Tuesday, November 10, 2020            (today’s lectionary)  Â
Memorial of St. Leo the Great, Pope & Doctor of the Church
The Great Doubt
Not long before he was accidentally electrocuted in Bangkok, Thomas Merton visited Christ in the Desert Monastery, a long way down dirt roads in the desert near Santa Fe. Leaving his Trappist digs in Kentucky to begin his trip to Asia, Merton fell in love with this place. He realized how much he had taken his Cistercian trappings for granted after twenty plus years of living in the same place with the same people, the same liturgies, the same energy day after day.
The grace of God has appeared, saving all and training us to reject godless ways and worldly desires, as we await the blessed hope, the appearance of the glory.
Sure, that consistent life was a good thing. But it was a bad thing too, and Merton had learned to hold those contradictory parallels within himself. “We have been content to find our way to a kind of peace, a simple, undisturbed thoughtful life, and this is certainly good, but is it good enough?”
Not far from Santa Fe my friend Jay and I spent a week at the Lama Foundation. While we were there we built an outhouse that stood up fine and worked like it was supposed to. Then we took off up Wheeler Peak, the highest mountain in New Mexico (13,159 feet).
We climbed, we stopped to rest, we stopped to eat, we made a fire and slept. As we crossed the tree line we entered the clouds, lightning, a thunderstorm, got soaked. We made another fire, dried off, and after spending awhile on top of the world, went straight down a riverbed to the Taos Ski Lodge, where we recovered in comfort, telling our stories to fascinated folks around another fire. They had been safe when we were not, and they tried to catch that wave of excitement and danger.
The Lord cleanses for himself a people as his own, eager to do what is good.
Merton would have loved all of this, I think. But at the monastery he had something else in mind, “to let change come quietly and invisibly on the inside … I feel the need to push on to the great doubt. Need for the Spirit. Hang on to the clear light!” (p. 49, Desert Spirit Places by Brad Karelious)
Merton knew how much he didn’t know. But the older he got, the more he read, the more he wrote and talked with others, the more he could be OK with that. And here’s why, I think. It became absolutely clear to him that his own work was not and had never been the point. It was God doing the work within him – words we’ve spoken a thousand times, and Merton probably spoke them ten thousand times, but on the way to Bangkok, waiting in the desert, they made more sense than ever.
By the Lord are the steps of a man made firm. The just shall possess the land and dwell in it forever.
So for my ego and my endlessly questioning mind, the Great Doubt is a necessary and precious possession . If I ever think I “know,” I’m lost. St. Augustine famously said, “If you do understand, then it is not God.”
Later on this same trip, but now in California at Our Lady of the Redwoods Abbey, Merton sat beside a fire and said, “You can’t have faith without doubt. Give up the business of suppressing it. Doubt and faith are two sides of the same thing. Faith will grow out of the real doubt. We don’t pray right because we evade doubt.”
Whoever loves me will keep my word.
Funny, though, keeping the word doesn’t just mean doing things. It means “being” things too. We do, and we are, like our Father God does, and is. I try not to get confused by this simplicity. We divide things up to understand them, but then at night God puts them all back together into one again.
One last thought from Merton’s fireside chat. “You have to experience duality a long time until you see it’s not there. The lower is higher. There are no levels. Any moment you can break through to the underlying unity which is God’s gift in Christ. In the end, Praise praises. Thanksgiving gives thanks.”
O sweet Jesus.
(Titus 2, Psalm 37, John 1, Luke 17)
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