Continuous conversion 2

 

Thomas Merton

The initial conversion experience that involves taking spirituality more seriously, is perhaps a bit like opening a door into another perspective on life, and eventually another way of being. However, what may have felt joyous at the start, almost inevitably becomes something much more complex and demanding.

Some years after Merton had entered the Abbey of Gethsemani and was preparing and undergoing ordination, he was writing that what he had thought was the end was merely the beginning. Whilst the summer months following ordination were filled with great joy and were a period of consolation, by September 1949 Merton reading the book of Job felt that he was about to begin living it. And indeed, for the next year, it seems from the oblique hints in his journal that he underwent an extraordinary experience.

‘When the summer of my ordination ended, I found myself face to face with a mystery that was beginning to manifest itself in the depths of my soul and to move me with terror.’ Merton cannot really explain what is happening. He did suffer some ill health, but this it seems to him was only ‘an effect of this unthinkable thing that had developed in the depths of my being’. ‘It was a sort of slow, submarine earthquake which produced strange commotions on the visible, psychological surface of my life.’

He writes about no longer feeling a real person, but also about being alone:

‘… with a different loneliness from that of Christ. He was alone because he was everything. I am alone because I am nothing. I am alone because I am nothing. I am alone in my insufficiency – dependent, helpless, contingent, and never quite sure that I am leaning on Him upon whom I depend.

Yet to trust in Him means to die, because to trust perfectly in Him you have to give up all trust in everything else. And I am afraid of that death. The only thing I can do about it is to make my fear become part of the death.’

By Christmas Merton was sensing that things were building up to a deep decision about what the outcome of letting go of this sense of his own self-importance might mean. He writes that when the time came it was a decision of neutrality and liberty and too difficult to write down.

‘There is a conversion of the deep will to God that cannot be effected in words- barely in a gesture or ceremony. There is a conversion of the deep will and a gift of my substance that is too mysterious for liturgy, and too private.’

This seems to be about belonging to God, but such an elusive whilst profound experience. The next inner revolution of continuous conversion involved Merton in the insight that to ‘belong to God I have to belong to myself.’ So, the death that is needed is not of the actual self, but rather on one’s absolute trust and dependence on the self. Ironically a painful conversion because there remains a self to suffer it. The place to be with this is in solitude.

On the same day as this insight Merton notes how deeply he is moved by Psalm 54,(55). ‘My heart is troubled within me: and the fear of death is fallen upon me. fear and trembling are come upon me: and darkness hath covered me’ Merton writes that he felt he was chanting something he had written himself from the very depths of his own soul.

And so the continuous conversion continued.