During Fr. Steve Adrian’s break from active ministry, we will look back at his previous reflections. Below is his reflection from the May 1, 2022 bulletin.
Thomas Merton portrait photo, Seven Storey Mountain book cover, Wikimedia Commons
I was ordained a priest on December 8, 1968. Two days later, Thomas Merton, author and spiritual master from the Trappist Monastery of Gethsemane, died. He was participating in an international meeting of monks from various religious traditions in Bangkok. He was electrocuted when he touched a badly wired electric fan.
I was introduced to him in the reading of his memoir, The Seven Storey Mountain. Then, through my college and seminary years, I read many of his books on the spiritual life, the meaning of holiness, the place of the Word of God in one’s life, the sacramental life.
In 1964, the Second Vatican Council taught that there was a universal call to holiness; that each human being is called into an intimate relationship with the Father through Jesus Christ. What is this holiness to which all are called? What do I need to do? Many books were written about “doing” the work of holiness. Merton wrote, not about “doing,” but about “being.”
He writes in his memoir that shortly after he was baptized Catholic, one of his college friends asked him, “What do you want to be now that you are a Catholic?” Merton answered, “I don’t know. I guess what I want is to be a good Catholic.” His friend (a non practicing Jewish philosopher) corrected him, “What you should say is that you want to be a saint. The secret to being a saint is to want to be one. Don’t you believe that God will make you what he created you to be, if you consent to let him do it?”
Much of Merton’s subsequent journey can be seen as a response to that challenge. His journey can be seen as putting off a series of masks – that bad boy, the sophisticated twentieth-century man, the good Catholic, the perfect monk – to become his true self, the saint, as his Columbia friend put it, that God created him to be. The path to sanctity for Thomas Merton the monk was not really so very different from the path of every other person in the world.
Merton said “ Don’t try to become another Thomas Merton or anyone else, but become your own true self, the very self that God made you to be; and that is a life’s long journey.”
Father Steve Adrian
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