xt72ng4gqs32 https://exploreuk.uky.edu/dips/xt72ng4gqs32/data/mets.xml  Thomas Merton 1959-04-11 This letter is from collection 75m28 Thomas Merton papers. archival material 75m28 English  Contact the Special Collections Research Center for information regarding rights and use of this collection. Thomas Merton correspondence Letter from Thomas Merton to Dr. Daisetz Suzuki, April 11, 1959 text Letter from Thomas Merton to Dr. Daisetz Suzuki, April 11, 1959 1959 1959-04-11 2023 true xt72ng4gqs32 section xt72ng4gqs32 Abbey of Gethsemani
Trappist, Ky.

April 11,1959.

My Dear Dr Suzuki:

What a pleasure to receive your kind reply to my letter. I was very happy
to learn that my suppositions had been correct, and that you were indeed
interested inthe Zen-like sayings of the Desert Fathers. Thank you for quoting
the two beautiful little poems about the monk and that burglar, so eloquent
in their brevity. They show exactly the same Spirit as that of the Desert
Fathers. And. one of the things the Zen Masters and Desert Fathers share, among
so many other qualities, is their quiet humor, bl ended with Spiritual joy
that transcends diffiflcul ties and sufferings.

Therefore I am sending on to you the manuscript w! ich has received the
provisional title of "The isdom of the Desert". It is going by surface mail,
and may take a little time to reach you. I hope you will feel free to say all
that you like. I give you a free rein and hope that you will have many ideas.
If you write a piece as long as my own introduction, or even longer, (which
muld be very welcome) we could think about dividing the royalties in some
way: some for our monks and some for you, or perhaps for some good monastic
cause of your choosing. I leave that up to you. As for the Desert Fathers,
they are not worried about their share of the material proceeds.

I was very happy to hear that you are active with further writings on
Zen. Your books are highly appreciated and fulfil an important function.

I for one am always delighted to read a new one and will be nest grateful if
your London publisher sends me some, I will be awaiting them with anticipation.

We in the west are always ready to talk about things like Zen and about

a hundred and one other things besides, but we are not so eager to do the things
that Zen implies: and that is what really counts. I only wish there were some

way I could come in contact with some very elementary Zen discipline, even

if it were only something like archery or flower—arrangement. At the moment,

I occasionally meet my own kind of Zen Master, in passing, and for a brief
moment. Fbr example, the other day a bluebird sitting on a fence post suddenly
took off after a wasp, dived for it, missed, and instantly returned to the

same position on the fence post as if nothing had ever happened. A brief,

split second lesson in Zen. If I only knew some Japanese I Would put it into

a Haiku, but in English the seventeen syllables somehow seem to have no justi-
fication except as translations from Uapanese. But the gist of it would be that
the birds never stop to say "I missed" because, in fact, whether they catch

the wasp or not they never miss, and neither does Zen. We in the west are the
ones with the hit-or-miss outlook on life, and so we hit and we miss. And

in both cases the results are likely to be tragic. I fear our successes more
than our failures.

And now for your deeply moving and profoundly true intuitions on
Christianity. I wish I could tell you with what joy and what understanding I
respond to them. We have very much the same views, and take the same standpoint
which is, it seems to me, so truly that of the New Testament. I am sending you
an article on Easter herewith, which will show you how I approach it-- in
Pauline language on this occasion. 'I w) 111d ask you to be indulgent, particu-
larly toward the limited perspectives of the first two paragraphs, and toward
the rather technical involvement in details of New Testament theology. But Md:
behind it is the same paradox you bring out in the words "we are innocent just
because of our sinfulness". ,That in fact is cm? of the great Christian
paradoxes, one that has pneoccupied thinkers like \St Augustine, Dostfnievsky,

 

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St Paul and a thousand others. However this presentation of mine in the
Easter article is not simple or cpen enough. A more direct and concrete
« expression of the same idea is in a little piece of poetic prose, Prometheus,
which comes to you separately by surface mail. And with it yet ano r
little book called Monastic Peace through wl'zich you will find running themes.
that reproduce your own paradoxes in various ways.

' In your phrase "God wanted to know Himself ,hence the creation" you
touch upon a most interesting theological idea that has been developed by
some Russian Orthodox thinkers and which has deep consequences and ramifica-
tions. Writers with this perspective are S. Boulgakov and H. Berdyaev. The
Russian view pushes very far the idea of God ”emptying Himself" (kenosis)
to go over into His creation, while creation passes over into a divine world,
-— precisely a new paradise. Your intuition about Paradise is profoundly
correct and Patristic. In Christ the world and the whole Cosmos has been
created anew (which means to say How: restored to its original perfection
am beyond that made divine, totally transfigured,) The whole world has risen
in Christ, say the Fathers. If God is ”all in all" then everythino is in fact
paradise because it is filled with the glory and the presenCe of God, and
nothing is any more separated from God. Then com-as the question whether or
not the resurrection of Christ shows that we had never really been separated
from Him in the first place . Was it only that we thought we were separated in
fromrflfim? But that‘thought was a conviction so great and so strong that it
amounted to separation. It was a thought that each one of us had to be god
in his own right. Each one of us began to slave and stmgfle to make him-
self a god which he imagined he was supposed to he. Each one slaved in the
service of his own idol-- his crnsciously fabricated social self. Each one
then pushed all the others away from himself, and down, beneath himself: or
tried to. This is original sin. In this sense, original sin and paradise are
directly Opposed. Inthis sense there is exclusion from. Peradise. But yet we are
-in paradise, and once we break free from the false image, we find ourselves
what we are: and we are "in Christ".

The essentially Christian element in all this is the fact that it is
centered in Christ. But what does that mean? Does it mean conformity to a socia
and conventional image of Christ? Then we become involved and alienated in
another projection: a Christ who is not Christ but the symbol of a certain
sector of society, a certain group, a certain class, a certain culture....
Fatal. The Christ we seek is within us, in our inmost self, is our inmost self,
and yet infinitely transcends ourselves. We have to be "found-in Him" and yet
be~perfectly ourselves and free from the domination of any image of Him other
than Himself. You see that is the trouble with the Christian world. It is not
dominated by Christ (which would be perfect freedom) it is enslaved by images
and ideas of Christ that are creations andprojections of men, and stand in the
way of God's freedom. But Christ Himself is in us as unknown and unseen. We
follow Him, we find Him (it is like the cowcatching pictures) and then He
must vanish and we must go along without Him at our side why? Because He
is even closer than that. He is ourseli’. O my dear Dr SuZuki I know you

will understand. this so Way people do not,» even though they are
"doctors in Israel". ‘

I will have someone copy out the hymn called the Exultet which is sung
on Easter Night in celebration and explanation of the m of the Resurrec-
tion. You will see in this what the Church really thinks about the "new
creation" and new paradise in Christ. Right after the Exultet, the first
chapter of Genesis is sung, with obvious implications.

As you know, the problem of writing down things about Christianity
is‘fraught with ludicrous and overwhelming difficulties. No one cares for
fresh, direct and sincere intuitions of the Living Truth. Everyone is pre- .
occupied with formulas. Is this correct, is this absolutely in accordance
with such and such a fornmla? Does this fit the official definitions? Etc.
Hence if you write anything about Christianity, I strongly suggest that you
avoid any kind of commitment that would subject your statements to judgement
according to this kind of standard. I hope you will present your ideas in such

 

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a way that you wimimpfizicitly challenge the theological watchdogs. In
other words, I would suggest that you do not preface your intuitions with
even an implicit claim to state the nature of Christianity. If you say
”this is Christianity" you will immediately hear a thousand voices shout
"this is not Christianity". Which mold be very sad, since in fact what you
say is Christianity, and yet is probably hard to express in a way that would
convince many Christians 0 "‘ its true nature. But you will certainly know
how to procede. If you say "this is what I think" well, nobody can dew it.
It is [certainly what you think.

Meanwhile you see that I enjoy talking with you of these things, and
I assure you I will be very happy to hear how the ideas develop. And for the
rest, we are in Paradise, and what fools we would bt to think thoughts that
would put us out of it (as if we could be out of itl) One thing I would
add. To my mind, the Christian doctrine of grace, (however understood-- I
mean here the gift of God‘s Life to us) seems to me to fulfil a most important
function in all this. The realization, the finding of ourselves in Christ and
hence in paradise, has a special character from the fact that this is all a
free gift of God. ”-Yith us, this stress on freedom, God's freedom, the indeter-
minateihess of salvation, is the thing that corr sponds to Zen in Christianity
The Break through that comes with the realization of what the finger of a
keen is pointing to, is like the break through of the realization that a
sacrament, for instance, is a finger pointing to the completely Spontaneous
Gift of Himself to us on the part of God-- beyondand above images, outside
of every idea, every law, every right or wrong, everything high or low,
everything spiritual or material. we Whether we are good or bad, wise or
foolish, there is always this sudden irruption, this break through of God's
freedom into our life turning the whole thing upside down so that it comes
out, contrary to all expectation, right side up. This is grace, this is salva-
tion, this is Christianity. And, as far as I causes, it is also very much
like Zen. Arid of course, personally, I like to see this freedom of God at work
outside of all set forms, all rites, all theology, all. contemplation, --
everything. But the rites and contemplation and disciplines have their place.
In fact they are most important.

And now one more thing. I feel obliged to say'this because of the huge
burden of the sins of the western world, the burden of our sins toward the
east: sins cormitted in the name of the Good and even in the name of Christ.

I want to speak for this western mrld which has been and is so utterly wrong.
This world which has in past centuries broken in upon you and brought you our
own confusion, our own alienation, our own decrepitude, our lack of culture,
our lack of faith. And worst of all, that we have shamed the Truth of Christ
by imposing upon you our confusion as if it came from Christ. 'Iith us Chris-
tians tears of sorrow are supposed to be significant. If I wept until the end
of the world I could hot signify enough of what this tragedy means. If only
we had thought of coming to you to learn something. There are srme who
want to do this now but perhaps it 53135? late.‘1‘he victims of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki are before me and beside me every day when I saw Mass.I pray for fit
them and I feel they intercede for me before God. If only we had thought of
coming to you and loving you for what you are in yourselves, instead of trying
to make you over into our own image and likeness. For to me it is clearly evi-
dent that you and I have in common and share most intimately precisely that
which, in the eyes of conventional westerners, would seem to separate us. The
fact that you are a Zen Buddhist and I am a Christian monk far from separating
us makes us most like one another. How many centuries is m it going to take
for people to discover this fact? A fact so obvious and so salutary? A
fact so truly and essentially Christian. Can you somehow convey this thought
to any monks or such like people there who might be interested? I feel most
united both to you and to them, and for this reason I sign myself,

Faithfully yours in Christ