No Islands in the Stream

A man who is not at peace with himself necessarily projects his interior fighting into the society of those he lives with and spreads a contagion of conflict all around him. Even when he tries to do good for others his efforts are hopeless, since he does not know how to do good to himself. In moments of wildest idealism he may take it into his head to make other people happy: and in so doing he willl overwhelm them with his own unhappiness. He seeks to find himself somehow in the work of making others happy. Therefore he throws himself into the work. As a result he gets out of the work all he put into it: his own confusion, his own disintegration, his own unhappiness.

-Thomas Merton
No Man Is An Island (1955)

I found this passage from Thomas Merton in a little pocket collection of his writings that is published by New Seeds Books and which I picked up at the Catholic bookstore in Old St. Mary's Church in San Francisco's Financial District (as oppposed to New St. Mary's Cathedral… down the hill on Geary) where I was on Palm Sunday looking for a small pendant that a friend of mine has and which I have been trying to find for some time. The pendant is a beautiful miniature metal sculpture representing a crown of thorns, and my friend wears it every year throughout Lent as a reminder of the suffering of Jesus and the call for us all to take up our share of that burden as well (at least that's how I interpret it, Mary may have a different pespective, and after all, it is her pin).

I never did find the pendant, but I did find this little book, and though I almost didn't buy it (I've already got quite a Merton collection that I have amassed over the last 30 years) I decided to plunk down the six bucks and take it along with me to read on the ferry as I road it over to Marin.

In the eight weeks since, I have read bits and pieces throughout the book, picking it up at odd times of the day when it sort of leaps out at me for some unconscious reason or another. This morning I began reading in a section that I started yesterday; a section entitled "A Theology of Love." It starts out non-threateningly enough with a look at the basic ideas that a theology of love would require, a sort of soft-edged liberation theology where the powerful are expected to live peacefully just like the poor are always forced to. It's a lesson that, it seems to me, should be taught right now to all the rabid christian activist types who keep proclaiming a "culture of life" while advocating everything from more war to a greater enforcement of the death penalty, to an anti-abortion stance that doesn't answer the basic question, "what about the baby after it's born?"

That section, coming from the book "Faith and Violence," and published nearly 40 years ago, was something I could shout "Amen" to while pumping my fist in the air and pondering the many ways I would like to see this gospel preached in our time. I could also picture any number of people I would like to personally confront with the idea. It was a satisfying image, a well-conceived rant.

It wasn't until this morning when I picked up the book after my morning meditation and paged through the next part of that section to find a new crucible for the day that I hit the passage above.

It stopped me dead in my proverbial tracks.

In one hundred twenty seven words, written a year after I was born, Merton has pinned my tail on the donkey. This could be my mini-biography, my lifelong manifesto, and my epitaph. Ebeneezer Scrooge, cowering at the feet of the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come, begs him to explain his vision: "Men's courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead, but if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with what you show me!"

I look at the words and my life literally flashes before my eyes.

I see the day in Arizona when I shuttled everything I owned out of my parents' house and into my little car with the determination to be out and done… to get on with my life and away from the oppression and restriction of my parent's house; a task which, on certain occassions, my parents no doubt wish I had more adequately completed.

I see the day on Waller Street in San Francisco when I picked up a large bag of laundry and slammed it on the ground while screaming at my wife at the top of my lungs (about what I have no idea)... she walked back into the room, centered me with a look straight in the eye and said, "You're an asshole." She was right.

I see a night – a series of nights – in Sonoma where I screamed and raged with a fury that frightened my lover, and her children, so much that they felt the need to escape me, to run away and stay somewhere else. It frightened my own daughter so much that she recently reminded me of those nights and how sad it made her feel that she had been left behind with the monster that was me.

I see another occasion, when in a similar fight, I raged through our bedroom breaking things… lifting up a large beading table and smashing it to the floor. The rage was so extreme that Jennifer came to the door of the bedroom where I was slamming things around, and crying she screamed at me, "Please stop daddy!"

I see times when my daughter was unable to open her mouth to speak as she sat next to me in the car on our way to some supposedly important thing or another. She wouldn't speak, because she couldn't speak; her father screamed at her and berated her for being silent so much that the words she might have formed if she'd been given the chance, if her angry father could have been silent himself, were stolen from her, leaving only silence and a fearful tear in her eye.

I see bad decisions in business and horrible fights with old and dear friends. I see arrogant and selfish proclamations and self-involved angry, sometimes (but not always so easily explained) drunken declarations about what's obviously right and wrong. I see more misery than it's possible for me to even contain in the box of my life that I've been carrying around with me for the past ten months. And rightly so… because I've really been carrying it around for 52 years; I've only begun to catch a glimpse of what's really there during the last ten months.

It's not like these are the only scenes I hold in my mind; these aren't the only realities of my life. There are wonderful, celebratory meals, joyous laughter, good jokes, fun games and funny times. We had a lot of laughter stuck into the middle of so much sorrow and anger. I know how to celebrate as enthusiastically as I can argue, or at least almost.

But the thing is, it is in the words of Merton that I find the source of both the joy and the pain, for he's right; my motivation was to make other people happy. My reason for living, for as long as I can remember, for what seems like every day of my life, has been colored by that goal, and that complication, that Merton describes when he so perfectly describes what I have done so much, because I could do nothing other than "overwhelm them with [my] own unhappiness."

In another passage from the little book, this one taken from his 1971 book "Contemplation in a World of Action," Merton expands his analysis and in so doing, gives a glimpse at what can – what must – be done by a person like me. "He who attempts to act and do things for others or for the world without deepening his own self-understanding, freedom, integrity, and capacity to love, will not have anything to give others." Clearly, this is the key. In order to have something to give, one must find it, and nurture it, inside oneself first.

As I have been working on this reflection, I've been listening to Springsteen's new album of American folk classics, "We Shall Overcome." One of my favorite songs on the album is the old spiritual, turned civil rights anthem, "Eyes On The Prize." Beginning with the story of Paul and Silas in prison and then magically released, it moves to a declaration of both the personal and collective grasp at freedom: freedom of mind, heart, body and soul.

"The only thing I did was wrong
Was stay in in the wilderness too long
Keep your eyes on the prize
Hold On
The one thing we did was right
Was the day we started to fight.
Keep your eyes on the prize
Hold On"

I have indeed been in the wilderness too long and I've packaged it up and brought that wilderness out to too many people, in too many places, over far too long a time. I am sorry for that, and I want to aplogoize to everyone of the people who I have hurt in ways that only they know, whether it happened long ago or just last week.

Today I am beginning that journey again. The thing I know (from studying the labyrinth and living my life) is that the journey won't be a straight line or a smooth road, but today I am seeking to do that one thing right. I will fight a new fight; the fight to see the good, the true, the joyful, the hopeful and the best, inside myself and out in the world. The fight to live it out… every day. I really have very little idea what all that actually means, and I have some big questions about some of it (for example how does one express the sort of peace that Merton is talking about while also keeping a personal edge… an edge which I happen to value as a particularly significant part of my personality).

I also don't expect it's a fight that's easily, or rapidly, won, but it's got to be better (or certainly no worse) than the one I've been engaged in for the past 52 years.