Stand On Your Own Feet

Br. David Steindl-Rast—Now At the Crack of Dawn

Here is the high point of his whole Bangkok talk, the background of which is the story of Trungpa Rimpoche, who moved to the U.S. and founded a number of lively, prospering meditation centers. Merton met him on his Asian journey and was impressed. When the communists invaded Tibet, Trungpa Rimpoche was abbot of a large monastery, but was out on a visitation and got caught by the invasion at some farmhouse. Now the question was, what should he do? Should he go back to his own monastery, or should he flee across the border? He sent a message to a nearby abbot-friend to ask, “What shall we do?” The abbot sent back a message which Merton found most significant: “From now on, Brother, everybody stands on his own feet.”

Merton goes on to say, “To my mind, this is an extremely important monastic statement.” (Remember, this man is now speaking in the last hours of his life!) “If you forget everything else that has been said, I would suggest that you remember this for the future: ‘From now on, each one will have to stand on his own feet.’” He throws everything back on each monk personally: “Don’t rely on structure; stand on your own feet.” Then Merton expresses his relationship to structures: “Yes, we do need structures; we are supported by structures. But they may be destroyed at any moment by a political power or a political force. We cannot rely on structures. Use structures, but do not rely on structures.”

The moment we stand on our own two feet, the moment we find contemplative life at the root of monastic life, deep down in our own hearts, in our own center, we go beyond division. That is the third essential that Merton sifts out in facing the monastic identity crisis: that the Christian monastic calling is one that unites us with all monks. There again is this crack where he breaks out from the enclosed shell of a Trappist, Christian, monastic structure into universal monasticism. Monks East and West share the same quest, the contemplative quest of the human heart, in which we are all united. We go beyond division to an inner liberty that no one can touch.

Merton sees the essence: “What is essential in the monastic life is not embedded in buildings, not in a habit, not necessarily even in a rule.” (That must sound like enormous heresy to some.) “It is somewhere along the line of something deeper than a rule. It is concerned with this business of total inner transformation.” Once we have reached that last quest for total inner transformation, to quote Saint Paul, “there is no longer slave or free-born, there is no longer Jew or Gentile,” there is no longer Asian or European, but we have transcended these divisions. “This kind of monasticism,” Merton said in his last talk, “this kind of monasticism cannot be extinguished. It is imperishable; it represents an instinct of the human heart.” …

This is where Merton’s vision of the monk at the margin of society comes in, the monk as being totally superfluous. Nobody needs the monk, and yet, from another point of view, nobody needs anything as urgently as we need monks. For we need nothing more urgently than the superfluous. What would life be without poetry? What would life be without music? What would life be without friendship? But real friendship goes far beyond comradeship, where you still need one another. Comrades, like two sides of a step ladder, hold one another up. But when you get to friendship, it is pure gift. It is more than practical help and support. It is mutual enjoyment. It implies this letting go, this freedom to let go. I am not bound to you. As the Sufis say, “Two birds tied to one another do not fly better for having four wings.” That is something true friends understand. They fly with one another, but they are not tied to one another. They are completely free. The realm of our life where the superfluous matters most is our contemplative life. In that sense all of us have a contemplative life. The contemplative life of every human being consists in the search for meaning over and beyond purpose…

One of the theses that evolves from all of Merton’s writings, but particularly from his Bangkok talk, is that the contemplative life is the secret in the heart of every human being. It belongs to all of us. It isn’t the specialty of monks or anything like that. All of us are contemplatives. The second thesis flows directly out of that: If we are all contemplatives, and if the monastery is a controlled environment in which the contemplative life is professionally cultivated, a sort of laboratory – even Benedict called it a workshop – then everybody deserves a monastery, at least for a time.

You must be liberated from the world to liberate the world. And that is the final word with which he leaves us at this talk. Liberation is the monastic life. It is imperishable, an instinct of the human heart.

That is the crack of dawn, that is the crack where I see Merton standing, just at the moment when he actually passes over into that life that is hidden with Christ in God. It is a crack that is widening these days…and tremendous things are going to come from it.

—Thomas Merton, quoted in Now at the Crack of Dawn, Br. David Steindl-Rast, OSB. (Gratefulness.org).

Parker J. Palmer—A Friendship, A Love, A Rescue

When my courage to work at the margins wavers, I take heart in what Merton said in his final talk, given to a conference of monks in Bangkok a few hours before he died. Quoting a Tibetan lama who was forced to flee his monastery and his homeland, Merton advised the monks, “From now on, Brother, everybody stands on his own feet.” In words that ring true for me at a time in history when our major social institutions—religious, economic, and political institutions—are profoundly dysfunctional, Merton goes on to say: “…we can no longer rely on being supported by structures that may be destroyed at any moment by a political power or a political force. You cannot rely on structures. They are good and they should help us, and we should do the best we can with them. But they may be taken away, and if everything is taken away, what do you do next?” (Parker Palmer).

