Quotes & Sayings


We, and creation itself, actualize the possibilities of the God who sustains the world, towards becoming in the world in a fuller, more deeper way. - R.E. Slater

There is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have [consequential effects upon] the world around us. - Process Metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead

Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem says (i) all closed systems are unprovable within themselves and, that (ii) all open systems are rightly understood as incomplete. - R.E. Slater

The most true thing about you is what God has said to you in Christ, "You are My Beloved." - Tripp Fuller

The God among us is the God who refuses to be God without us, so great is God's Love. - Tripp Fuller

According to some Christian outlooks we were made for another world. Perhaps, rather, we were made for this world to recreate, reclaim, redeem, and renew unto God's future aspiration by the power of His Spirit. - R.E. Slater

Our eschatological ethos is to love. To stand with those who are oppressed. To stand against those who are oppressing. It is that simple. Love is our only calling and Christian Hope. - R.E. Slater

Secularization theory has been massively falsified. We don't live in an age of secularity. We live in an age of explosive, pervasive religiosity... an age of religious pluralism. - Peter L. Berger

Exploring the edge of life and faith in a post-everything world. - Todd Littleton

I don't need another reason to believe, your love is all around for me to see. – Anon

Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all. - Khalil Gibran, Prayer XXIII

Be careful what you pretend to be. You become what you pretend to be. - Kurt Vonnegut

Religious beliefs, far from being primary, are often shaped and adjusted by our social goals. - Jim Forest

We become who we are by what we believe and can justify. - R.E. Slater

People, even more than things, need to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. – Anon

Certainly, God's love has made fools of us all. - R.E. Slater

An apocalyptic Christian faith doesn't wait for Jesus to come, but for Jesus to become in our midst. - R.E. Slater

Christian belief in God begins with the cross and resurrection of Jesus, not with rational apologetics. - Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann

Our knowledge of God is through the 'I-Thou' encounter, not in finding God at the end of a syllogism or argument. There is a grave danger in any Christian treatment of God as an object. The God of Jesus Christ and Scripture is irreducibly subject and never made as an object, a force, a power, or a principle that can be manipulated. - Emil Brunner

“Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh” means "I will be that who I have yet to become." - God (Ex 3.14) or, conversely, “I AM who I AM Becoming.”

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. - Thomas Merton

The church is God's world-changing social experiment of bringing unlikes and differents to the Eucharist/Communion table to share life with one another as a new kind of family. When this happens, we show to the world what love, justice, peace, reconciliation, and life together is designed by God to be. The church is God's show-and-tell for the world to see how God wants us to live as a blended, global, polypluralistic family united with one will, by one Lord, and baptized by one Spirit. – Anon

The cross that is planted at the heart of the history of the world cannot be uprooted. - Jacques Ellul

The Unity in whose loving presence the universe unfolds is inside each person as a call to welcome the stranger, protect animals and the earth, respect the dignity of each person, think new thoughts, and help bring about ecological civilizations. - John Cobb & Farhan A. Shah

If you board the wrong train it is of no use running along the corridors of the train in the other direction. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

God's justice is restorative rather than punitive; His discipline is merciful rather than punishing; His power is made perfect in weakness; and His grace is sufficient for all. – Anon

Our little [biblical] systems have their day; they have their day and cease to be. They are but broken lights of Thee, and Thou, O God art more than they. - Alfred Lord Tennyson

We can’t control God; God is uncontrollable. God can’t control us; God’s love is uncontrolling! - Thomas Jay Oord

Life in perspective but always in process... as we are relational beings in process to one another, so life events are in process in relation to each event... as God is to Self, is to world, is to us... like Father, like sons and daughters, like events... life in process yet always in perspective. - R.E. Slater

To promote societal transition to sustainable ways of living and a global society founded on a shared ethical framework which includes respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, universal human rights, respect for diversity, economic justice, democracy, and a culture of peace. - The Earth Charter Mission Statement

