The Truth Series #3 The Monk

The Truth Series #3 – The Monk

Truth or Dare was quite popular in the time period of my middle school exile. Over thirty years later, I still have no understanding of why anyone, ever, consented to this choice. The rational response to truth or dare is neither and please leave me alone, yet somehow, irrationally, I often partook. Some people seemed to find the choice to be a difficult one. As far as hard goes, comparisons seem a logical assessment. They sharpen the distinctions at least. Sure, clap push-ups are hard, but have you tried learning Swedish? Pinball is hard but not as hard as calculus which is far less hard than having measles, mumps, or rubella. But which is harder – truth or dare?

Amongst my middle school acquaintances, dares came in the form of goofy yet bothersome tasks, the kinds of things I never would have voluntarily done and which made me somewhat uncomfortable, like prank calling a teacher, (We had phone books then, full of all sorts of juicy information including listed numbers. Combine that with the absence of caller ID and you get a lot of prank calls.) placing a can of soda in the mailbox of the town scold, (It was as stupid as it sounds.) or terrorizing some poor old lady with ding dong ditch. (Who came up with that?) These uncomfortable dares were less uncomfortable to me than the truth, which always involved some sort of secret, something to do with crushes, teachers, family dramas, or adversaries, none of which I wanted to discuss. I never wanted to lay bare my inner workings, not even to myself. I did not select truth, not once, not even the time when Cheryl the most popular girl in eighth grade said she was too tired to think of a dare and promised she would tell everyone I wet the bed unless I picked truth. Even the likelihood of public humiliation, at least until someone figured out there was no way for Cheryl to ascertain what I did in bed, was better than the truth. I avoided the truth, not for lack of will or will power or power, but courage.

Adults, presumably, maybe, have the courage to face their inner truth, and seek the outer truth as well. While we still have aspects of our inner selves we want to conceal, the truth about the world around us and the people in it, as well as the world beyond us, seems both more interesting and more important, certainly than it did when I was thirteen. “The truth” is what we seek. We even have a term for it, a “truth seeker.” Where to look for the truth is not always apparent.

The ancient Greeks liked to argue about truth as much as we do. Aristotle opined that rhetoric (and, quaintly, poetry) was merely manipulation when it appealed to emotions while omitting facts, sort of pathos ultra without any logos or ethos I suppose. Aristotle argued for rhetoric to be grounded in philosophy, and to be used for the pursuit of enlightenment, an eternal and unchanging truth present from the time of creation, available to every individual who seeks it. Available where?

There is a truth that deals with demonstrable facts, science, economics, history, mathematics, etc. We need to look at those facts with clear eyes, something notoriously hard to do and notoriously dangerous not to do. But is there another truth to seek out, not one that necessarily helps us decide how to vote or whether we should be vaccinated, although it might, but who and how to be? Where to find such a thing?

Enter the monk, next up for consideration in the Truth Series. Because of their unique, some might say extreme, lifestyle, it is not a surprise that monks have something singular to say. Some of the most provocative, beautiful writing has emanated from monasteries, including deep, thoughtful exegesis and discursion about the nature of truth. One example of such a writer is Thomas Merton.

Thomas Merton was a Trappist monk who spent over twenty-five years of his life living at the Gethsemani Monastery in Kentucky. Some of those years were spent living in the main monastery building. In the last years of his life he lived alone, in a small hermitage on the property. What can a semi-hermetic monastic who died in 1968 possibly have to tell a 21st century woman living through unprecedented times about truth? A lot, it seems.

“I am alone with the bronze hills and a vast sky, and shadows of pine trees. Sometimes the shadows are alive with golden butterflies. Everywhere is the inscrutable and gentle and very silent face of truth.”

Merton’s lush, poetic words glow with a light that contemporary accounts say he himself possessed. Indeed, some might say that Merton’s words taught those who partook what it meant to contemplate, within, to seek a contemplative life in a decidedly non-contemplative world.

“May you find again within yourself the deep life-giving silence which is genuine truth and the source of truth: for it is a fountain of life and a window into the abyss of eternity and God.”

Merton believed that the courage for truth was special to writers, a unique gift they shared. He believed writers used their poetics to voice the truth.

“But the poets have the humility to seek truth from the springs of life, which are first of all silent. They have the courage to disbelieve what is shouted with the greatest amount of noise from every loudspeaker, and it is this courage that is most of all necessary today. A courage not to rebel, for rebellion itself tends to substitute another and louder noise from the noise that already deafens everyone, but an independence, a personal and spiritual liberty which is above noise and outside it and which can unite men in a solidarity which noise and terror cannot penetrate.”’

Merton acknowledged what likely explains why many of us work so assiduously to avoid the truth, even risking dares. The truth can be difficult to take.

“It would be impossible to invent something more terrible than the truth itself.”

Merton was referring to a poem he wrote using the actual words of commanders of Auschwitz. His point is quite clear. The truth is not always pretty. When we don’t like it, does the truth become undesirable? And from whence does this truth emanate? I think Merton would have a lot to say about our modern attempts to gain truth through divisive politics, social media, Net Flix, and Twitter.

“When will people discover that artistic truth, and any other truth, is never manufactured in the offices of bureaucrats or thought police?”

For Merton, contemplation was the only path, a contemplative life the only way. Thinking profoundly about something brings a kind of inner vision or seeing, transcendent of the intellect, facilitated by practices such as prayer or meditation. This, he believed, was the way to discover the inner, to then discover the outer.

Do we really have a truth inside? Is it there from birth, put there by God or Mother Nature or DNA or all of the above? It never changes, through all the churnings of life? Can it be revised, to reflect present circumstances? What if it’s wrong or, worse, unlikeable? Is it akin to finding yourself, in modern secular parlance? Is it the self you wanted to be, you dreamed and schemed and plotted to be, or the one you are, the one life handed to you, or the one you still hope to become? Which is the true self? Are we looking to find inner truth or looking to establish inner truth? Maybe finding an inner truth would help in the assessment of outer truth? If I know for sure who I am, would it help me to evaluate the information, facts, science, etc. labeled as the truth?

I daresay Merton would argue inner truth provides the courage to try, having a fidelity to the truth one discovers, in spite of opposition, disagreement, silencing, heartens. The truth we find within us enables us to be faithful to the truth we see without us, no matter what that truth may be.

“So we continue to live and try to seek truth. Each must do so with courage and indefatigable patience, constantly discerning it from the obsessive fictions of the establishment everywhere…”

The truth is a dare. Facing our own inner truth, seeking it out, looking at it, living it, is a dare. It takes courage. For me, I would still reject the forced choice. But if I had to, I would pick truth, contemplative truth, and dare. A dare to look inside, to listen, to contemplate, to see the truth.

All quotes taken from Thomas Merton The Courage for Truth: Letters to Writers

Selected and edited by Christine M. Bochen