Things do not always work out so well, of course. History is full of tragically failed visions of possibility, and the more profound the vision, the more likely we are to fall short of achieving it. But even here, Merton has a word of hope for us, a paradoxical word, of course: “…do not depend on the hope of results. …you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself.”

As long as we are wedded to “effectiveness” we will take on smaller and smaller tasks, for they are the only ones with which we can get results. If we want to witness to important but impossible values like love, truth and justice, there must be a standard that trumps effectiveness. The name of that standard is “faithfulness.” At the end of the road, I will not be asking about outcomes. I’ll be asking if I was faithful to my gifts, to the needs I saw around me, to the ways in which my gifts might meet those needs, to “the truth of the work itself.”

For helping me understand this—and for imbuing me with the faith that, despite my many flaws, I might be able to live this way—I owe a debt of deep gratitude to Thomas Merton, friend, fellow traveler, and messenger of hope.

—Parker J. Palmer: A Friendship, A Love, A Rescue, (On Being column).

Sister Mary Luke Tobin—Merton’s Last Words 

“In the very last of his life, he gave this final talk in Bangkok. I went to the place in Bangkok, and I visited the room where he gave the final talk, and I visited the little bungalow where he died. I remember then what I heard about his last words. Merton, as you know, gave his talk, and then sat down and said. “We are going to have the questions tonight. Now I will disappear.” Many people repeat that as a prophecy. I think Merton meant he’d leave. And we’ll have the questions tonight.
So then he went from there to the lunchroom and had the lunch they had prepared, and then he walked over to his room accompanied by a French monk who talked to him as they walked along to Merton’s room and said to him, “Well, thank you for the talk you gave this morning. Everybody didn’t exactly appreciate it, though. We had some questions.” And I thought to myself, “Yes, this is the way it always is. Yes, I know they said some good things BUT.” There’s always that little part, and Merton was experiencing that there. Actually, it was a nun who said that, but usually I don’t say that because we have a bad enough press as it is, so I don’t usually set up the nun as the one who said that. Anyone could have. She happened to say it, and what she said was repeated to Merton: “I thought he would talk more about converting people to Christianity. I thought that’s what he was going to be talking about.” She enlarged on that. This is a pagan area where we are working, and we’re missionaries, and it’s a pagan area, and here he’s talking about something else and alienation, whatever. But I thought he’d talk about bringing people to Christ.
Merton, when he heard that, instead of getting upset the way many of us would get upset, said simply, “Well, I don’t think that is what we are asked to do today. All the preaching we get on television telling us who God is—honestly, you wonder what the word ‘God’ is to mean in all of that.” Merton has it better. “today I don’t think it is what we are asked to do. I think today it’s more important for us to so let God live in us that others may feel God and come to believe in God because they feel how God lives in us.” These were Merton’s last words that we know anything about and were said right before Francois de Grunne took him to his room where he tragically died, tragically for us, in any case. Certainly he had completed what was his journey. In other words, so let God live in us, so allow God to be the center where we make our decisions, where we live our lives, so let God live in us that others may find God by seeing how God lives in us, by somehow grasping how God lives in us. Better than any long television explanation of who God is. A beautiful last message, and I’d like to leave that with you as we conclude the talk on prayer because prayer, that presence of God, that reality of God, which each of us possesses, is our good fortune, “All love’s luck.” We have achieved it. Thank you very much.”

—Sr. Mary Luke Tobin SL, quoted in Beth Cioffoletti “Merton’s last words.” Father Louie Blog.

Additional Thomas Merton Quotes

“…I stand among you as one who offers a small message of hope, that first, there are always people who dare to seek on the margin of society, who are not dependent on social acceptance, not dependent on social routine, and prefer a kind of free-floating existence under a state of risk. And among these people, if they are faithful to their own calling, to their own vocation, and to their own message from God, communication on the deepest level is possible. And the deepest level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless. It is beyond words, and it is beyond speech and beyond concept.”

—Thomas Merton,The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton

“This new language of prayer has to come out of something which transcends all our traditions, and comes out of the immediacy of love. We have to part now, aware of the love that unites us, the love that unites us in spite of real differences, real emotional friction… The things on the surface are nothing, what is deep is the Real. We are creatures of Love. Let us therefore join hands, as we did before, and I will try to say something that comes out of the depths of our hearts. I ask you to concentrate on the love that is in you, that is in us all. I have no idea what I am going to say. I am going to be silent a minute, and then I will say something…
O God, we are one with You. You have made us one with You. You have taught us that if we are open to one another, You dwell in us. Help us to preserve this openness and to fight for it with all our hearts. Help us to realize that there can be no understanding where there is mutual rejection. O God, in accepting one another wholeheartedly, fully, completely, we accept You, and we thank You, and we adore You, and we love You with our whole being, because our being is Your being, our spirit is rooted in Your spirit. Fill us then with love, and let us be bound together with love as we go our diverse ways, united in this one spirit which makes You present in the world, and which makes You witness to the ultimate reality that is love. Love has overcome. Love is victorious. Amen.”

—Thomas Merton [Closing statements and prayer from an informal address delivered in Calcutta, India (October 1968), from The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton (1975).