My marriage is a good fit for me, no ambivalence, no regrets. Her limitations were known beforehand and accepted, and mine by her. There was full disclosure from the outset about what I am about in this world. 42 years into it my marriage is steady as she goes 'til death parts us as impermanence will part every partite thing. I will play the nurse when and if her need requires: duty will defeat disinclination. I will enter the space beyond desire and aversion as I attend to the needs of her body and mind. Kant taught me the sublimity of duty, and Buddha the need to master desire and aversion. And Christ? Matthew 25:40. "What you have done unto the least of my brethren, you have done unto me."
Thomas Merton was uneasy behind the walls of the cloister: the Siren songs of the '60s reached his ears after his initial enthusiasm and true-believership wore off. Tempted by the extramural, he went back and forth, his desire to be a contemplative in tension with his incipient activism and the rejection of his early contemptus mundi. (See The Journals of Thomas Merton, vol. 4, p. 34, entry of 21 August 1960, also p. 101 and p. 278.)
Did Merton enter the monastery too soon, before he fully tasted the futility and nonentity of this world? Or did he live in full authenticity and existential appreciation of the antinomian character of this life of ours, which is neither futile, nor empty of entity, nor affirmable without reserve?
Whatever the case, I love the guy I meet in the pages of his sprawling seven-volumed journal. Yes, he is something of a liberal-left squish-head both politically and theologically, but "I am large; I contain multitudes." (Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself")
Tom Merton is a window into the '60s for serious students of a decade far off in time but present in influence, good and bad.
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