Hopeless Causes, Claretians, and Charisms

'La caridad me urge, me impele, me obliga a gritar.' -St. Antonio Maria Claret

'You will find something more in woods than in books. Trees and stones will teach you that which you can never learn from masters.' - St. Bernard of Clairvaux

'To reach something good it is very useful to have gone astray, and thus acquire experience.' - St. Teresa of Avila

'Arm yourself with prayer rather than a sword; wear humility rather than fine clothes.' - St. Dominic



With all that being said, in regards to my statement in the last post about there being no one-fits-all spirituality, I do not mean to say that some truths cannot be universal, nor either that admiring and utilizing elements of other traditions is inherently wrong or fatuous. But trading one inadequately-investigated tradition for superficial adherence to another, one set of misapprehended truths for another yet more confusing system, is every bit as goofy as Chesterton makes it sound. Familiarity is a no more sufficient basis for renouncing a spiritual tradition than it is for divorcing a spouse or vowing never again to read Dostoevsky or eat ice cream.

Augustine defended his use of Plotinus by likening it to the Jews taking the gold out of Egypt, and varied things from different sources may have especial resonance to individual seekers. What is necessary when confronted with all these sparkling jewels is a determined refusal either to make lead out of them or to appropriate what seems convenient or commonsensical while gravely mistaking its essence.

In that vein, there are as many different spiritualities available within Catholicism as there are Catholics. John Dunne, John Dear, John Main, and the fourteenth-century Dominican John Tauler have not only the same name but a shared focus on contemplation and meditation that would not be entirely unfamiliar to a real Buddhist. Martin de Porres, Vincent de Paul, Francis of Assisi, Oscar Romero, Dorothy Day, Antonio Claret, Cesar Chavez, Jean Vanier, and Simone Weil can give anyone a good start who wishes he could combine his love of the poor and the suffering with his love of God.

And this is where the saints come in. There are two primary ways to look at the saints. One is as Friends of God. They did so well in this lifetime that they have God's ear in the next, so while you are praying to God directly that the Red Sox please, please, please take the pennant this time, you can also suggest to St. Jude that this may be the sort of hopeless case worthy of his attention as an advocate. If you are struggling in school, you can ask a brilliant scholar like Aquinas to help you along, or you can petition someone who battled the same challenges to at least give you the courage to keep plugging away diligently.

The other way to see them is as Heroes for Grownups. Saints can indeed be intimidating: they were saints, after all, and we are probably not. But each is as memorable for what he or she overcame as for what s/he accomplished, and meditating on those struggles is often where we can gain the most. They were also individuals, with distinct tendencies and temperaments, walking very different paths toward union, and just as we feel greater sympathy toward particular people we meet in daily life, so, too, will different saints' stories seem more or less apropos of our own journeys, strivings, and weaknesses.

I don't know why people are scared of saints. I think particularly if we refuse to idolize them, to make them into something they were not (i.e., perfect), we can see in their examples how far a small, flawed, and eminently human being - possibly a human being who shared some of our own fears and failures - can get in this life by not letting those fears and weaknesses surmount him.

'Stay me with flaggons,

Comfort me with apples: for I am sick with Love.' --Song of Songs

My good heavens. I'm reading parts of St. Bernard's commentary on the Song of Songs, and I just noticed that someone left the goofiest mean comment (anonymously) on the Barnes and Noble post. Fascinating timing, as with everything these days. Anyway, I approved it and let it in because I think it is interesting - not to mention troubling - when people are so angry that they will use any forum available to them just to get rid of one tiny piece of that venom. As though there were some literal, physical store of it, like a bank account into which and from which quantities could be put and taken. If I could spend it all, in other words, I could deplete the account and finally return to civil and friendly interactions. In emptying it I might be again made whole.

Of course it doesn't really work that way. We don't lose our anger by throwing it around as much as we can, by dishing it out to everyone who crosses our path. There isn't an actual, finite amount of it for us to shepherd or amass interest or over-limit charges on. Frankly, it builds within us the more we live in it and the more we give in to seeing the world as one filled with enemies. And unity, even in small doses, even among small groups, can seem overwhelmingly daunting when you really try to absorb the fact that even the genuine and good-willed still ineluctably see the world only through one pair of eyes. Still, telling strangers to go kill themselves does seem a bit extreme in the other direction. Even if the stranger does dislike 80s pop icons Billy Joel and Elton John.

