Thomas Merton's three epiphanies

Theology Today, Apr 1999 by Commins, Gary

He had gone to the desert to leave the corruption of the city; the fruits of the desert-the gift and discipline of detachment-freed him to love the city. His spiritual life laid the ground for his social activism, the politics of the desert he practiced in the 1960s: affirming the good, the true, and the beautiful in humanism, poetry, and art, and challenging-with a militant nonviolence-voracious, capitalistic materialism, myths of cleansing violence, virulent and subtle racism, and society's veneer of civility that appeared to him like a thin skin easily shed by a poisonous beast.

He looked to redefine and purify his vocation in light of this new realization-he, like all people, lived in the world of the arms race, race hatred, mass media, and big business.35 Merton's epiphany was like Peter's vision in Acts 10: God revealed that nothing created is unclean. Merton now knew that "the whole illusion of a separate holy existence is a dream."36 He had been half awake, but now his awakening purged, illuminated, and united, he sees clearly that there is no separation, becomes one with the humanity of Christ, and becomes one with God through those created in God's image. In Havana, love and knowledge had become "inseparable."37 In Louisville, a breach had been healed; the monk and the human race had been reunited.

As he had in Havana, Merton again discerned a new kind of clarity. It was the "function of solitude to make one realize such things with a clarity that would be impossible to anyone completely immersed in" the common illusions of the good citizens of Louisville.38 The monastery and solitude had been tested, purged, refined, redirected, but ultimately proven. If one heeds Meister Eckhart, one could surmise that Merton's faith enabled him to see strangers as neighbors. Eckhart said that faith was like staring at the sun, and then looking elsewhere: wherever you looked, you saw the sun.39 Perhaps Merton's monastic life and a contemplative light prepared him to see the "sun" shining in the common people of Louisville.

Once again, Merton asserted that "this seeing. . . is only given." There were no formulas of faith, no exercises of prayer and meditation that cultivated the soul's spark for God. This realization, too, was a gift of God's grace. The possibility for this seeing was ordinary: "The gate of heaven is everywhere."40

Like Merton's two-pronged reflections on his eucharistic epiphany in his journal and The Seven Storey Mountain, his immediate frame of reference in his journal and his later reflections in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander take his street corner revelation in different theological directions. In his journal, Merton wrote that it was specifically women-exiles from his monastic life-who ignited his experience: not their physical beauty, but a "secret beauty" of their hearts. In their "woman-ness" he saw "Wisdom and Sophia and Our Lady." Interpreting the experience through his reading of Russian mystics, and the testimony of the Book of Proverbs to Sophia, he addressed his journal entry to his intimate friend, "Proverb," his nickname for Sophia: