,” but not what you expected everything to be!) This kind of God is almost a disappointment, at least to those who were in any way “using” God up to now. There is nothing to claim anymore. God is not a possession of any type, not for your own ego or morality or superiority or for control of the data. This is the “nada” of John of the Cross and the mystics, and this is Jesus on the cross. Yet it is a peaceful nothingness and a luminous darkness, while still an “affliction.”
What choice remains?
Well, to be ordinary is not a choice:
It is the usual freedom
Of men [and women] without [their] visions.
In the second half of the spiritual life, you are not making choices as much as you are being guided, taught, and led—which leads to “choiceless choices.” These are the things you cannot not do because of what you have become, things you do not need to do because they are just not yours to do, and things you absolutely must do because they are your destiny and your deepest desire. Your driving motives are no longer money, success, or the approval of others. You have found your sacred dance.
Now your only specialness is in being absolutely ordinary and even “choiceless,” beyond the strong opinions, needs, preferences, and demands of the first half of life. You do not need your “visions” anymore; you are happily participating in God's vision for you.
With that, the wonderful dreaming and the dreamer that we were in our early years have morphed into Someone Else's dream for us. We move from the driver's seat to being a happy passenger, one who is still allowed to make helpful suggestions to the Driver. We are henceforth “a serene disciple,” living in our own unique soul as never before, yet paradoxically living within the mind and heart of God, and taking our place in the great and general dance.
Amen, Alleluia!
Notes
Bible versions: I studied from the Jerusalem Bible, I have made use of the New American Bible, and I often read The Message to get a new slant on a passage, but the edited form I use is often my own translation or a combination of the above.
The Invitation to a Further Journey
1I am going to take the liberty of capitalizing this term throughout this book so you will know that I am not referring to the small self or psychological self, but the larger and foundational self that we are in God.
2John Duns Scotus (1266–1308) was the Franciscan philosopher who most influenced Thomas Merton and Gerard Manley Hopkins, and all of us who love his subtle arguments for divine freedom, a Cosmic Christ, a nonviolent theology of redemption, and, in this poem, his wonderful doctrine of “thisness.” For Scotus, God does not create categories, classes, genuses, or species, but only unique and chosen individuals. Everything is a unique “this”! See Ingham, Mary Beth, Scotus for Dunces (St. Bonaventure, N.Y.: St. Bonaventure University, 2003); Hopkins, Gerard Manley, Poems and Prose (New York: Penguin, 1984), 51.
Introduction
1Rohr, Richard, Adam's Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation (New York: Crossroad, 2004).
2
Armstrong, Karen, A Short History of Myth (Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2006).
3Rohr, Richard, The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See (New York: Crossroad, 2009).
4The Odyssey, trans. Samuel Butler (Lawrence, Kans.: Digireads.com Publishing, 2009).
Chapter 1: The Two Halves of Life
1 Maslow, Abraham H., “A Theory of Human Motivation,” Psychological Review, 1943, developed and revised in many of his later books.
2 Wilber, Ken, One Taste (Boston: Shambhala, 2000), 25–258. Although Wilber develops his distinction between the “translative” and the truly “transformative” functions of religion in several places, this is one of the most succinct summaries. Religion must “devastate” before it consoles.
Chapter 2: The Hero and Heroine's Journey
1 Campbell, Joseph, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973).
2 Rohr, Richard, Adam's Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation (New York: Crossroad, 2004).
Chapter 3: The First Half of Life
1 Fromm, Eric, The Art of Loving (New York: Harper & Row, 1956), 43f.
2 Mander, Jerry, In the Absence of the Sacred (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1991).
3 Spiral Dynamics is a theory of human consciousness that claims to “explain everything.” In fact, it is quite convincing and helpful in terms of understanding at what level individuals, groups, nations, and whole eras hear, process, and act on their experience. Paralleling the foundational work of Piaget, Maslow, Fowler, Kohlberg, and Clare Graves, people like Robert Kegan, Don Beck, and Ken Wilber have made “Integral Theory” a part of much political, social, and religious discourse. “Transpartisan” thinking would often describe the higher levels of consciousness, whereas many progressive people still think “bipartisan” is as high as we can go. I have used the words nondualistic thinking, or contemplation, to mean approximately the same.
4 Rohr, Richard, From Wild Man to Wise Man (Cincinnati, Ohio: St. Anthony Messenger Press, 2005), 73f.
5 Plotkin, Bill, Nature and the Human Soul (Novato, Calif.: New World Library, 2008), 49f. In Plotkin's eight-stage wheel of development, he sees the early stages as largely ego driven, as they have to be. Until we make some kind of “soul encounter” with the deeper self, we cannot be soul drawn and live from our deeper identity. It is a brilliant analysis that parallels our own work in initiation (M.A.L.Es) and my thesis in this book.
6 Plotkin, Bill, Soulcraft (Novato, Calif.: New World Library, 2003), 91f.
7 Turner, Victor, The Ritual Process (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University, 1977), 94f. This book first clarified for me the concept of liminality, and why spiritual change, transformation, and initiation can happen best when we are on some “threshold” of our own lives. “Liminal space” has since become a key concept in my own work in initiation. Many people avoid all movement into any kind of liminal space, keep on cruise control, and nothing new happens.
8 May, Gerald, The Dark Night of the Soul (New York: HarperCollins, 2004).
Chapter 4: The Tragic Sense of Life
1 de Unamuno, Miguel, Tragic Sense of Life (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 1954).
2 Rohr, Richard, The Enneagram: A Christian Perspective (New York: Crossroad, 1999). After almost forty years of working with this explanation of human motivation and behavior, I am convinced that it was discovered and refined to help the “discernment of spirits” in spiritual directees. It makes very clear that your “sin” and your gift are two sides of the same coin and that you cannot fully face one without also facing the other. This tool has changed many lives.
3 Brueggemann, Walter, Theology of the Old Testament (Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 1999), 61f, “Israel's religion, and thus the texts, are incessantly pluralistic,” according to both Brueggemann and Professor Rainer Albertz.
Chapter 5: Stumbling over the Stumbling Stone
1 Rohr, Richard, Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality (Cincinnati, Ohio: St. Anthony Messenger Press), 195f. For Franciscans, Jesus did not need to change the mind of God about humanity, but he came to change the mind of humanity about God. Ours was a Cosmic Christ from all eternity who revealed the eternal love of God on the cross, but God did not need any “payment” to love us.
2 Moore, Robert, Facing the Dragon (Wilmette, Ill.: Chiron, 2003), 68f.
Chapter 6: Necessary Suffering
1 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, “That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire and the Comfort of the Resurrection,” Poems and Prose (New York: Penguin, 1984), 65f.
2 Merton, Thomas, New Seeds of Contemplation (New York: New Directions, 1962), passim. Merton's descriptions of the terms “true self” and “false self” have become a foundational piece of modern spirituality, and have clarified for many what the self is that has to “die” according to Jesus, and what the self is that lives forever.
Chapter 7: Home and Homesickness
1 Jung, Carl G., The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, vol. 1, Psychiatric Studies (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980), 483.
2 Christiansen, Michael, and Jeffery Wittung, Partakers of the Divine Nature (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University, 2007). The process of the divinization of human persons, or theosis, is for me at the very heart of the meaning of the Christian message, but it has been feared and undeveloped in the Western churches.
Chapter 8: Amnesia and the Big Picture
1 Clement, Olivier, The Roots of Christian Mysticism: Texts from the Patristic Era with Commentary (London: New City, 2002). This excellent and profound book is worth reading several times, and reveals how little the Western churches studied the Eastern Church fathers or the early period at all.
2 Wordsworth, William, “Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” Immortal Poems of the English Language (New York: Washington Square), 260f.
3 General audience, Pope John Paul II, June 28, 1999.
4 Gulley, Philip, and James Mulholland, If Grace Is True (New York: HarperCollins, 2004).
Chapter 9: A Second Simplicity
1 Pearce, Joseph Chilton, The Biology of Transcendence (Rochester, Vt.: Park Street Press, 2002); Newberg, Andrew, Why God Won't Go Away (New York: Ballantine Books, 2002).
2 Butcher, Carmen Adevedo, The Cloud of Unknowing (Boston: Shambhala, 2009). This new translation of an enduring classic can serve as the missing link for both modern fundamentalism and atheism, which suffer from the same deficit.
3 Eliot, T. S., “The Dry Salvages,” Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1971), 39.
4 Rohr, Richard, Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer (New York: Crossroad), 1999.
Chapter 10: A Bright Sadness
1 Augustine, Confessions, Book 10, 27, largely my translation.
2 Merton, Thomas, New Seeds of Contemplation (New York: New Directions, 1961), 297.
Chapter 11: The Shadowlands
1 Men as Learners and Elders, or M.A.L.Es, is our male spirituality program, which offers men's rites of passage and programs for male enrichment worldwide. See http://malespirituality.org.
Chapter 12: New Problems and New Directions
1 The Center for Action and Contemplation was founded in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1987 to help people working for social change to develop a rich interior life; we have always said that the most important word in our long title is “and.” See http://cacradicalgrace.org.
2 McLaren, Brian, Phyllis Tickle, Shane Claiborne, Alexie Torres Fleming, and Richard Rohr, “Emerging Christianity” (2010) and “Emerging Church” (2009), recorded conferences, available at http://cacradicalgrace.org.
3 Sardello, Robert, Silence: The Mystery of Wholeness (Berkeley, Calif.: Goldenstone Press, 2008); Picard, Max, The World of Silence (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1988).
4 Rohr, Richard, The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See (New York: Crossroad, 2009).
Coda
1Merton, Thomas, Collected Poems (New York: New Directions, 197
7), 279f.
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