And I think it is obvious that there is so much more loneliness and anomie in the world now than was ever even possible before. People are disconnected, often isolated much of the time -- and how can I see someone as my brother when I haven't even met him? Maybe it is a leap, but equally so is seeing the stranger as the enemy and reacting in that manner.

I was actually going to write something about this the other day, but I couldn't find a way to make it not sappy. With Mr./Ms. Anonymous as inspiration, however, I can give it a try. My point was going to be about the fairly amazing day-to-day consequences of vigorously trying to keep love and respect in the forefront when dealing with other people. Some of us believe a reward will come in the next stage of life if we treat others well in this one, but we can choose to have a very different sort of life right here by opening up our hearts now and trying to act out of love.

I'm not even referring to any grandiose schemes, or recognizable 'acts of mercy' per se. Just being nice, basically. Not taking your frustration with a bad sleep into your interaction with the bank teller. Stopping for every pedestrian. Letting the right-turn guy merge without resistance. Asking the waiter where he got his watch, the neighbor how his rebuilt Triumph is coming. Sending an email to a store manager because the clerk was extra helpful. Refusing to tailgate the slow old lady in the Lincoln. And then actually thinking about why it is old ladies drive slowly, and imagining what your own world will be like when you yourself are eighty.

This is where it gets sappy, and I don't have the skill to make it otherwise. The fact is, if you take just one day of assiduously being nice to everyone you encounter, it will be an amazing day for you. If when someone goes on about something in a way that seems stupid, or excessive, or so alien to your own understanding, you might genuinely try to read what is behind it, why that person needs to say it, and is saying it in that particular way - not only will your blood pressure drop and you stop rolling your eyes, but you will know more about yourself as well as the other person. You will also have the additional opportunity to think about why you were given that experience at that time, and thus the chance to take even more from it. And you will come home at the end of the day satisfied and full and happy, having had twenty or thirty truly human, truly pleasant and enriching encounters with other people. Sappy, perhaps, but completely true!

Anyway, here is one pretty gorgeous thing St. Bernard had to say about love, which is far better than anything I could hope to write and not sappy in the slightest:

'Love is sufficient of itself, it gives pleasure by itself and because of itself. It is its own merit, its own reward. Love looks for no cause outside itself, no effect beyond itself. Its profit lies in its practice. I love because I love, I love that I may love. Love is a great thing so long as it continually returns to its fountainhead, flows back to its source, always drawing from there the water which constantly replenishes it.'

Coherent Narratives (in Life, friends, not here.)

Caution: This entry says nothing of consequence about anything of consequence. Things of substance, written somewhat coherently, are elsewhere; skip ahead or back if you want one of those. If you like your logic loose, loopy, and slapdash, read on.

...At any rate, Dominicans being everywhere does not mitigate the fact that the last place I would expect to find one in my blog is IN-in my blog, but it seems you can't escape them with anything near the sort of regularity and indeed predictability with which we routinely fail to bump into Cistercians at the Circle K (do Circle K's still exist? I used to buy my Now 'n' Laters there, and once got a Bit o' Honey with a mosquito half-embedded in the top), but Fr. Fones, of prudential-judgment-and-politics, whom/which you'll remember from a few posts back, left a lovely comment about one of my posts about poverty.

But that's not what I'm getting to. Although, if only more people would comment, that would be great. Although, 'more people commenting' does presuppose someone is reading, and I think that is where the whole idea sort of loses a bit of steam.

At any rate.

Unlike a journal entry or emails, I try to afford those nonexistent readers of my blog the courtesy not only of a concluding sentence, but often a good title, too, when something strikes me. This allows me to believe, by framing the post so nicely, that there is indeed a middle thus framed, leaving me free of guilt and able to carry on with outfit-coordination for another day.

However.

