Thomas Merton, prophet of urbanism

 

Thomas Merton (Creative Commons)

A few weeks ago, I was chatting at a concert with two women who I know from very different places, but who turn out to know each other from a Thomas Merton study group. This immediately brought to mind one of my favorite urbanist quotes, which I first encountered at a talk by Parker Palmer. Merton wrote in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander [Image Press, (1966) 2009: 153]: 

In Louisville, at the Corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers.

This encounter made me more curious about the context for this bit of prose poetry.

4th and Muhammad Ali (formerly Walnut) in 2019
(Google Street View screen capture)

Merton (1915-1968) was an American monk, who lived at a monastery in Kentucky called Gethsemani ("the strictest monastery he could find," according to Thomas Moore, who wrote the introduction to the 2009 edition). Conjectures was preceded by thirty other published works, including a best-selling autobiography The Seven Story Mountain (1948). More work was published after his death, so there is plenty to nourish study groups for quite awhile. His oeuvre includes poetry, devotions, studies of Eastern religion, and social-ethical commentary. 

Abbey of Gethsemani (Wikimedia commons)

Conjectures is an assembly of short reflections (the "conjectures" of the title) from a decade's worth of his journals. The nonlinear presentation tempts me to pick from the reflections to build my own argument, like creating something from a pile of Legos. This temptation must be resisted, for the sake of the text's integrity, yet there the pile is anyway. What follows is one humble blogger's reading. 

The "In Louisville" quotation above occurs early in part 3, "The Night Spirit and the Dawn Air," the longest of the book's five sections. Many of the reflections in part 3 deal with unity or totality, such as not opposing the hour of dawn and the middle of the night but as seeing them as part of the same day. He is a monk, and most of us are not, but that difference is "illusory" (154). We are not birds, or Shakers, or Marxists, but they each have their wisdom to share, and we lose when we turn our backs on it:

St. Anselm and his group were open to a more tolerant and reasonable dialogue with the Jew as well as the Muslim. But the Crusades did much to destroy this spirit of openness and toleration. (131)

I will be a better Catholic, not if I can refute every shade of Protestantism, but if I can affirm the truth in it and still go further. (140) 

Cities are places of death because humans separate themselves from nature as well as from each other:

Stone Age man was not a man of war. He was concerned with hunting, agriculture, domesticating animals, the home. The city is the place where the mythology of power and war develop, the center from which the magic of power reaches out to destroy the enemy and to perpetuate one's own life and riches--interminably if only it were possible. But it is never possible.... Urban culture is then committed to war "as to the elixir of sovereign power and the most effective purgation of sovereign discontent with that power" (Mumford). (134-135)

That sounds more anti-urban than urbanist, but his key insight--that humans are at their best when they are conscious of and connected to the world around them--is one he shares with, say, Charles Montgomery and Jeff Speck.

Then, a little later, comes this koan:

Flycatchers, shaking their wings after the rain. (137)

He concludes by hoping that everyone gets to a similar insight about human common life:

Because there is love in the world, and because Christ has taken our nature to Himself, there remains always the hope that man will finally, after many mistakes and even disasters, learn to disarm and to make peace, recognizing that he must live at peace with his brother..... Everything else is trivial compared with this supreme and urgent need of man. (213)

Other themes of the book consider his "bystander" perspective, viewing the day-to-day socioeconomic struggles of the 20th century from the safe distance of a monastery, technology, and evil. Part 1, "Barth's Dream," points to the difficulty in focusing on what matters, whether in human society or the worship of God. Part 2, "Truth and Violence: An Interesting Era," discusses the difficulty of careful moral reasoning or Christian social action amidst political crisis and rapid technological progress. He writes a lot about differences. To define ourselves by what we are not--Catholic not Protestant, Christian not Jewish, capitalist not communist, male not female, one who doesn't have sex or play cards or eat meat or whatever--is missing the point of human life. This theme provides additional context for the quotation with which I started, because the epiphany is that what unites us is more powerful than what divides us. He is them and we are all together, in spite of our labels and lifestyles. 

Then, in part four, he has another reflection on Louisville, sounding for all the world like Jane Jacobs:

Cities, even Louisville (which, being the city nearest to home is to some sense my city), leave me with a sense of placelessness and exile. There is an immense movement spread all over everything: the ceaseless motion of hot traffic, tired and angry people, in a complex swirl of frustration. While one could easily have all that one needs within easy reach, the purpose of a city seems to be to guarantee one has to travel about eighteen to fifty miles a day just in the performance of the routine duties of everyday life. One must move through noise, stink, and general anger, through blocks of dilapidation, in order to get somewhere where anger and bewilderment are concentrated in a neon-lit air-conditioned enclave, glittering with "products," humming with piped-inn music, and reeking of the nondescript, sterile, and sweet smell of the technologically functioning world. Then back again into the heat, through the devastated areas, blocks and blocks razed by the bulldozer, empty fields of ragweed, with an occasional gutted building standing in the void: a wreck in which the the winos come to howl, or where the bums sleep, or sinners sin, vast areas for the grasshoppers of the apocalypse. (There are of course more polite and more intricate sins in the bright new buildings.)

Even where war has not yet touched, cities are in devastation and nonentity: and yet, once again, under the surface of glitter and trash, in the midst of all the mess of traffic, there are the people, sick and distraught, drunk, mad, melancholy, anguished or simply bored to extinction. It is the people I love, not the roles in the city and not the glitter of business and of progress.

Can't we do something more than give them air-conditioning? (259-260) 

As they say on The War on Cars Twitter page, "Fr. Thomas Merton, welcome to the war on cars."

In his introduction, Thomas Moore cautions, "I have been told by those who knew him that we was not the person of his public persona, and that anything I think about him is probably wrong" (2009: xii). I have written of  my own frustration at the gap between my blogging about our common life and my  frequently less-lofty attitudes. Probably Merton, too, struggled to act on his own insights. At least he had them! and knowing that even Thomas Merton struggled to be as wise as his books should give us all courage to persist at the rewarding struggle of common life.