Christian humanism is the belief that human freedom, individual conscience, and unencumbered rational inquiry are compatible with the practice of Christianity or even intrinsic in its doctrine. It represents a philosophical union of Christian faith and classical humanist principles. - Scott Postma

It is never wise to have a self-appointed religious institution determine a nation's moral code. The opportunities for moral compromise and failure are high; the moral codes and creeds assuredly racist, discriminatory, or subjectively and religiously defined; and the pronouncement of inhumanitarian political objectives quite predictable. - R.E. Slater

God's love must both center and define the Christian faith and all religious or human faiths seeking human and ecological balance in worlds of subtraction, harm, tragedy, and evil. - R.E. Slater

In Whitehead’s process ontology, we can think of the experiential ground of reality as an eternal pulse whereby what is objectively public in one moment becomes subjectively prehended in the next, and whereby the subject that emerges from its feelings then perishes into public expression as an object (or “superject”) aiming for novelty. There is a rhythm of Being between object and subject, not an ontological division. This rhythm powers the creative growth of the universe from one occasion of experience to the next. This is the Whiteheadian mantra: “The many become one and are increased by one.” - Matthew Segall

Without Love there is no Truth. And True Truth is always Loving. There is no dichotomy between these terms but only seamless integration. This is the premier centering focus of a Processual Theology of Love. - R.E. Slater

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Note: Generally I do not respond to commentary. I may read the comments but wish to reserve my time to write (or write from the comments I read). Instead, I'd like to see our community help one another and in the helping encourage and exhort each of us towards Christian love in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior. - re slater

Thursday, August 20, 2020

Work and Prayer: The Brief Friendship of Thomas Merton and Wendell Berry

Thomas Merton

Wendell Berry

     








Work and Prayer: The Brief Friendship of
Thomas Merton and Wendell Berry

by Dan Rattelle
June 19, 20205

Leeds, MA. In 1965 Thomas Merton, after long waiting, moved into his hermitage on the grounds of Our Lady of Gethsemani monastery near Bardstown, Kentucky, where he had lived since 1942. A few months earlier and eighty miles north, Wendell Berry took apart a cabin that had belonged to his uncle and rebuilt it as his writing place, a kind of hermitage of his own, which James Baker Hall describes as “not just a quiet place, it was a place of quiet.”

Merton and Berry met, it seems, at least once—on December 10, 1967, exactly one year before Merton’s death. Wendell and his wife Tanya, poet Denise Levertov, the photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard, and his wife Madelyn all met at Gethsemani for lunch. The meeting seems to have been pleasant but exhausting for Merton, who wrote in his journal for that day “I am hoping this next week will be quiet—a time of fasting and retreat. Too many people here lately.” It is possible that they met before this, as their letters display a certain familiarity—Berry mentions that he had his publisher send a copy of one of his books (possibly Openings) to the hermitage. Berry addresses his first letter to Fr. Louis, Merton’s religious name, which suggests any earlier meeting may have been under more formal circumstances.


For Want of Silence - re slater

The other letters are mostly to do with Merton’s magazine Monk’s Pond, which Berry had sent some poems to. “Maybe I am losing all my friends by failure to answer about Monks Pond. . . .” Merton writes in his journal, “Must write Jonathan Greene, Wendell Berry, etc. etc. Will try to get the second number lined up today. First is stalled in Cassian’s printshop. Liturgy choking every press.” He dates Berry’s letter a day earlier, saying he’d run most of the poems in the next two issues and had done some toggling with others. “This is probably a hell of a way to edit a magazine,” he says. A picnic at Gethsemani is suggested for around Easter—Merton, by the way, had been looking forward to the solitude of that Lent. Berry, however, would be on the West Coast, he says, and can’t make it. They would never meet again.