Dominicans were called sometimes, by some, in certain parts, the Black Friars, or the Blackfriars, due, unsurprisingly, to their wearing of a black outergarment. And Shakespeare's (well, partly Shakespeare's) Blackfriars Theatre in London is on the site of a 13th-century Dominican monastery which, after Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries in England, France, and Wales in the 16th century, had very few friars of any color left in it.

That fact notwithstanding.

I was trying to trying to come up with something vaguely amusing for the title here. Now, stepping up another century, the Black Robes were the Jesuits, the Sulpicians, and the Récollets in New France. But mostly the Jesuits. I could use 'black robe' if I gave it a twist. But I lacked a twist.

So at this point (in the naming of one stupid blog entry!) we have: Dominicans, Shakespeare, England, egomaniacal homicidal kings, Québec, Jesuits, and the color black. Which is a lot of things, but not much to work with. So I looked up stuff on the author of Black Robe, the Belfast native Brian Moore, who also wrote Judith Hearne, which became The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne with Maggie Smith and Bob Hoskins, which I did not see and have nothing funny to say about.

But Black Robe also became a movie about two centuries after bad King Henry, when in 1991 it was directed by Bruce Beresford, who had previously directed Driving Miss Daisy, which is about slow driving and a slow-building relationship. Black Robe happily retained in film form many of the difficult moral issues of the book. And it had Lothaire Bluteau, of Jesus of Montréal fame, in the lead as Fr. Laforgue, whose deep faith leads him to great courage. It's one of my favorite films, and is at times unbearably beautiful and at others unbearably disturbing.

Which of course has nothing to do with Dominicans. Inconveniently.

However, it turns out that that when he died in 1999 (in Malibu, which is far, far away from Shakespeare and the Algonquins of either 1600s-Québec or 1920s-New-York-City type), Moore was working on a novel based on the life of Arthur Rimbaud, while in 1984 his screenplay for Simone de Beauvoir's (a thinky, ethical risking-her-life-for-the-good-of-others atheist if ever there were one) Le Sang des Autres, her novel about the French Resistance, was made into an American film by French director Claude Chabrol. And is said to be ungreat.

But to go back a century now, Arthur Rimbaud, while probably more anti-religion than either Mr. Moore or Mme. de Beauvoir, and not one to trouble himself overmuch with ethical problems - from gun-running (and some biographers say slave-running, as well) to stealing people's husbands - was, despite all that and his early death and even earlier renunciation of poetry-writing (at 20), one of the most influential poets in modern times.

Which brings us to me, as the stupid URL of this blog, oisive-vitesse (which only exists because I couldn't get vifargent) (who only has one post, by the way, from 2004), which is a very stupid pun on a very famous Rimbaud poem and also has to do with my driving style, which could very well be characterized (by a gentle person, charitable of heart and tolerant by nature) as 'relaxed,' or 'easy-going.'

The line I bastardized is from the poem 'La chanson de la plus haute tour,' and goes something like this:

'Oisive jeunesse
A tout asservie,
Par délicatesse
J'ai perdue ma vie.
Ah! Que le temps viennent
Où les coeurs s'éprennent.'

And likewise something like this:

'Idle youth
Enslaved to everything,
Through sensitivity
I have wasted my life.
Oh! Let the time come
When hearts open up.'

Which is ungraceful, but there you go. You get what you pay for. Anyway, 'oisive' means lazy, even though birds are anything but. Sort of like Canadian Smarties, which are no longer made by Rowntree and are basically sweeter M & M's, with nothing acidic or 'smarty' about them. And I'm not a lazy driver, but I'm sure it looks like either the car or I must be at times. Still, I have remembered this stanza always (I have no idea what the rest of the poem says) not just because I like the redemptive hope of the last line, not if such a time comes, but when (literally 'where,' but we'll not trouble ourselves excessively with that for now; the certainty holds either way), but also because it can seem sometimes that all our youthful passion for fifty thousand different things simultaneously could have been wasted.

