MysticBliss: Merton on War & Poets

Inside our front Japanese Maple.

I do not consider myself integrated in the war-making society in which I live, but the problem is that this society does consider me integrated in it.

Thomas Merton in Raids on the Unspeakable


Are monks and hippies and poets relevant? No, we are deliberately irrelevant. We live with an ingrained irrelevance which is proper to every human being. The marginal [person] accepts the basic irrelevance of the human condition, an irrelevance which is manifested above all by the fact of death. The marginal person, the monk, the displaced person, the prisoner, all these people live in the presence of death, and the office of the monk or the marginal person, the meditative person or the poet is to go beyond death even in this life, to go beyond the dichotomy of life and death and to be, therefore, a witness to life.

The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton


We realize very keenly in American today [October, 1968] that the monk is essentially outside all establishments. He [or she] does not belong to an establishment. He [or she] is a marginal person who withdraws deliberately to the margin of society with a view to deepening fundamental human experience.

The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton


I am thinking a lot about the ideas in these quotes lately. How to be in but not of this world as an artist and a writer and as someone who believes in the possibility of peace on every level?

So I've been reading about monasticism, thinking there is a clue as to how we can live differently.

And I came across this great idea right within the first few pages of Kathleen Norris' most recent memoir that a monk is someone who has chosen deliberately to live within a routine that mirrors eternity in its changelessness.

Wow.

I've been thinking about those words since I read them. About the challenges of them and the rewards. I might be getting somewhere with this...