Berry wrote in one of his letters to Merton that “you are one of the few whose awareness of what I’m doing here would be of value to me.” He is acknowledging that he and Merton lead lives of similar mission, lives shaped by work and silence. Given the enormous development in Merton between The Seven Story Mountain and Zen and The Birds of Appetite (which he was finishing when he met Berry) who knows how he would have changed further if he had lived longer. Throughout the 1960s, though, he and Berry were truly co-laborers. The work of both writers narrates the problem of "Man in Mass Society," which Merton describes in Marxist terms as a problem of alienation. Man is alienated from his work. He works for others and does not get or even see the product of his labor. Instead of revolution, Merton gives this solution:

"Work that is productive, properly organized, and remains in contact with nature, work that is truly physical and manual outdoor work, work that is properly managed and well done, work that is managed and taught on a human and monastic level, and not carried out like factory-type drudgery or office routines— such work can do much to help the young monk find his identity and grow in Christ, by teaching him to accept himself, work in harmony with others, and feel himself fully part of a world made by a loving father in which his own work has a redemptive and sanctifying quality because it is united with the labor and sacrifice of the Incarnate Son of God."

Though seldom invoking dogma in this way, you can find this kind of thing on almost every page of Berry. In one instance, in his book on William Carlos Williams, he criticizes those “numerous people to whom ‘the Word was made flesh’ was no more than an idea.” Recall also how anti-platonic the Merton of Seven Story Mountain is. This resistance to abstraction is partly what led Merton to Zen in the first place. We live abstracted lives. We flip a switch and we have light. We open a package and we have dinner. We cast our images onto the internet. We look at other people’s bodies through a screen. Think of how companies like Zoom have abstracted and commodified basic human interaction. In his hermitage, Merton felt he was encountering real life and was therefore capable of giving himself to God more fully. This privileging of the concrete world of disembodied ideas, for both Merton and Berry, is rooted in the incarnation. Because the word has been made flesh “there are no unsacred places.” Berry illustrates this point well in “A Native Hill” from 1969: “A path is little more than a habit that comes with knowledge of a place.” A path is the incarnation of a people’s idea of the place, while the road is almost pure abstraction whose “tendency is to translate place into space in order to traverse it with the least effort.” Elsewhere, Berry describes his commute from Lexington, where he taught, to the long-legged house as a journey from the abstract into the concrete:

"It was always a journey from the sound of public voices to the sound of a private quiet voice rising falteringly out of the roots of my mind, that I listened carefully in the silence to hear. It was a journey from the abstract collective life of the university and the city into the intimate country of my own life. It is only a country that is well known, full of familiar names and places, full of life that is always changing, that the mind goes free of abstractions, and renews itself in the presence of the creation, that so persistently eludes human comprehension and human law."

Merton describes the hermitage in similar terms, saying that the hermit’s life “should bear witness to the fact that certain basic claims about solitude and peace are in fact true. And in doing this, it will restore people’s confidence, first in their own humanity and beyond that in the grace of God.”

Merton makes this point, that grace is not opposed to nature, in an attempt to redefine the monk’s position toward the world. For him, the point of the monastic life is not a rigid turning away from ‘the world,’ an escape from the flesh but an opportunity to get more in touch with what it means to be fully human in a world that dehumanizes us. The monk works with his body and seeks silence and solitude so that “his mind and heart can relax and expand . . . there too he can hear the word of God and meditate on it more quietly, without strain, without forcing himself, without being carried away in useless speculations.”

Silence, apart from farming, is Berry’s other major preoccupation. Think of how Burley keeps reminding Nathan that “It doesn’t pay to talk too much about your business” in Nathan Coulter, how the novel’s would-be climax of the huge catfish is spoiled for Burley by too much chatter, and how, by the end, Nathan begins a long silence that will last the rest of his life. Encouraging the reader to get rid of the television set, Berry says “the ensuing silence is an invitation to our homes, to our own places and lives, to come into being.”

On finding one’s own place Merton writes “this implies a kind of mysterious awakening to the fact that where we actually are is where we belong.” This means that I belong at this desk, in this room, on this acre of woods at the edge of a much larger forest, and not anywhere the computer that is on my desk can take me. Silence for Merton, as a monk, is of course connected to prayer. So it seems with Berry:

"Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of what little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came."



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