I don't think it is. I think we take it with us. I think perhaps one has to reach a certain age to be able to look back and see just how shockingly coherent the narrative of our lives is. Maybe the aggregate of facts simply has to be large enough to let the pattern emerge. All my childhood obsessions I still have, if sometimes in mitigated form. All my tastes and predilections (except those for footed pjyamas and tea with sugar) remain about the same, with some accommodation for education and fine-tuning (I no longer want literally to live in a genie bottle; I'm content to hang a Moroccan lantern inside, and string some curtains around, my bateau ivre of a bed and call it done), and I'm most satisfied or content when I have some version of the things that made me happiest as a child and adolescent - down to the bottle full of buttons I spent countless hours sorting and resorting on my grandmother's floor. I don't think it's wasted; I think we just sometimes take too long to realize what it taught us about ourselves.

Habitual Concerns

Alright, more on Merton, it seems, and nothing on Dominicans. Okay, not really so much on Merton, either, truth be told, but it starts with him.

In the same part of the same book, the Sign of Jonas, where Merton deals a bit with his struggle between intellect and something like what he construed as 'real work' or the 'right path' to communion with the Divine at the time, he mentions his correspondence with some Carthusians. For Merton the Trappist Cistercian, the spirituality and life of the Carthusians seems to have seemed higher, purer, better. At the time he wrote that particular entry, there was no Carthusian monastery in the US (by the early 1950s, however, there was a small Carthusian Foundation, followed by construction of the Charterhouse of the Transfiguration in Vermont, completed by 1960), and Dom Porion suggested to Merton from France that the idea of an American Carthusian charterhouse was an unlikely one at any point. The Carthusian rule is the most austere of all the orders, and Americans, well...

Echoing Merton's respect for the Carthusian charisms, Robert Speaight, visiting the monastery at the time for a performance, remarked to Merton that 'half the people he knew at at some time or other tried to become Carthusians.' Merton reflects upon Dom Porion's letter that 'I saw at once very clearly how literally the contemplative vocation is taken by the Carthusians...It reminded me of my own longing for solitude, interior purity, perfect silence, a life for God alone. I haven't prayed in months as I have been praying since I read that letter...but burning up with the desire of God and with shame at my unmitigated interior activity and the futility of so much that I do.'

Now, part of Merton's frustration would arise in anyone committed to any sort of a mission, whether religious or secular. He had to do all sorts of administrative things for his publishing and for the monastery, he had to proofread, revise, order books for his monastery, 'barter' books with other communities, and he had to read and answer fan mail, as the world's most famous Catholic, the world's favorite monk, and some kind of unintentional poster boy for religion and the contemplative way in the new age. And as he said, 'the theology of contemplation does not mix well with fan mail. Also it is difficult.' These are all rather worldly things, 'noisy' things - even the theology of contemplation - compared to the encompassing silence he wished to cultivate and live inside - a silence to which it seemed the Carthusians had more ready access.

And this is what I am getting to: this apparent human need to have a hierarchy, rather than an egalitarian taxonomy, of gifts. The Tibetan Buddhists are better than straight-up Mahayana, because theirs is a solidly monastic tradition. The priest is better than the devoted father of three, because he is celibate. A Poor Clare is better than a Franciscan sister, because she has renounced all possessions, not 'merely' embraced poverty. The choir nun is better than the lay sister, and Carthusians are better than Cistercians, who are better than Benedictines, who are better than Dominicans. And any religious who wears a habit is better than a religious who doesn't.

I see a lot of this, and a whole lot of the latter. Vocations are booming, too (okay, relatively speaking) in more 'traditional' orders part of whose tradition includes centuries-old garb. There are good and bad reasons to be drawn to orders part of whose rule includes habits, but as someone with a lot of experience with clothing, history of clothing, anthropology of clothing, psychology of clothing, and philosophy/semiotics (yes, there is such a thing) of clothing, I can understand and relate to feelings on both sides. In part this whole issue relates to the 'traditionalist' stream in Catholicism in general, and I'm not not going to get into that specifically. Everyone's spirituality is their own, and it's up to the individual and his conscience to figure out what his path is.

But there is a sound bit of logic on the part of apostolic or active (i.e., out in the world doing stuff; not solely contemplative) orders for not wearing 13th-century clothing. When the Franciscan and Dominican orders were started, the clothing reflected the clothing of the common people of the time. It was meant in part as a bridge between the brother or sister and the population they were called to serve among. Yes, a vow of poverty is indeed one of the vows of every religious, so even the many who came at that time from aristocratic backgrounds would have renounced their rich robes in favor of simple garments, but the aim is greater, and more communal, than that.

