Merton Monday 34

With the last two Merton Mondays, I left seven or eight months of New Seeds at a pretty good place. I now need to decide from which book I should start taking the next Merton Monday series. In the meantime, here are a few little thoughts which hang out in my brain, in the little shoebox labeled "Merton."

As I sit here working on the close of the semester, which means I am struggling as always to write a final paper, I'm thinking about the tension between taking my interest area seriously enough and taking myself too seriously. For example, I find this semester that I've started to cite my own work when writing papers. I've always found this uncomfortable when I read other people's work and they cite themselves. I'm not sure why I find it that way, but I do. It seems… ostentatious. But then again, isn't this what I'm supposed to be doing, if I take my interests seriously and believe in the idea of bringing about something new?

I think I'm taking myself too seriously just by nature of the fact that I'm worried about such things. I should just do what I do, because it's what I do. And so be it.

Merton didn't take himself too seriously. He took his subject matter extremely seriously, but not himself. I was thinking tonight about a discussion I had at the Abbey, with an old monk who knew Merton. The old monk made a remark about Merton once saying of himself that he belonged to the world. Then the old monk, in a statement that left me amazed, said something like this: "I've heard that his writings have become quite popular; that there are even little groups of people who read his books and sit and talk about them. I hear he's sort of famous. I guess, in the end, he was right. He does belong to the world."

I was left with the distinct impression that this old monk never had, and never would, learn of just how famous Merton became. And that impression left me… I don't know… emotionally and intellectually moved in a very positive, but very strange, way.

If I remember correctly, that old monk said he stood outside in the snow and waited for Thomas' casket to arrive at the Abbey one day in December of 1968. It was planted in the ground beside those of all the monks who had previously committed their lives to that place—simply, humbly, and away from the world to which they each belonged.