Merton and Indigenous Wisdom ed. by Peter Savastano

Abstract

Reviewed by: Merton and Indigenous Wisdom ed. by Peter Savastano Christopher Pramuk Merton and Indigenous Wisdom. Edited by Peter Savastano. Louisville, KY: Fons Vitae, 2020. 304 pp. $27.95. This is the seventh volume in Fons Vitae’s exceptional Thomas Merton series, each of which gathers essays by international scholars to assess Merton’s enduring witness to ecumenical and interfaith dialogue. Editor and cultural anthropologist Peter Savastano has gathered an impressive chorus of voices, opening with a powerful chapter from Native American Vine Deloria, Jr.’s seminal 1972 work, God is Red, followed by nine essays by scholars and writers from diverse disciplinary backgrounds. What unites the essays is a shared commitment to the “decolonization of the mind” (xvi) as seen through Merton’s study of Native American cultures and traditions—North, Central, and South— during the last decade of the monk’s life. Savastano sets a balanced tone in the Introduction that is generally shared by the other authors, bringing a welcome hermeneutic of suspicion to Merton’s engagement with indigenous traditions even while celebrating his uncommon willingness to engage deeply so as to be challenged and transformed by the “other.” Unlike most Catholics during the 1960s and perhaps most Americans today, Merton understood that what most of us “see” when we consider Native American culture, if we bother to look at all, is not American Indians as they are, “but the American conception of what Indians should be,” (11) in the stinging words of Vine Deloria, Jr. Through the perverse looking glass of white (Christian) supremacy, the transformative if painful process of deconstructing deeply entrenched biases is “a lifelong project,” as Savastano notes, and Merton did not always “get it right” (xvi). Yet as these essays bear out, Merton “still inspires those of [End Page 93] us who are not Native American to receive and learn the wisdom of indigenous people with sensitivity and respect” (xx). Why should this be so? Merton’s journey from an “anthropomorphic mode of thinking” (Robert G. Toth, 83) toward what the mystic and poet calls “the hidden ground of Love”—an experiential grasp of God’s indwelling presence, through Christ, in all creation—mirrors our own desperate need, on the precipice of catastrophic climate change, to connect “with a different way of being and its implications for how to live” (89). Some fifty years ahead of Pope Francis’s call for environmental conversion in Laudato Si’, Merton intuited that Native American spiritualities provide critical signposts for disentangling ourselves from the seductive traps of individualism and capitalist exploitation of the planet. There are very fine critical essays here on Ishi Means Man (1968) and The Geography of Lograire (1968), Merton’s most substantive attempts to “see from within” indigenous ways of seeing, and thus, prescient parables for our time; on his “ethnopoetic” method in the context of contemporary anthropology and postmodern fragmentation; and on his forays into particular aspects of Native American spirituality, such as the Ghost Dance and the use of entheogens, substances that purportedly facilitate an experience of the divine. Even where Merton critically interrogates such practices, especially when adopted by non-indigenous persons, he affirms the desire for egotranscendence and communion with God that may be at their root. Perhaps above all, Merton aims to expose “the dark lining of the ‘civilized’ Western mind” (239) that would reduce the Indian to an exotic object of fascination, an anonymous, dehumanized, “homogenous mass,” separated from the rest of cultured “civilization” by an uncrossable distance (240). The volume concludes with a new translation of Merton’s pivotal “Preface for Latin America Readers” with a superb introduction by Argentinian scholar Marcela Raggio. Written in late March 1958, just weeks after his “epiphany” at 4th and Walnut in Louisville, the Preface signals Merton’s realization that he could no longer be “a partial American,” nor rest content with being “a partial Catholic, which would be even sadder. To me, Catholicism is not confined within the boundaries of a culture, a nation, a period of time, a race” (263). As he would write in 1962, if the history of European colonization has sealed up “the deepest springs of vitality” in the subjected peoples of the Americas...