Clothing is on the surface (forgive the pun) completely trivial. It's just fabric and some fasteners, shoes, maybe some jewelry. But what we wear conditions how people perceive us. And it does so in an instant, rather than gradually, as through diction, accent, mannerisms, vocabulary. Clothing can also condition our own behavior: imagine just your own gait in an evening gown and heels versus in shorts, a baggy tee-shirt and 'flip-flops.' And the average person, consciously or no, does treat people differently based on their clothing. Whatever we might wish the ideal be, in reality clothing is always an easily readable declaration of something.

So, an ungreat reason for wanting the habit (and, certainly, for focusing overmuch on that aspect in assaying an order's 'worth' or level of spirituality) involves this declarative aspect. It can signify, and be read as, an unbridgeable distance between the person in it and everyone else, between the sister and the world. A habit neither confers nor proves holiness or inaccessibility, but it can easily be perceived that way, most particularly in environments hostile to or ignorant of, religion, religious life, or spirituality. For those populations, whether they are university students, counseling patients, or clients of a soup line, a habit can be a barrier to natural and vital human interaction, to a feeling of community - which is for anyone suffering any kind of trial what is most precisely and urgently needed.

Merton indirectly brings up another motive for desiring the habit. He talks in his later work about his juvenile and facile contempt for all things worldly, which he believed in his immaturity had led him to a larger contempt for the world, for everything outside obvious spiritual pursuit. I get the notion in some things I read that the habit provides for some this clear delineation between, or defense against, the things of the world: the truly hideous, the rightly renounced, rather than the merely mundane, as with Merton's jejune stance. It's not outward-directed, and it's not ego. Rather, it is maybe some psychological bulwark against worldliness, a prayer and hope in itself that the wearer remain true, a 'full-body sacramental' to aid the wearer in maintaining full-time devotion. From this perspective, it's more like a soldier's letters from home pressed against his heart than the suit of armor he wears on the outside.

Then, too, there is an interpretation that shares something in common with Queen Victoria's perpetual mourning gear after the death of her beloved husband. She would hardly have been inclined to go out dancing and carousing had she simply changed her clothes, but the widow's weeds she cleaved to for forty years linked her outer and inner life. Again, it's not so much meant as a barrier as an invitation: read this, know this - and you will know a great deal about who I am, what I am, today and tomorrow. The problem that arose with Victoria's extended mourning, however, was that many of her subjects had experienced a great many more deaths in their families than she had (Catholics can easily recall the family of Thérèse of Lisieux, who lived in the same period and were middle class, not underprivileged, and yet lost four children within just three years and for the first year of her life feared the sickly Thérèse was next). Victoria's focus on mourning rather than the 'pastoral,' public duties of a monarch, served to alienate her from her subjects. It's not a great parallel, since her reclusiveness was as great an obstacle as her arch attire, but my point is that for apostolic, active work that is not confined to religious or exigent circumstances, or serving the already-faithful alone, a habit can be confusing, distancing, and make the wearer seem more like a symbol than a rich, complex, fault-filled and human individual to whom the suffering and struggling can turn in a lonely moment of crisis and pain.

And I think any smart person will tell you that reaching out in love to the wounded and needy is the highest pursuit of anyone who even suspects there may be something greater than solecism and material gain to strive for.

There's no Escaping Them, Part II

So, as the last posting recounted, Thomas Merton the young Trappist had just become a sub-deacon, was undergoing troubles in his writing, and had come across an issue of La Vie Intellectuelle, which happens to have been written by a Dominican, a thinky Frenchman by the name of Sertillanges.

At this time Merton was struggling with something I, too, have always intermittently struggled with: essentially a distrust of la vie intellectuelle. It's not like Merton didn't read, and it's not as though I don't. But in certain people inclined that way there is a very real awareness of the aridity that can arise by being given overmuch to cerebration. Intellect can give rise to intellectualism. Philosophy can lead to sophism. One can know all there is to know about the first three years of the first plastics-manufacturing plant in Guangdong -- and know nothing about love, or living, or laughter. One can be esteemed by one's peers as the most brilliant and erudite exponent of ____, and yet remain a cripple in all other areas. In life, that is.

Merton seems always to have been terribly uneasy with his vocation as writer. He realized how many he touched, he realized it was a gift, and that he was thus obliged to exercise it - and yet his particular spirituality made the intellectual aspects of his writing hard for him to reconcile with his faith, his desires, his ideal of the man of God:

'Every book I write is a mirror of my own character and conscience. I always open the final, printed job, with a faint hope of finding myself agreeable, and I never do.

There is nothing to be proud of in this one (speaking of his Seeds of Contemplation), either. It is clever and difficult to follow, not so much because I am deep as because I don't know how to punctuate, and my line of thought is clumsy and tortuous. It lacks warmth and human affection. I find in myself an underlying pride that I had thought was all gone, but it is still there, as bad as ever. I don't see how the book will ever do any good. It will antagonize people, or else make them go around acting superior and stepping on everybody.

Laughlin tells me a book club is taking it and advertising it as a "streamlined Imitation of Christ." God forgive me. It is more like Swift than Thomas a Kempis.

...the book is cold and cerebral.'

Now, some of that can read to modern ears unfamiliar with the larger picture of Merton, as reminiscent of the self-flagellation in print of medieval saints, whose 'autobiographies' were constrained by social and ecclesiastical realities as much as by the lack of modern psychological perspective. Merton's auto-critique here is, taken in the broader context, about his fear of excessive intellectualism and its effects on others. He is trying to lead others into contemplation, a union with God in the heart, and he is scared his vital message will be obscured by 'cleverness' and rhetoric, which will have the opposite effect from that intended. He is humble, yes: no one in his right mind would wish to be called the 'new Aquinas' or 'this century's Aristotle,' but it's far, far from pathological insecurity. It is only recently that humility has come to be perceived as a vice.

Anyway, Merton finds much of sound value in the little book. It is in many ways a handbook; it's not, despite the similarity of titles, something like Hannah Arendt's A Life of the Mind. And, being by a Dominican/Catholic/Christian/believer, it views thinkiness and writing, for those thus endowed, as vocations, as a means of and responsibility toward using one's (God-given) gifts in service to God and man.

Which is something Dominicans and Jesuits are not just good at, but comfortable with and schooled in. Other orders, other faiths, people with different histories -- well, it can be a tricky road. Most ethical traditions teach the importance of giving, whether as corporal acts of mercy, or standing up in the face of injustice, or giving materially, as with traditions of philanthropy, alms, tzedekah, and zakat. Compared with, say, the extraordinary giving of Miep and Jan Gies or Mother Teresa or Dorothy Day, it can be difficult for some people to believe a philosopher, a thinker - or, for that matter, a Carmelite or Tibetan Buddhist monastic pray-er, might be as worthy as these individuals. In rigidly secular circles, the latter groups are dismissed altogether, as either charmingly benighted or possibly obscenely self-indulgent.

Which brings us back to Thomas Merton, who didn't want to be self-indulgent but feared that the nature of his work might always be thus. In his handbook, Sertillanges advises that the body is not inseparable from the mind, and insists (sounding rather Benedictine, I might add) that work, sleep, silence, and proper eating all play a part in cultivating the whole person necessary to such a pursuit. If one is properly to exercise this gift, one must exercise also other disciplines: detachment, simplicity, ample reflection, note-taking, etc. In Sertillanges' schema, right ordering of the whole of one's life and one's mind results in an intellectual life which is neither all-consuming, nor shallow, nor sterile, nor incompatible with spirituality or the contemplative life.

Merton, however, while seeing the great practical wisdom of the book, recoiled and wondered what John of the Cross would have to say about all this. He felt he could never reconcile the two -- but perhaps someone like Maritain (une vie intellectuelle, bien sûr!) might be able to. When Sertillanges decrees that the man who has just come from physical labor is like a wounded man, should be respected and cared for, Merton demands to know What about John of the Cross, and his 'labor' in prison in Toledo? Surely he emerged from his cell 'comme un blessé' - and with the Canticle and the Dark Night stuffed in his clothes!

