Should I Stay or Should I Go?
The exchanges of Thomas Merton and Rosemary Radford Ruether on withdrawal and engagement
Look around in society, and you will quickly be sick to your stomach. Poverty, violence, genocide, hunger, and suffering permeate the consciousness on an average day. One can scarcely unlock their phone without being bombarded with the latest atrocity in the Middle East—or walk to the train without passing a lost soul, eyes glazed over, shuddering against the cold. Given the horrors of our world, what should be our response as people of faith? Should we stay or should we go?
Retreat or Renew?
Rosemary Radford Ruether, radical ecofeminist theologian, and Thomas Merton, Catholic mystic and monk, spar over this idea during the course of letter exchanges between 1966 and the start of 1968 (Merton would die from electrocution in Asia later this year). Ruether, at this time, was just beginning her iconic lifework in the realm of theology, while Merton was a seasoned contemplative writer nearing the end of his life. Exchanges initiated by Ruether begin over discussions of books and ideas the two are thinking about, but rather quickly they run into a debate: Ruether is probing Merton to come down from his “tree top” at his monastery in Kentucky, and join Ruether in the struggle for liberation of the world from powers and principalities (“the water’s fine”). Merton resists and defends his removed life in the woods.
I find the exchange fascinating. Ruether, while respecting monasticism, posits that “For those who wish to be at the “kingdom” frontier of history, it is the steaming ghetto of the big city, not the countryside that is the place of the radical overcoming of this world, the place where one renews creation, disposes of oneself and does hand to hand combat with the demons” in one letter. She lives in inner city D.C., doing justice work while writing theology. For Ruether, living out faith involves relocation to the “frontier” where the big time demons live—poverty, murder, racism—rather than retreating from the world in order to preserve one’s self. She prods Merton to reconsider his relationship to the world, something which touches a nerve.
Merton, on the other hand, defends his monastic lifestyle. He argues that the monastic life is not one of utter isolation, but rather a ministry to different people. Merton gives spiritual talks once a week to farmers in rural Kentucky. He plants trees and restores forests, as a way of resisting ecological destruction and increasing the harmony between nature and humanity. He is in constant contact across the globe with poets, prophets, writers, theologians, even Zen Buddhists and his Holiness the Dalai Lama. In a world of exploitation and technology which alienates people, it is better for him to retreat entirely and recover where God truly is. From his vantage point, he can speak with greater truth on spiritual matters without getting wrapped up in the world of action. He writes on current issues of his day frequently, but with a distinctive, intentional lens, not (as) caught up in the intense fervor of the 60s. As he writes in one letter to Ruether, he makes a point of not signing any declaration, but would rather be in personal contact with those fighting for change themselves (he does this with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, which was a crucial part of the Civil Rights Movement). He alleges that he would be living more inauthentically to rejoin the world of society.
Ruether isn’t so impressed. She alleges that he is working to defend his life choices, and that his defensiveness is proof of his own hesitation. To be fair, I think Merton is pretty transparent with his guilt from the jump (I have one of his books titled Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander on my bookshelf in NJ. I haven’t read it yet, but the title alone says a lot about his inner turmoil over the monastic life.) While Merton finds God in the deepest part of the self, Ruether sees God as “otherness” and finds the “face of God is revealed in the face of our brother.” Salvation, for Ruether, is “precisely salvation of and not from the world” and says that monasticism treats the world Christians tasked as redeeming as if it were dirty. Here, I think, Ruether comes out on top—although it seems a strange dualism the two set up: God in the ground of the self, or God in others. Can one not say both? If the spark of the Divine can be found in humanity, surely one would find the imprint of the Creator in the most bare part of the soul, as well as in the face of a brother or sister.
As an aside, a humorous moment is when the letter exchange begins heating up, and Merton calls Ruether cerebral and abstract. In the post-script of her response, Ruether replies, “Sorry you find me so abstract. If I weren’t a woman would it have occurred to you to accuse me of being cerebral?… I am just as fleshy as you, baby, and I am also just as much a ‘thinking animal’ as you.” (March 21, 1967). Merton is humbled. “I promise I won’t get up in the air again. I don’t know why you frighten me so. (‘Cerebral’ probably because I resented my mother’s intellectuality…)” (March 24, 1967). He concedes on several points, and it’s refreshing to see his growth considering Ruether’s perspectives as well as his evolving opinions on female theologians. He jokes towards the end of their exchange, “Ah yes, I have become very wicked. This is due in great part to my hanging around with these women theologians. Let others be warned in time.” (December 31, 1967).
Stay or Go: the Church
What I love most about these published letters, though, is that I see Merton, who I have come to regard as one of my favorite writers, at his most vulnerable and authentic. Although he already has a name for himself and Ruether initiates contact, Merton humbles himself beneath her, asking her to teach him (“Do you think you could help me once in a while?” January 29, 1967). And by far my favorite part of the entire exchange has to be when Merton opens up in a way I’ve never seen before, one that applies to the concept of staying or going in a different context:
But I do wonder at times if the Church is real at all. I believe it, you know. But I wonder if I am nuts to do so. Am I part of a great big hoax? I don’t explain myself as well as I would like to: there is a real sense of and confidence in an underlying reality, the presence of Christ in the world which I don’t doubt for an instant. But is that presence where we are all saying it is? We are all pointing (in various directions), and my dreadful feeling is that we are all pointing wrong. Could you point someplace for me, maybe?
Staying or going applies not only to society, but also to the Church as a whole. Merton wrestles with the very notion of staying in the Church, and if it’s even real. This comforts me tremendously—to know that those before me have wrestled with the same questions. “Am I part of a great big hoax?” Says the man who has spent his life writing about something he now questions. It punches me in the gut. “Being a Catholic and being a monk have not always been easy” writes the spiritual master in a form letter dated January 22, 1967.
I understand Merton here on a profound level. As I told my friend a couple months ago, on a creaky porch swing one summer night, “In the past year, I’ve gotten more confident than ever that God is real. But I’ve gotten less confident that Jesus is this God.” That is, more convinced of this “underlying reality” or the “presence of Christ in the world” which is the Source and to which all things return. But less convinced that this Source is where I’ve been told my whole life it is: in the dogma and doctrine of Christianity. Like Merton, I often feel on the fringe or outskirts of this tradition, as if those outside the Church understand me better than the Church itself. (“I love all the well-meaning good people who go to Mass and want things to get better and so on, but I understand Zen Buddhists better than I do them, and the Zens understand me better.” January 29, 1967) Here is how Ruether answers him, and it is, I believe, an answer to my questions as well.
“The Church: what is it; surely not first of all the institution. This structure blasphemes when it says it was founded by Christ. It was not founded by Christ, but by history; as such it is a necessary but secondary structure serving as the temporal vehicle for a tradition about a certain reality; but that reality is not only, or even primarily, happening there. That reality is nothing else but God’s constant renewal of His good creation, which has fallen into alienation and estrangement… the “true Church” is wherever this reality is happening, and it is to the glory of God’s omnipotence that this reality is now beginning to happen a little bit, here and there, in the structure which we so misleadingly call the “church”
Such words remind me of the Hebrew concept of the “tikkun olam,” of “renewing the world” back into its original state. Is the Church an institution? Or is it anywhere that this renewal and redemption, the tikkun olam, is taking place? I choose to believe the latter. With this definition in mind, I could never think to leave the Church—to do so would be to give up on renewing this world. Such a definition opens us up to interfaith collaboration, knowing that anywhere redemption takes place is where God is. It makes me feel less that I have drifted from the bounds of Christianity into the fringe—given this definition, perhaps I have gotten closer to the Reality which is the Church itself, which is Christianity in its purest form. It leads us to question the notion of the “Church” that is more concerned with dogma than Reality. Reality such as this cannot be systematically theologized. Thomas Aquinas, the great theologian himself, croaked on his deathbed: “Such secrets have been revealed to me that all I have written now appears as so much straw.”
Ruether herself, though extremely critical of the Church, never left it her entire life. I look to her as a model of staying even when it’s hard, both in society and in the Church.
Conclusion: The Cycle of Contemplation & Action
What’s all this “stay or go” business, really? I must confess that I’ve been flirting with the idea of becoming a monk the past couple months. Merton makes it sound so alluring1: a simple life, no possessions, time to read and write and study, frequent alone time with God, deeper knowledge of the self, living in community with others deeply dedicated to search of God, time in nature, physical labor tying one to the land, growing your own food, witnessing to the community around you. Beyond the mere allure, I also grapple with how to carry myself in a system so utterly dehumanizing that it’s almost impossible to simply exist without exploiting someone across the globe. It seems more ethical, at times, to take myself out of it entirely, and refuse to buy or sell anything. The contemplative perspective is needed in a world of action. Would I be more effective as a tool for redemption if I went out in the woods to pray and think?
And yet, Ruether reminds me that this isn’t what I really want. What I want is to practice tikkun olam, and experience the renewal of the world which is where the true Church exists. I think she’s absolutely right in pointing out that Creation is Good, and that the very core idea that the desert Fathers ascribe to is flawed in some ways: that if they retreat from the World, unification with God will be finally possible. But unification with God exists in a bodily sense as well, the literal unification of friendship, community, relationships through hugs, food, sex. The “World” in the sense that the monks fear it, the “temptations of the flesh”, will follow them even into their monasteries far out in the desert. That is not to say that there is less temptation in the desert, away from society, however. I would not go as far as Ruether in denouncing all monasticism. Jesus began his ministry in the desert, in solitude and fasting. Clearly, periods of retreat are of crucial import to the spiritual journey. But the prophets always return from the desert. They always come back to the cave, as Ruether points out.
I think Ruether simplifies Merton’s situation in some regards. After all, the World that Merton was supposedly retreating from was greatly blessed by his thoughts and intimate relationship with God that he cultivated through his withdrawal. The contemplative way of life is greatly needed in a world that goes faster and faster and generates more and more noise every year. It seems to me that both the more active and more contemplative minded are trying to achieve the same early church vision: a community in which all members share all things in common, share one another’s burdens, and act to renew the world. Ruether, and the activist Christians, believe it would be better to stay in the world renewing it than to get it perfect. Merton, and the monks, on the other hand, retreat from the world and attempt to perform this daring experiment away from the corrupting elements of the world. Their experiment, then, acts as inspiration for the rest of us laypeople.
Ruether, I believe, finds the perfect synthesis in a letter dated early March, 1967:
I don’t think that man has lost all need for solitude and contemplation. In fact those who believe that the work of Christ is hand to hand combat with the powers and principalities in the arena of real historical action in order to make God’s good creation again and again appear on Earth, these people are in sore need for the inner strength and discipline that solitude and contemplation can give. But it must be evident that this will be as an auxiliary help and place of temporary withdrawal for inner deepening which is not an end in itself but directed back towards the real action.
I believe this cycle of action and contemplation is the answer to the question “Should I stay or should I go?” Go. Be with God, in the utter simplicity among the elements that reminds us of our reliance on the Divine. Then return, and seek God in the face of the sibling who is suffering. Love is an action. Take monastic practices with you while you do hand to hand with the demons in the “frontier”—practice contemplation, intention, community, sharing, as you restore the world. Periodically return back to solitude and find God within the deepest part of the soul. Rinse. Repeat. Such is the lifelong practice of tikkun olam. Both Ruether and Merton were true Laborers in a world that desperately needs more workers of the tikkun olam, regardless of their divergences.
I mean, just listen to how he describes it to Ruether: “One of the things I love about my life, and, therefore, one of the reasons why I would not change it for anything, is the fact that I live in the woods and according to a tempo of sun and moon and season in which it is naturally easy and possible to walk in God’s light, so to speak, in and through his creation. That is why the narcissist bit in prayer and contemplation is not problem out here, because, in fact, I seldom have to fuss with any such thing as ‘recollecting myself’ and all that rot. All you do is breathe and look around and wash dishes, type, etc. Or just listen to the birds.”