Prop 14b.06                                                      August 13, 2006

“Be imitators of God . . .
      and walk in love as Christ loved us . . .
      Put away all bitterness and wrath and anger
      and wrangling and slander, together with all malice
      and be kind to one another . . . .”

Thomas Merton spent his youth trying to keep entertained.
Then as a young man in New York,
      he began to study Christianity seriously.
This study eventually led him to his first epiphany
      or conversion experience.
It happened at St. Francis Church in Havana, Cuba,
      in 1940, when Merton was 25 years old.

During the celebration of Communion,
      Merton not so much saw something as intuited its presence.
He wrote:

     “I knew with the most absolute and unquestionable certainty,
     between me and the altar, somewhere in the center of the church . . .
     was . . . God in all His essence, all his Power . . . surrounded
     by the radiant faces of the thousand million uncountable numbers
     of saints contemplating His glory . . . .”

One year later, Merton turned his back on the world
       in order to turn his face toward God at Gethsemene,
             the Trappist Monastery in Kentucky.
There, he prayed, wrote poetry, and became famous
      for his holiness – a renowned Christian spiritual master
             with a huge following.

From his monastic vantage point,
      Merton sat in judgment on the corrupt world
             of commercialism and consumerism.
He said that he had symbolically “spat upon Chicago
      and tromped on Louisville”
             by moving to Gethsemene.

In 1952, at the Cincinnati airport,
      he looked at the crowd and described them as

             “infected with a moral corruption that had been
                     brought in by a plane from New York.”
Merton the monk kept the skirts of his alb clean.

But 17 years after his first conversion,
       he had another conversion experience.
It’s called the Louisville Epiphany.
On March 18, 1958, Thomas Merton
      was on a mundane errand.
      when something happened inside him
              that once again changed the course of his life.

He wrote:

       “In Louisville, at the corner of 4th and Walnut,
        /in the center of the shopping district, //
        I was suddenly overwhelmed by the realization
        that I loved these people,
        that they were mine and I was theirs,
        that we could not be alien to one another . . . .
        It was like waking from a dream of separateness,
        of spurious self-isolation in a special world,
       the world of renunciation and supposed holiness.”

From that time forward, Merton shifted gears.
He remained a monk.
He continued to practice prayer and solitude.
But from then on he was also engaged with the world,
       with the struggles for racial justice, nuclear disarmament,
               and inter-faith dialogue.

Thomas Merton had been practically phobic
       in his aversion to consumer culture.
I can relate to that. I still get anxiety attacks
       in malls and tourist gift shops.
So it was absolutely perfect
       that his second conversion, the Louisville Epiphany,
       should come to him, as he put it,

       “in the center of the shopping district.”

He went on to describe that moment,

      “The sense of liberation from illusory difference
      was such a relief to me that I almost laughed out loud . . . .

      (M)y happiness could have taken the form of the words,

      ‘Thank God I am like other men,
             that I am only a man among other men . . . .’”
He went on:

       “It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race,
       though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities
       and one which makes terrible mistakes;
       yet, with all that,
               God himself gloried in becoming
               a member of the human race.”

Thomas Merton’s 1940 Havana Epiphany
       happened during Holy Communion.
He discovered the presence of God in the sacrament.
And that was a good thing.
It separated Merton from his immature way
        of connecting to the world.
He had treated the world as a gratifier of his needs, his ego.
So he left the world. He intended, he said, “to disappear into God.”

But he had discovered only a piece of the truth of Holy Communion.
There was the larger piece, and to discover it,
         he had to rejoin the world

                  – but in a new way.

Holy Communion, Merton learned,
         isn’t about abandoning people for God.
It’s about finding people in God – and God in people.
That’s what the common cup and the one loaf mean.
We connect person-to-person in God,
         by seeing each other through God’s eyes.

Merton said of his 1958 experience,

         “ . . . I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts,
                 the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire
                 nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality,
                 the person that each one is in God’s eyes.
         If only they could all see themselves as they really are.
         If only we could see each other that way all the time.
         There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty,
                 no more greed . . . .
         I suppose the big problem is that we would fall down
                 and worship each other.”

Holy Communion is encountering the Real Presence of Christ,

         – not only in the sacrament – but in each other.
Holy Communion is the central defining ritual act of Christianity,
         and it points to the central defining truth of Christianity,
                  which is God-with-us.
As Merton put it,

         “God himself gloried in becoming
                  a member of the human race.”

The practice of connecting with God,
        not in the sky but in other people,
                 is the heart of Christian faith.
In moments, like Merton’s Louisville Epiphany,
        the humanity of our faith is liberating,
        and warm and feels like the joyful
                 Ebenezer Scrooge on Christmas morning.
That, is in fact, what Anglican novelist Charles Dickens
        expressed in all his stories.

But lived out day to day,
        the humanity of our faith makes it hard.
It’s as if we finally work up the audacity
        to invite Jesus into our hearts

        – and he shows up with his friends

        – some of whom are not our friends

        – they come in various colors, nationalities, and personalities

        – they come bearing various ideologies and agendas

        – they come with their sins, their neuroses,
                 and their sometimes endearing, but oft-times irritating,
                          idiosyncracies.

We invite Jesus to dinner,
         and he shows up with a mob of his friends.
And we are in the mode of the disciples
         when the 5,000 people showed up
                 for teaching, healing, and dinner.
The disciples said, “Send them away. Jesus said, “You feed them.”
He says to us, “I don’t go anywhere without my friends.”

St. Paul says in today’s lesson that Christians are people
         who have the Spirit of God in them.
So we are to “imitate God.”
And how do we do that?
“Walk in love,” he writes.
“Walk in love as Christ loved us
         and gave himself up for us.”

We imitate God by giving up ourselves

         – not our personalities or our memories,
                 but our judgments about others.
The self Paul invites us to give up
         is a throne of judgment from which we approve
                 or disapprove of other people.

It is that throne of judgement on which Thomas Merton sat,
         spitting on Chicago, tromping on Louisville,
         and diagnosing the people of Cincinnati
         as infected with the moral corruption of New York.

God invites us to step down from that throne
         as he did in the Incarnation,
         to join the human race as he did in the Incarnation,
         and to act in this human family the way he did in Christ.
“Be kind to one another,” Paul wrote, “tenderhearted,
         forgiving one another as God in Christ has forgiven you.”

This is a hard thing – a hard thing indeed
         to whatever extent we have identified with
                 our judgments, our moral superiority,
                 and especially our grievances against those
                          who have offended us or done us real wrong.

When Paul says to me,

        “Put away from you all bitterness and wrath
                 and anger and wrangling and slander,
                 together with all malice . . .”
        I wonder what I’ll have left.
Who will I be?

There may not be much left except Christ,
        except Christ living in me as a healer, reconciler,
                 and welcomer of the world’s unwelcome ones.
That’s what Paul meant when he said,

        “I have been crucified with Christ,
                 and yet I live

                 – No. Not I. It is Christ who lives in me.”

After the Louisville Epiphany, Merton wrote the epitaph
   of that sanctimonious young man who had found the Truth,
   and wrote of it with such self-satisfaction in The Seven Story Mountain.
He penned his own epitaph,

        “Say that Merton is dead,” he wrote,

                 “and never existed, and (that he) is a fake.
                 Bogus Trappist. Golf trousers under cowl . . . False priest.”
His next book was Conjectures Of A Guilty Bystander,

 the meditations of a man who loved others albeit not always very well,
    just doing his best in this world, as are we all.

                                                                Amen.