His concern is largely, as I interpret it, the same as mine: a fear of losing humility in some sort of elegant proportion to using the intellect. Merton relents and admits the two paths may not be irreconcilable - but it seems that he still feels he would in some way be choosing to 'be' Jacques Maritain in a sense when what his heart really seeks is the direct mystical union between 'God in His Oneness and not broken up into all His shadows' of St. John of the Cross. He doesn't really feel he can have it both ways, but he confesses, 'the truth is, there is room for both. In what proportions is there room for them in my life? That'll work itself out in practice.'

The truth is, I love Merton. And ask ten different Catholics, ten different Buddhists, and ten different 'Buddhist' Whole Foods customers, what they believe about Thomas Merton, and you'll get thirty different answers, possibly. He can no doubt express it best:

"I will be a better Catholic, not if I can refute every shade of Protestantism, but if I can affirm the truth in it and still go further. So, too, with the Muslims, the Hindus, the Buddhists, etc. This does not mean syncretism, indifferentism, the vapid and careless friendliness that accepts everything by thinking of nothing. There is much that one cannot 'affirm' and 'accept,' but first one must say 'yes' where one really can. If I affirm myself as a Catholic merely by denying all that is Muslim, Jewish, Protestant, Hindu, Buddhist, etc., in the end I will find that there is not much left for me to affirm as a Catholic: and certainly no breath of the Spirit with which to affirm it."

And I think it is this effervescent, radiant, expansive 'Yes' that is at the core of any true religious, and any true vocation. Merton was afraid of losing that Yes if he wandered too far into the cerebral, while at the same time he felt no risk to it by embracing the genuine beauty he could see elsewhere.

I still didn't get to the Dominicans and their intimidating 'balance' (which is my perspective, not their expression), but I'm sure they'll follow me again, if not to the next posting, then the one after the bit about vicious Australian reds that destroy the esophagus in one swallow...

Those Pesky Dominicans Return -

and just where you'd least expect them...

To begin, here are some of the books I'm reading right now: Chesterton's Aquinas bio in a double volume with his Francis, Josipovici's On Trust: Art and the Temptation of Suspicion, Rancière's Hatred of Democracy, the Dalai Lama's The Good Heart, Jean-Luc Nancy's Dis-Enclosure: the Deconstruction of Christianity, and Ratzinger's Truth and Tolerance: Christian Belief and World Religions. Apart from the Chesterton, which is very chatty, 'personable,' and inviting, the rest are more, well, I take time off. With different things: with the Chesterton, with poetry (a lot of Jorge Guillén at the moment), a slim, early volume by Eco on aesthetics in the Middle Ages and, I just decided today when I lay down for a nap, Merton's The Sign of Jonas, which I probably haven't read since I was 17 or 18.

Now, why there is no fiction in there, either as a primary reading or as 'relief,' is that I can't do with a novel what I can do with poetry or non-fiction, which is to say stop and start wherever and whenever I please. In fact, even with language textbooks, as long as you have a good base already you can go forward and backward, practicing just the dative case one day and the past dubitative-abilitative mood the next. A good novel consumes the reader to the exclusion of all other books until it is sated; a bad one merely bores and is tossed away - and then the reader is back where he started in either case.

And at the moment I am enjoying this profligacy, so no novel right now.

But back to Merton.
As I said, this particular book I haven't read in many years. It is five years of Merton's daily journal early in his vocation just before and after his ordination, an it was interesting (in a manner now completely unshocking to me) that I picked it today, as just last night I had written to a friend just starting a blog how sometimes I become frustrated with what I would call the 'definitional' issues of the medium. It is not at all a diary, though a personal blog does, or can, share attributes with that form. It's not the same as even a completely open op-ed column, since if the blog is truly non-commercial/personal, the sense of writing for/to one's audience is naturally different - if the writer even considers the issue of audience at all.

