“Love for the Paradise Mystery”–Thomas Merton: Contemplative Ecologist

Abstract

“Love for the Paradise Mystery”–Thomas Merton: Contemplative Ecologist Kathleen Deignan “Love for the paradise mystery”1 is a dominant motif woven through all the writings of Thomas Merton—a gossamer thread of mystical insight and prophetic urgency that fastens together the assemblage of his multi‐focused literary legacy. Now, forty years after his death, a pentimento pattern of ecological consciousness becomes evident throughout his corpus as its complexity and unity become more transparent with time. As the contemporary ecological crisis deepens, we urgently require more than instrumental remedies to stem the life‐loss of our ecosphere suffered at human hands. We need a penetrating understanding of the more troubling and mysterious pathology underlying it: why, indeed, have we plundered paradise? This was the difficult “koan” Merton carried to fruition over a half‐century ago, as he explored the congenital disorientation of spirit that exiles us from our Edenic home in the community of creation. Having suffered such exile, he recovered from it, and taught a holistic therapy of contemplative living that can restore our paradisal consciousness, conscience, and practice. “Here is an unspeakable secret: paradise is all around us and we do not understand. It is wide open …. ‘Wisdom,’ cries the dawn deacon, but we do not attend.”2 The wisdom that focused Merton’s attention on the encompassing mystery of paradise was a wisdom based on love: “love for the wilderness and for its secret laws.”3 The biblical mythologem of “paradise” served as the foundational archetype grounding his wide‐ranging discourse on matters of the sacred, providing a metaphorical way to speak of metaphysical truth: “the world … made as a temple, a paradise, into which God Himself would descend to dwell familiarly with the spirits He had placed there to tend it for Him.”4 Employing a Cistercian hermeneutic, he interpreted the biblical narrative as a perennial meditation on the gift and loss and recovery of paradise. The early chapters of Genesis … are precisely a poetic and symbolic revelation of God’s view of the universe and of His intentions for man. The point of these beautiful chapters is that God made the world as a garden in which He himself took delight. He made man and gave to man the task of sharing in His own divine care for created things. He made man in His own image and likeness, as an artist, a worker, homo faber, as the gardener of paradise.5 Entrusted with the earthly paradise of Eden, Adam and Eve—our mythological progenitors—would not simply be another species among the “innocent nations” of the biosphere, but collaborators with God in “governing paradise.”6 Their partnership was so intimate that the Creator entrusted to these earthlings the naming and knowing of all living things.7 Such confidential governance implied a dimension of primordial familiarity with the Edenic tribes—an acquaintance at once simple, primitive, religious, and non‐violent—which sustained a clear vision of the singular vestige of God in the great multiplicity of creatures.8 Paradise, then, is a dialectical or bi‐valent mystery arising in at least two dimensions simultaneously: at once manifesting in the physical sphere of inexhaustive cosmogenesis; and then emerging within the noosphere of human consciousness.9 In Merton’s mind, “paradise” is an ontological truth which has an epistemological challenge; it is our vocation, our existential labor, to awaken to “paradise all around us.” Awakening to paradise Merton spent his whole monastic life teaching ways to awaken the paradise mind by the practice of contemplation, a process of deepening subjectivity to access the wellsprings of inherent wisdom. For him, contemplation is the pinnacle of human realization: “It is life itself fully awake, fully active, fully aware that it is alive … It is gratitude for life, for awareness, for being.”10 In contemplative therapy, the psyche researches its own depths in solitude and silence; the senses rest in a cloister of habitual containment and contentment, purified for the work of beholding and befriending the wonders of embodiment. By experientially touching the source of Being ceaselessly breathing within us, we begin to recognize its sweetness and purity conspiring with all forms of life. Trading breath for breath, the work...