Thomas Merton: Failings of Faith Life & Prayer

Thomas Merton (1915-1968) was a Cistercian (Trappist) monk resident at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky. He was a poet and, perhaps, the most prolific and authoritative 20th-century writer on the Christian contemplative life and tradition. His name and works were recognized broadly outside the cloisters of his monastic life and his Roman Catholic Christian faith. His best known work is his autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, but his most important work on the contemplative life is likely New Seeds of Contemplation.

Merton was also a scholar and sympathetic ambassador to the contemplative traditions of other faiths, particularly those of East Asia. He provided respected commentary on the Chinese Taoist Master in The Way of Chuang Tzu, along with English translations of his poetry. His book Zen and the Birds of Appetite provides an intriguing treatment of Chan/Zen Buddhism from the perspective of a Christian contemplative, and offers a fascinating, insightful dialogue between Merton and Japanese Zen Master and scholar D.T. Suzuki.

But the work that speaks most directly to me is his instructive, profound reflections on Contemplative Prayer, published after his accidental death in 1968. And one of the characteristics of Merton that made him more real, a citizen in this world even if a monk, was his open, unapologetic commentary about the ills and failings of society, and the ills and failings of the organized Christian Church. A man after Christ's own heart, he lived the humble, compassionate life of an impoverished monk, yet never failed to take up his cross in calling out the religious Pharisees and vipers, the fakes and hypocrites of his day--and the misguiding expressions of their misappropriated faith.

This from Contemplative Prayer, Chapter 19, pp. 113:

Of course it is true that religion on a superficial level, religion that is untrue to itself and to God, easily comes to serve as "the opium of the people." And this takes place whenever religion and prayer invoke the name of God for reasons and ends that have nothing to do with Him. When religion becomes a mere artificial facade to justify a social or economic system--when religion hands over its rites and language completely to the political propagandist, and when prayer becomes the vehicle for a purely secular ideological program, then religion does tend to become an opiate.

It deadens the spirit enough to permit the substitution of a superficial fiction and mythology for His truth of life. And this brings about the alienation of the believer, so that his religious zeal becomes political fanaticism. His faith in God, while preserving its traditional formulas, becomes in fact faith in his own nation, class or race. His ethic ceases to be the law of God and of love, and becomes the law that might-makes-right: established privilege justifies everything. God is the status quo.

In the last book to come to us from the hand of Raissa Maritain, her commentary on the Lord's Prayer, we read the following passage concerning those who barely obtain their daily bread, and are deprived of the advantages of a decent life on earth by the injustice and thoughtlessness of the privileged:

If there were fewer wars, less thirst to dominate and exploit others, less national egoism, less egoism of class and caste, if man were more concerned for his brother, and really wanted to collect together for the good of the human race all the resources which science places at our disposal especially today, there would be on earth fewer populations deprived of their necessary sustenance, there would be fewer children who die or are incurably weakened by undernourishment.

She goes on to ask what obstacles man has placed in the way of the Gospel that this should be so. It is unfortunately true that those who have complacently imagined themselves blessed by God have in fact done more than others to frustrate His will....

In such cases, religion is understood to be at least implicitly misdirected, and therefore the "God" whom it invokes becomes, or tends to become, a mere figment of the imagination. Such religion is insincere. It is merely a front for greed, injustice, selfishness, violence. The cure for this corruption is to restore the purity of faith and the genuineness of Christian love: and this means a restoration of the contemplative orientation of prayer.

How, I wonder, might Thomas Merton view the hubris of those more politicized, triumphalist, and polarizing Christian church cultures of today?