Literary / Arts
Susan and God
Volume 34 Issue 1, 2 & 3 | Posted: March 30, 2020
This is a very creative book where two dedicated Christian writers wrestle with Thomas Merton’s mystical side. Published in 2018, it was not the first essay McCaslin has written on Merton’s mystical dimension. She has an excellent piece in Thomas Merton: Monk on the Edge (Thomas Merton Society 2012) titled ‘Merton’s Mystical Visions: a Widening Circle’.
Merton was a Trappist monk who entered Gethsemane Monastery in Kentucky at the age of 27, dying mysteriously 27 years later in December 1968 at a conference in Thailand. On that final journey to the Far East, he met with the Dali Lama more than once, and stayed with Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a publisher and founder of City Lights bookstore in San Francisco.
This is a very creative book where two dedicated Christian writers wrestle with Thomas Merton’s mystical side. Published in 2018, it was not the first essay McCaslin has written on Merton’s mystical dimension. She has an excellent piece in Thomas Merton: Monk on the Edge (Thomas Merton Society 2012) titled ‘Merton’s Mystical Visions: a Widening Circle’.
Merton was a Trappist monk who entered Gethsemane Monastery in Kentucky at the age of 27, dying mysteriously 27 years later in December 1968 at a conference in Thailand. On that final journey to the Far East, he met with the Dali Lama more than once, and stayed with Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a publisher and founder of City Lights bookstore in San Francisco.
He also contemplated moving to Vancouver Island to be part of a Catholic hermit community then recently established under the auspices of Bishop Remi De Roo. ICN has been publishing a series of articles and reviews of a recent book, The Martyrdom of Thomas Merton, An Investigation by Hugh Turley and David Martin that argues convincingly that he was murdered by The CIA in 1968 for his peace activism. (See related review page 10.)
Merton had written his worldly autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain, which much to his surprise had proven an international bestseller, propelling him into the sort of fame he had hoped to eschew by entering the Trappist Order which promised a life of radical silence, poverty and anonymity.
Such was the paradox of Merton’s whole life and as such he proved to be a fascinating subject for the gifted poet in Susan McCaslin. In the fifth chapter titled ‘A Grotto of Sophia Ikons’, she presents 15 graphic poems to saints who influenced Thomas Merton from his mother Ruth Jenkins to Ernesto Cardenal and Joan Baez, including Mystic Simone Weil and Beat poet Denise Levertov.
McCaslin came out of a reform Protestant tradition where mysticism was almost more a hidden discipline/science. She focuses on the line between the contemplative and the mystical, rather than his social prophet role. Merton moved rapidly through many contrasting stages, often blurring the traditionalist hermit aspirations which his autobiography and earlier spiritual writings celebrated.
Merton was truly ‘a monk on the edge’, the title of the volume which included McCaslin’s earlier related essay. Even in Catholic circles, Mystics are a rare commodity. Contemplative was more the description of Merton’s nature usually bandied about, but Susan cites four experiences outlined in Merton’s writing that border on the mystical.
Certainly every monk aspires to direct experience of God and Merton's love of God shines forth on every page he scripted, but in the hairsplitting world of Catholic scholarship these encounters might be typified more as major Epiphanies, angel tipped with mystical experience.
I have known a number of mystics and psychologically they do not resemble Merton. God is their lover, their thrall, the source of regular ecstasies and rarely differentiated through the lens of analysis or even lucid description. To be apart from these regular direct emotional experiences of either profound serenity or depressive turmoil is unbearable agony for the mystic.
Merton was too balanced a personality and worldly in his formation and education to dwell exclusively in that zone. For example, to his college friends who came to visit him at Gethsemane, he surprised them by describing the Catholic Mass as akin to a ballet with thematic movements.
Truly Merton had a mystical side, his spirituality rather than academic theology is the element that held his attraction for readers. Susan’s and J.S. Porter’s book is a beautiful rendering of his dance with the feminine through poetry and essays which revealed the poetic aspect of his soul.
Merton was a great lover of God, he was in love with God, dedicating his whole being to serving his Lord and Creator. God was understood as his Saviour. He influenced other major writers in this direction. In this vein, McCaslin’s essay on the parallels with poet Denise Levertov was especially interesting.
The only woman in the Black Mountain poetic movement, and a beatnik and peace activist and war resister, Levertov, like Merton was born and raised in England, from a counter-cultural background. Her father was a Hasidic Jew who converted to Christianity through mystical experience, becoming an Anglican priest. Their mutual lives were typified by regular unlikelihood.
Susan does a brilliant job comparing these two kindred spirits. Her research and analytical work seem par excellence. Merton and Levertov met but once, on December 10, 1967, exactly one year to the day prior to his death in Asia. McCaslin does a good job showing how Merton continued to influence Denise Levertov up until her own death in 1997, including her ultimate conversion to an ecumenical socially progressive form of Catholicism which she lived out in Seattle.
A number of poems are used to illustrate this development and as I said Susan does a fine job of tracing the process. Especially in this essay, however, I was looking for Susan McCaslin to stretch her own gifted poetic wings a touch more, so that it did not read quite like a college compare and contrast essay. As a prize winning poet herself, she might have let loose with a few metaphors and colour passages to show how closely she is joined in spirit to these two contemporary saints.