Thomas Merton's three epiphanies

Theology Today, Apr 1999 by Commins, Gary

I knew that when I saw you again it would be very different, in a different place, in a different form in the most unexpected circumstances. I shall never forget our meeting yesterday. The touch of your hand makes me a different person. To be with you is rest and truth. Only with you are these things found, dear child, sent to me by God!41

Given Merton's abiding distaste for consumer culture, no place could have been more unexpected to reveal human glory than the shopping district. Just as unlikely was that the particularity of the incarnation that moved him-of Wisdom-was feminine.42

While his journal entry briefly refers to the incarnation, in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, Merton framed the entire epiphany with the incarnation and transfiguration: God had "gloried" in becoming human! What a "glorious" thing to be a member of the human race, one of them, one with them!43 Human nature had been sanctified. If in Havana he saw "heaven," now perhaps he had finally seen earth. If in 1940 he had been illumined about God, now God had illumined for him the human race. If in Havana, he had sensed heaven and God's glory in church, tabernacle, and temple, now he discovered "the pure glory of God in us, . .. a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven."44 That "the secret beauty of [human] hearts" and "the center of our being ... untouched by sin" belonged "entirely to God" was no longer hidden. Each person was a temple of the Holy Spirit, as full of God's glory as Moses' tent or Jerusalem's temple (1 Cor 3:16-17, 6:19, 2 Cor 6:16).

Again Merton felt "happiness," a "sense of liberation," "such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud."45 He felt like saying, "Thank God, thank God that I am like all the rest of them."46

THE THIRD EPIPHANY

There would be no time in 1968 for Merton to interpret his third epiphany at Polonnaruwa. He died a week later in Bangkok. This significant chapter of his spiritual autobiography remains written in rough draft in the vocabulary of Asian religions with which he was experimenting in his journal, yet it seems to contain multiple theological meanings.47

Merton spent much of the day in the car.48 Polonnaruwa was another point on his spiritual tourist's map of shrines and holy places.49 So, when he saw the statues of Buddha, he was seeking something, just as he had been looking for something a few days before when he visited the Hindu shrine at Mahabalipuram.50

At first, as Merton stood before the great Buddhas, he admired their artistic beauty: "The great smiles. Huge and yet subtle":

Filled with every possibility, questioning nothing, knowing everything, rejecting nothing, the peace not of emotional resignation but of Madhyamika, of sunyata, that has seen through every question without trying to discredit anyone or anything-without refutation-without establishing some other argument.51

The Madhyamika tradition, a basis of Zen and a spirituality congenial to Merton, stressed experience over thought, and preferred to "explode the argument itself" instead of engaging in rational debate, dogmatic structures, or philosophical systems.52