Thomas Merton's three epiphanies

Theology Today, Apr 1999 by Commins, Gary

This epiphany occurred in a holy place set apart for experiences of the divine. St. Francis Church had become, for Merton, like Old Testament holy places in which God's glory is so thick that it barely leaves room for worshipers (Exod 40:34-35, 1 Kgs 8:10-11). The glory seems to seep through tent and temple like uncreated wine uncontainable in created wineskins.

Merton had experienced "clear and immediate knowledge," an "illumination," "immediate contact" with the Truth. He had received a gift he later described as the goal of prayer: clarity. Prayer and meditation gave no "guarantee to see more details" or clearer concepts of God, but prayer could put more "light" on things so that one could "see them more clearly." As the Desert Fathers had sought "purity of heart" as "a clear, unobstructed vision of the true state of affairs,"17 so prayer could give "clarity" about one's "relationship with God."18 Merton spoke of a constant "dialectic of seeing and believing": "When you realize you don't have to see, you see! Realizing that you don't have to see is seeing in the realm of faith, and it can become very clear seeing. A deep awareness and conviction of the fact that you don't need to see can be a very clear form of sight." 19

It was not like receiving a new pair of glasses, a telescope, or a microscope. Prayer helped one to see what one saw clearly.

Merton experienced his first epiphany as "certainty" and "belonging," brightness without "visible light," illumination and union, a wedding of love and knowledge in delight. He felt himself in union with God, who belonged to him. As John of the Cross had interpreted his poem of illumination in The Ascent of Mount Carmel as purification, so Merton altered the focus of this illumination to respond to his yearning to be "cleansed" and "clean" from sin.20 His theology and his experience of sin redefined the experience more than they elucidated it.

This epiphany in Cuba crystallized Merton's conversion, the passion he expresses in The Seven Storey Mountain for the Roman Catholic Church, monasticism, and priesthood, and his sour pity on all else as he confused the instruments of grace in his life with the source. It foreshadowed his elation when he arrived at Gethsemani for the first time, heard the door close behind him, and believed-with relief-that he had left the "world."21 He rejoiced that God belonged to him. In entering the monastery so that he could belong to God, he had found something like heaven on earth. All else seemed to him to be hell.

THE SECOND EPIPHANY

The circumstances of Merton's epiphany in 1958 were seemingly even less promising than the Mass at St. Francis. He had gone into the commercial district of Louisville on a monastic errand when "... [I] suddenly realized that I loved all the people and that none of them were or could be totally alien to me. As if waking from a dream-the dream of my separateness, of the 'special' vocation to be different."22

This time he sees nothing unusual, senses no extraordinary presence. He is simply overwhelmed by "love," which is the revelation. For Merton, love was "a certain special way of being alive," "an intensification of life, a completeness, a fullness, a wholeness of life." "The meaning of our life," he wrote, "is a secret that has to be revealed to us in love, by the one we love. "23