A reacquaintance with an old friend

To My Magnificent Agents, Staff and Friends:

Several weeks ago I had the privilege of conducting a seminar at another real estate company in Baton Rouge. At the conclusion of my presentation, the broker of the company gave me a parting gift. It was a very nice cook book filled with wonderful local recipes. Attached it was a religious card containing two prayers. One was penned by Thomas Merton. As I read his prayer, I felt as if I  had bumped into someone with whom I was at one time close, but who I hadn’t seen in 40 years. This compelled me to research his prolific writings and become reacquainted. As one might expect in reuniting after 40 years, it seemed that we both had acquired significantly more depth. In actuality, Merton died in 1968, before I was first exposed to some of his writings during my “radical youth” period in the early 1970’s. Clearly then, he had not grown in depth. I had.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Merton, here is a short biography:

Thomas Merton (1915-1968) is arguably the most influential American Catholic author of the twentieth century. He authored over sixty books and hundreds of poems and articles on topics ranging from monastic spirituality to civil rights, nonviolence, and the nuclear arms race.

Merton was born in Prades, France. His New Zealand-born father and his American-born mother were both artists.

After a rambunctious youth and adolescence, Merton converted to Roman Catholicism while he was attending Columbia University. In 1941 he entered the Abbey of Gethsemani, a community of monks belonging to the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance (Trappists), the most abstemious Roman Catholic Monastic order.

The twenty-seven years Merton spent in Gethsemani brought about profound changes in his self-understanding. His ongoing conversion ultimately brought him into conflict with “the establishment” during the peace movement of the 1960’s. Referring to race and peace as the two most urgent issues of our time, Merton was a strong supporter of the nonviolent civil rights movement, which he called “certainly the greatest example of Christian faith in action in the social history of the United States.” Due to his social activism, Merton endured severe criticism, from Catholics and non-Catholics alike, who assailed his political writings as improper for a member of the clergy, especially a monk.

During his final years, Merton became deeply interested in Asian religions, particularly Zen Buddhism. After several meetings with him, the Dali Lama noted that Merton had a more profound understanding of Buddhism that any other Christian he had ever encountered.

While on a trip to a conference on East-West monastic dialogue Merton was electrocuted in a freak accident and died on December 10, 1968.

Here are a few of my favorite excerpts from Thomas Merton’s writings:

“…community is not built by man, it is built by God. It is God’s work and the basis of community is not just sociability but faith. This is what we need to see very clearly, because it is very important.” “… what really starts fighting is possessions. And people get into fights by preferring things to people. This is well developed in Christian theology, and therefore, for us, the importance of detachment from things, the importance of poverty, is that we are supposed to be free from things we might prefer to people. You can extend that to any limits you like – wherever things become more important than people we are in trouble. That is the crux of the whole matter. Figure it out for yourself!” – from “Thomas Merton in Alaska”

“Love is the revelation of our deepest personal meaning, value, and identity. But this revelation remains impossible as long as we are the prisoner of our own egoism. I cannot find myself in myself, but only in another. My true meaning and worth are shown to me not in my estimate of myself, but in the eyes of the one who loves me; and that one must love me as I am, with my faults and limitations, revealing to me the truth that these faults and limitations cannot destroy my worth in their eyes; and that I am therefore valuable as a person, in spite of my shortcomings, in spite of the imperfections of my exterior ‘package.’ The package is totally unimportant. What matters is this infinitely precious message which I can discover only in my love for another person. And this message, this secret, is not fully revealed to me unless at the same time I am able to see and understand the mysterious and unique worth of the one I love.” – from “Love and Living”

“One of the chief obstacles to this perfection of selfless charity, is the selfish anxiety to get the most out of everything, to be a brilliant success in our own eyes and in the eyes of other men. We can only get rid of this anxiety by being content to miss something in almost everything we do. We cannot master everything, taste everything, understand everything, drain every experience to its last dregs. But if we have the courage to let almost everything else go, we will probably be able to retain the one thing necessary for us -whatever it may be. If we are too eager to have everything, we will almost certainly miss even the one thing we need.
Happiness consists in finding out precisely what the ‘one thing necessary’ may be, in our lives, and in gladly relinquishing all the rest. For then, by a divine paradox, we find that everything else is given us together with the one thing we needed. “ – from No Man is an Island

“It is useless to try to make peace with ourselves by being pleased with everything we have done. In order to settle down in the quiet of our own being we must learn to be detached from the results of our own activity. We must withdraw ourselves, to some extent, from effects that are beyond our control and be content with the good will and the work that are the quiet expression of our inner life. We must be content to live without watching ourselves live, to work without expecting an immediate reward, to love without an instantaneous satisfaction, and to exist without any special recognition. “ – from No Man is an Island

“There is a silent self within us whose presence is disturbing precisely because it is so silent: it can’t be spoken. It has to remain silent. To articulate it, to verbalize it, is to tamper with it, and in some ways to destroy it.Now let us frankly face the fact that our culture is one which is geared in many ways to help us evade any need to face this inner, silent self. We live in a state of constant semi-attention to the sound of voices, music, traffic, or the generalized noise of what goes on around us all the time. This keeps us immersed in a flood of racket and words, a diffuse medium in which our consciousness is half diluted: we are not quite ‘thinking,’ not entirely responding, but we are more or less there. We are not fully present and not entirely absent; not fully withdrawn, yet not completely available. It cannot be said that we are really participating in anything and we may, in fact, be half conscious of our alienation and resentment. Yet we derive a certain comfort from the vague sense that we are ‘part of’ something – although we are not quite able to define what that something is – and probably wouldn’t want to define it even if we could. We just float along in the general noise. Resigned and indifferent, we share semiconsciously in the mindless mind of Muzak and radio commercials which passes for ‘reality.’ “ – From Thomas Merton: Essential Writings

Finally, I’d like to share Merton’s prayer that was on that card given to me – the prayer that drew me back to an old friend.

Have an AWE-full weekend!

Bill Bacque