A Focus on Truth: Thomas Merton's Uncensored Mind by Patrick W. Collins

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Focus on Truth: Thomas Merton's Uncensored Mind by Patrick W. Collins Robert Inchausti A Focus on Truth: Thomas Merton's Uncensored Mind. By Patrick W. Collins. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2021. 197 pp. $19.95. Based on the five volumes of Thomas Merton's selected correspondence, the ten essays that make up this book chart the evolution of Merton's thoughts on a variety of religious subjects—everything from interreligious dialogue to the priesthood, ecumenicalism, church authority, liturgy, and monastic renewal. They are united—Collins tells us on the very first page—by Merton's "unending search for what is real and true, not just in books but in living experience and practice" (1). As each essay unfolds, we see Merton evolve from a young convert thrilled by the "answers" he has found in the liturgy and teachings of the Roman Catholic Church to a seasoned monastic and spiritual master who has arrived at questions not so easily answered by the "verbal formulas" that satisfied him as a young convert. The chapter "On Spirituality," for example, starts with Merton's youthful aspiration to "be a saint" as he spelled it out in the Seven Storey Mountain, then jumps to this passage from a letter he sent to Catherine de Hueck Doherty ten years later: "After so boldly advertising to the world that I was out to become a saint, I find I am doing a pretty bum job of it. . . . But it is certainly a wonderful thing to wake up suddenly in the solitude of the woods and [End Page 85] look up in the sky and see and see the utter nonsense of everything, including all the solemn stuff given out by professional asses of the spiritual life: and simply to burst out laughing, and laugh, and laugh with the sky and the trees because God is not in words, not in systems, and not in liturgical movements, and not in 'contemplation' with a capital C, or in asceticism or anything like that, not even in the apostolate. Certainly not in books. I can go on writing them, for all that, but one might as well make paper airplanes out of the whole lot" (16–17). Collins follows this selection up with passages from Merton's correspondence with John Harris, a schoolteacher in England, and the Anglican scholar Etta Gullick. In both of these exchanges Merton defends contemplation against its facile popularizers in the late sixties and against those churchmen who reduce it to a species of rare and extreme piety not for public consumption. Near the end of this essay, Collins cites Merton's letter to Dom Francis Decroix in which Merton admits that when he entered the monastery in 1948, he had a lot of "answers," but now—twenty years later—he has only just begun to seek the right questions. "And what are those questions?" Merton asks. "Can man make sense out of his existence? Can man honestly give his life meaning merely by adopting a certain set of explanations which pretend to tell him why the world began and where it will end? Why there is evil and what is necessary for a good life. My brother, perhaps in my solitude, I have become as it were an explorer for you, a searcher in realms which you are not able to visit—except perhaps in the company of your psychiatrist. I have been summoned to explore a desert area of man's heart in which explanations no longer suffice, and in which one learns that only experience counts" (49–50). Each of the chapters in the book have a similar kind of progression as Merton corrects his own youthful simplifications, deepens his commitments, and qualifies his claims. On some topics, however, Merton retains his original positions now clarified and deepened by personal experience. Other times, he forges ahead into new territory or owns up to a new, honest, and hard-won befuddlement. Taken together, this multiple highlight reel of Merton's subtlest and most intimate spiritual turns of thought, throw light on the discerning operation of his mind and demonstrate for us what it means for a Christian contemplative to "focus...