A Point of Pure Truth

Thomas Merton

Thomas Merton (born in Prades, France, January 31, 1915) was an influential and beloved twentieth century luminary. He was a Trappist monk at the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemane in Kentucky, as well as an author, poet, mystic, theologian and social activist. He was committed to interreligious and interfaith dialogue. He sought out and befriended luminaries, including D. T. Suzuki, Huston Smith, the Dalai lama and Thich Nhat Hanh.

Huston Smith met Thomas Merton at a conference in Calcutta. In his book The Way Things Are Huston Smith shares several anecdotes from this experience and concludes: “We ended the week by flying together from Calcutta to Delhi. I was going up to the Tibetans in northern India at Dharamsala, and he was going down to Thailand to his death* Of course we didn’t know that.”

• Thomas Merton died of ‘accidental’ electrocution in Bangkok on December 10, 1968.

Richard Rohr on this Thomas Merton Quote

Most people spend their entire lives living up to their false self, the mental self-images of who they think they are, instead of living in the primal “I” that is already good in God’s eyes. But all I can “pay back” to God or others or myself is who I really am. This is what Merton is describing above. It’s a place of utter simplicity. Perhaps we don’t want to go back there because it is too simple and almost too natural. It feels utterly unadorned. There’s nothing to congratulate myself for. I can’t prove any worth, much less superiority. There I am naked and poor. After years of posturing and projecting, it will at first feel like nothing.

But when we are nothing, we are in a fine position to receive everything from God. As Merton says above, our point of nothingness is “the pure glory of God in us.” If we look at the great religious traditions, we see they all use similar words to point in the same direction. The Franciscan word is “poverty.” The Carmelite word is nada or “nothingness.” The Buddhists speak of “emptiness.” Jesus speaks of being “poor in spirit” in his very first beatitude.

The Bible as a whole prefers to talk in images, and the desert is a foundational one. The desert is where we are voluntarily under-stimulated—no feedback, no new data. Jesus says to go into the closet or the “inner room.” That’s where we stop living out of other people’s response to us. We can then say, I am not who you think I am. Nor am I who you need me to be. I’m not even who I need myself to be. I must be “nothing” in order to be open to all of reality and new reality. Merton’s reservoir of solitude and contemplation allowed him to see the gate of heaven everywhere, even on a common street corner.

A Zen master would call the True Self “the face we had before we were born.” Paul would call it who you are “in Christ, hidden in God” (Colossians 3:3). It is who you are before having done anything right or anything wrong, who you are before having thought about who you are. Thinking creates the false self, the ego self, the insecure self. The God-given contemplative mind, on the other hand, recognizes the God Self, the Christ Self, the True Self of abundance and deep inner security. We start with mere seeing; we end up with recognizing.

—Richard Rohr, [Adapted from, Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer (Crossroad Publishing: 1999, 2003)] pp. 76-78. [See Citation above and link in Resources below].

Additional Thomas Merton Quotes

“The sin of bad theology has been precisely this – to set Christ up against man, and to regard all flesh and blood men as “not-Christ.” Indeed to assume that many men, whole classes of men, nations, races, are in fact “anti-Christ.” To divide men arbitrarily according to their conformity to our own limited disincarnate mental Christ, and to decide on this basis that most men are “anti-Christ” – this shows up our theology. At such a moment, we have to question not mankind, but our theology. A theology that ends in lovelessness cannot be Christian.”

―Thomas Merton [Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander].

“A Christian society? Such a society is not one that is run by priests, not even necessarily one in which everybody has to go to Church: it is one in which work is for production and not for profit, and production is not for its own sake, not merely for the sake of those who own the means of production, but for all who contribute in a constructive way to the process of production. A Christian society is one in which men give their share of labor and intelligence and receive their share of the fruits of the labor of all, and in which all this is seen in relation to a transcendental purpose, the “history of salvation,” the Kingdom of God, a society centered upon the divine truth and the divine mercy.”

―Thomas Merton [Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander].

“Is Christian ethics merely a specific set of Christian answers to the question of good and evil, right and wrong? To make it no more than this is to forget that man’s fall was a fall into the knowledge of good and evil, reinforced by the inexorable knowledge of a condemning law, and that man’s restoration in Christ is a restoration to freedom and grace, to a love that needs no law since it knows and does only what is in accord with love and with God. To imprison ethics in the realm of division, of good and evil, right and wrong, is to condemn it to sterility, and rob it of its real reason for existing, which is love. Love cannot be reduced to one virtue among many others prescribed by ethical imperatives. When love is only “a virtue” among many, man forgets that “God is love” and becomes incapable of that all-embracing love by which we secretly begin to know God as our Creator and Redeemer – who has saved us from the limitations of a purely restrictive and aimless existence “under a law.”

So Bonhoeffer says very rightly: “In the knowledge of good and evil man does not understand himself in the reality of the destiny appointed in his origin, but rather in his own possibilities, his possibility of being good or evil. He knows himself now as something apart from God, outside God, and this means that he now knows only himself and no longer knows God at all…. The knowledge of good and evil is therefore separation from God. Only against God can man know good and evil.”

―Thomas Merton [Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander].