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Survival or Prophecy?: The Letters of Thomas Merton and Jean LeClercq

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The Obedience described by Saint Benedict is based in consensus and discernment of gifts and abilities and callings and weaknesses. Saint Benedict ever calls for consideration for the weak, the elderly, the infirm, and above all that none may lose heart.

In fact Obedience is not a Benedictine vow, but Stability, Poverty and the conversion of ways. Humility is an ideal to work towards assiduously, and the path upon which we travel. The Abbot finds who bears the proper charisma and abilities to bear certain offices and responsibilities, and frees each one in his charge to their true vocation in a process of liberation ("obedient and free" as Father Leclercq here writes) to the spirit. In fact in this book we often read of spiritus libertatis: the liberty of the spirit, or the spirit of liberty.

Thus when military men returned from the SEcond World War to take over our monasteries as seemingly fitting to their customary and severe regime, they had no idea what they were doing and turned monks into their slaves, to take orders without question but with joy. This is not the spirit and the rule of Saint Benedict, who humbly saw his as a rule for beginners, and better to follow that of the great Saint Basil.
With the military regime in place the monastery become not the angelic and liberating path to heaven but a cruel Trap.

Thus this fragmentary record of correspondence reads like an inexorable and tragic novel of opportunities for spiritual growth purposefully and seemingly maliciously and carelessly cut off by ignorant authorities, like something out of Gogol, without the dreamy madness of Kafka, but much as his The Trial, in which incomprehensible and unappealable but grotesquely unjust and life-destroying decisions are made by nebulous and all-powerful absent authorities.

Merton was nearly self-taught as a Catholic, even after his entrance into the monastery, where he read and studied and meditated his reading without end. These letters reveal him at the intellectual and spiritual level of the great European monks of Saint Benedict, but without their rich and deep seed bed in which to sprout and to grow. He had to do it all on his own, at great cost and effort, and unimaginable agony as he confronted the hard wall of the inexperienced and superficial American monastic life, under an unbending military officer, as if in Kafka's The Penal Colony: Stories and Short Pieces, an officer moreover with little perception of the true monastic vocation and the way of the hermit, the first and greatest of Christian monks.

Thus his European correspondent can merely stand by baffled at the purposeful destruction and frustration of all of Merton's true and holy monastic aspirations, at the unfeeling and senseless rubbing out of his great vocation. Had Merton been free to live out the vocation God planted in his fruitful heart and soul, for one thing he would still be alive, and for another, so would American monachism. Many observers note his return to Gethsemane took place aboard a military plane, without autopsy, in a closed coffin provided no other monk, in that year of the slaughter of three American prophets of peace. Many draw the obvious parallel to the absurd accident which reportedly killed the great French worker-priest, Father Perrin, SJ.

Whatever be the true cause of his death, whether faulty wiring in a fan as we are supposed to believe, or his public and prohpetic opposition to war in a year in which war was very profitable indeed, preceding this his physical death, were long years of little murders of his true vocation, senseless and against the will of God, as we see so well chronicled in this good book.

Had Merton been a European monk he would have been well trained, well fed, well respected, well educated, and still writing. Instead we find none of this. The loss is ours, and we weep to read it here. The loss is to our Holy Mother Church, who weeps with us, like Rachel for her lost child.

To learn our true and glorious Church, read this book, and see why we cannot have extra-sacramental Oaths of Fidelity which bind will and intellect in obedience to anyone but our God, who is all loving compassion and mercy, who draws all of us home together as one, who commands us to Love one another, not to brutalize, humiliate and rub out, but to support and to encourage in Love.

By the way, early on is mentioned the Abbot of Clervaux, Dom Michel Jorrot, who made the correspondence available and who served as my Pere Zelateur at Solesmes over a quarter century ago, and who was indeed very encouraging. Also frequently mentioned is Regina Laudis (now Abbey) as a frequent site of Father Leclercq's conferences, and where I gratefully lived before and after Solesemes and remain in contact. Please see as well Mother Benedict: Foundress of the Abbey of Regina Laudis. She courageously faced the monastic life and brought it to America, where her Abbey still thrives and gives us hope.

I may have slight quibbles with some of the Latin translations here inserted by the editor, and with the introduction by Abbot Weakland, but this is an extraordinary and powerful work which subtly builds to its ultimately tragic and senseless sacrificial ending, or beginning. At this price you cannot afford not to read this book. I began it after the midnight hour and could not put it down until it was time to go to work, much as the hermit monks of old would read at vigil in their solitary cells. It is long past time to recognize our noncanonical American Saints: Day, Merton, Romero, Chavez, RFK, and the other such of our great PATRIOTIC American and staunchly Catholic heroes and martyrs and Saints.

We must especially dare bring to light the full implications of the passion, suffering and violent death of Father Louis, OCSO, Thomas Merton, and how he brings light and life and hope and peace to us even now in this present darkness. Let this book be a portal to more complete understanding and appreciation and prayer with this great, intelligent, persevering, obedient, brilliant and Faithful saint. Let it also serve as gateway to more complete collections of his correspondence, such as The Courage for Truth: The Letters of Thomas Merton to Writers (The Thomas Merton letters series), and all of his still crucial writings, from The Last of the Fathers: Saint Bernard of Clairvaux and the Encyclical Letter 'Doctor Mellifluus' to Cold War Letters.

Tome Mertone, ora pro nobis, filiorum tuorum. Amen.