For me, certain topics seem clearly too boring to subject others to (not that I don't sometimes ignore this concern altogether), some too emotional to discuss in a (potentially, at least) public space, some too heavy or controversial to feel right mixing them in with postings about shoe organization and exboyfriends' irksome proclivities. Then, too, there is the idea of coherence of the whole, coherence of voice, something which has bedeviled me to the point of not posting anything at different times, because the stuff I was writing about wasn't 'bloggy' enough in my view. I have no idea how to address this, because worrying about it overmuch defeats one of the points of personal weblogs, which is that sense of freedom the medium shares with diaries, but which distinguishes it from even the most unrestricted columns in the paid world. Minimally, a columnist would have to find a way to unify that week's concern with the voice and the stance that come through the column as a whole. More typically, the subject itself would have to appear clearly congruent with the other topics in the series.

But back to me.


I'm not a columnist (despite any sartorial similarity to Peggy Noonan in the above; I'm just running out of photos and my mother insists upon 'seeing your pretty face' every so often). Any sense of wishing a consistent voice or outlook or stance is my own preoccupation, comes from my own meditations on why anyone would be writing one of these things in the first place, and a desire to make it 'earn its keep.' The reason I started to write a blog was as a discipline, to make myself write regularly. The reason I was told to write a blog is the same as with anyone who has demonstrated evidence of writing ability: people tell you that since you can write, you should write; in fact, you should 'be a writer.'

Which, as those less reactionary among us are all too aware, is something altogether different than merely being able to write. And it is not solely a matter of discipline: being able to expatiate endlessly on the differential merits of various wardrobe-organizational systems is not the same as being able to write 500 pages on the social history of wardrobe-organizing systems, nor certainly 500 more on the history of railroad building in Japanese-occupied Manchuria.

And yet there is overlap: those who taught themselves to read, those who spent their childhoods in books, read books about books and books about words, those to whom language comes easily and those for whom a well-turned description is as alluring as a well-turned ankle, clearly have much in common with those who spend lifetimes capturing their own or others' lifetimes in print. Even if not Writers, they can certainly be called writers, without any need of scare quotes to emphasize their non-professional status. I look at it this way: my exhusband was and is a musician. He can do other jobs, he has done other jobs; like all of us, he has various different abilities. But his gifts as a musician are so clear, so profound, that they are, I would argue, constitutive of who he is, his self, his way of being in the world, such that one reveals much of substance to say about him 'he is a musician,' the copula there doing what it is has the power to do but seldom does.

But back to Merton.

As I said above, I enjoy being able to open books and start reading at whatever page I happen to land on. It doesn't always work so well while in school, I admit, but I'm not in school, and I like the way it works much of the rest of the time. In cases of postmodern history and historiography, it works very, very well, I must say, as I get to miss the introduction wherein the same list of the same secondary sources is tiresomely trotted out to ensure the reader understands just how thoroughgoingly postmodern the coming exegesis of trends in kitchen appliances in postwar Bavaria is going to be. I like skipping that bit and getting right to the riveting parts about the evolution in backsplashes and cupboard-pulls.

Anyway, not that Merton has exhausting prefaces, or cites much Gramsci, Derrida, Butler, or Homi Bhabha, but part of my enjoyment in reading this way, at least with certain types of material, is to imagine why I'm being given what I'm being given right then. It's often shocking, and always productive. I tuned in when Merton has just become a subdeacon, and I had to go back a few pages to find out what he was referencing when he referenced his current experience with Sertillanges' La Vie Intellectuelle. It turns out (a few pages earlier, which is one of the downsides of this reading method) that he received a copy during this time, when he was really struggling with writing what became The Ascent to Truth. He got stuck a lot, he wrote a good deal he was completely unhappy with, but spending time with Sertillange had on him 'the effect that Dale Carnegie's advice might have had on a despondent salesman.'

Now, I've loved Merton forever. He taught me invaluable things, led me in all sorts of meaningful directions, and I have to say a good deal of that was due to the personal tone of much of what he wrote. I do love struggling with prickly authors and thorny texts at times, and in my weaker moments I can take great delight in the recondite and the recherché, but we're all human, and it is only the deeply, universally human expressed in the works of great novelists, poets, memoirists, and diarists that speaks directly to the heart, and results in a staggering convincement of the soul, rather than a gradual assent via logic.

***Because this is already too long for a blog posting, I'm going to leave this with 'logic' as the last word in the body, since that is surely a one-off, and I should savor it!