What Thomas Merton Would Say Today with Fr. Dan Horan (Part 1)

What Thomas Merton Would Say Today with Fr. Dan Horan (Part 1)

Ilia Delio interviews Fr. Dan Horan, professor of Philosophy, Religious Studies and Theology at Saint Mary’s College and author of Engaging Thomas Merton: Spirituality, Justice, and Racism. Ilia asks Dan how he became interested in Thomas Merton, and what relevant insights he believes the teachers of yesterday have for us today in the shadow of ecological crisis and in need of social justice.

ABOUT DAN HORAN

“God’s love is not conditioned like our love, God’s mercy is not bound as ours is, and God does not discriminate or reward a person according to the standards of a given society, no matter how widespread such criteria may be.”

Daniel P. Horan, OFM, PhD, is Professor of Philosophy, Religious Studies and Theology and Director of the Center for the Study of Spirituality at Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana. He is also Affiliated Professor of Spirituality at the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, Texas. A columnist for the National Catholic Reporter, he is the author or editor of more than fourteen books, including Catholicity and Emerging Personhood: A Contemporary Theological Anthropology, A White Catholic’s Guide to Racism and Privilege, and The Way of the Franciscans: A Prayer Journey Through Lent. Prof. Horan’s most recent book is titled Engaging Thomas Merton: Spirituality, Justice, and Racism and his next book, due out in Summer 2024, is titled Fear and Faith: Hope and Wholeness in a Fractured World. He is currently working on a book on Christology tentatively titled, Not Because of Sin: Reconsidering the Reason God Became Human. His academic research, writing, and teaching focuses on medieval and contemporary spirituality, theological anthropology, Christology, antiracism and LGBTQ issues, and theologies of creation. Prof. Horan regularly lectures around the United States and abroad; and serves on several university, academic, and publication editorial boards. He is recipient of numerous awards for his writing and service and is co-host of The Francis Effect Podcast.

Transcript

A HUNGER FOR WHOLENESS TRANSCRIPT | S04E08

What Thomas Merton Would Say Today with Fr. Dan Horan (Part 1)

Robert: Welcome to Hunger for Wholeness. I'm your host, Robert Nicastro. This week Ilia talks to Father Dan Horan, professor of philosophy, religious studies and theology at St. Mary's College, an author of engaging Thomas Merton, spirituality, justice and racism. By way of introduction, Ilia asks Dan how he originally became interested in Thomas Merton and what relevant insights he believes the teachers of yesterday have for us today.

Ilia: Father Dan Horan, we welcome you this afternoon and on our Hunger for Wholeness podcast. It's really great to be with you. I've known you for a number of years now, and I've watched you develop your own pedigree as a theologian, as a public scholar. And so, maybe we can just begin by you're a Franciscan and one who is a specialist in Thomas Merton, and Thomas Merton has now become again in our own time because he was so prophetic and insightful in his own time. Why don't you just maybe begin by articulating how you became attracted to the work of Thomas Merton, his writings.

Dan: I'd be happy to, and thank you so much for having me. You're right. We've known each other a very long time, and so it's a delight whenever we're able to meet up to talk about theology and spirituality and science and to do so on the air, as it were, is a real treat. My honest answer to that question about how I came to be interested in Thomas Merton is a little bit silly. I often say that he was a hobby that grew out of control, that I started reading Merton for kind of spiritual reading and reflection and inspiration like so

Produced by the Center for Christogenesis

many people. But I became fascinated by his insights and the depth of his own understanding in the ongoing conversion that he experienced. I think one thing that I have always found attractive about Merton is that he kind of puts it all out there; the pros and the cons, the positive and the negatives of his life, the challenges, as the second Vatican Council might say, the joys and hopes and

1

griefs and anxieties. And so, I always found him rather relatable. And something near and dear to both of us is his sort of like Franciscan heart as well, the kind of one of the many threads that comes together in the tapestry of his own spiritual and theological insight and social criticism. So, I guess that's how I started being asked to talk more about Merton and to write about Merton and to give talks about Merton. And that was that hobby that grew out of control, so now I continue to be drawn to him.

Ilia: Yeah. Well, I too was fascinated by Thomas Merton initially, his spirituality, his writings from his famous New Seed Contemplation and that kind of spiritual journey that he laid out with the interiorization of the word. But he went on to develop, he himself developed, he grew in a sense in and through his own spirituality. And this growing from the inside to the outside, I found very interesting, and I still find very interesting in Merton. Do you see that as well, this kind of deepening of his own life in this mystery of God? And then out of that wellspring of that God center within him, he began to speak on behalf of war and violence, on behalf of religious pluralism, peacemaker. Maybe let me ask this. What can Merton teach us today? We live in a very complex world as we well know with the same problems. They haven't gone away, which is very disconcerting to me that this many years later we could be talking 1950, 1960, the problems still prevail. So, what are we missing and what is it that Thomas Merton clicked into and how can we learn from him?

Dan: Well, I think you're exactly right. And I would agree that it is lamentable that we're still talking about some of the same things he talked about 50, 60, 70 years ago. And I think it just supports that adage, history repeats itself, but there's also something really profound about the kind of grounding or anchoring of his spiritual outlook, which led him in this kind of ongoing conversion toward the world. So, oftentimes Merton scholars will talk about a period of time in the late 1950s when Merton made a so-called turn to the world. And Merton himself even reflects on this in some ways. Quite famously in March of 1958, he has this real kind of mystical spiritual experience out in the busy streets of

2

downtown Louisville at the intersection of fourth and Walnut, or what is today, fourth and Muhammad Ali have.

And he has this kind of—actually, very kind of Meister Eckhart kind of sense of just sort of the immensity of the world and God's immediacy within the world, and more importantly, within every single person. He talks about that point within every person in which God is present. And then he says in a rather off quoted line; it's like everybody's walking around shining like the sun. If only we could see one another this way. And in his own journals, he's reflecting, again, it's really historically interesting. It's the 1950s pre-Vatican too, he sees himself certainly in the previous 14 years or so of his life as leaving the so-called World, a fuga mundi, and entering into this sort of acetic, monastic, special place in vocation. And that all sort of starts to crumble. It's like the veil is lifted from his eyes and he says, you know what? "No, no, no, no. I am connected with all of these people. I am their brother. I am united to them. We are connected to one another." And so, it's easy to kind of point to that really powerful personal transformative experience to say like, "Okay, this is the cardinal point." And I think that's fair.

Actually, just a few years later, he writes to Dorothy Day in New York and says in one part of his letter, I can't just go about writing about monastic ideas and prayer and reflection; that has its place, but now I need to turn to the life and death issues, the really important issues. And as you say, it's at that moment that he turns to subjects like war and non- violence, racism and poverty. To some degree, he was reading Silent Spring, so he was having a kind of a very early environmental kind of awareness to it this time. And I would say that that was the occasion, the condition of the possibility for his turning to the world, that his ability to see kind of with prophetic clarity was because he had this sense of interior spiritual, and contemplative life that he felt anchored. He was grounded in this kind of sense of divine love and wholeness that allowed him to see the world as it actually is, and then respond really truly in a prophetic mode, calling out where we weren't living up to that call.

3

Ilia: I often wonder, because I think a lot of people today, especially, there's kind of resurgence of contemplation, meditation. There's a lot of centering going on, which is a good thing, and we're very aware of the conditions of the world, but what moves one, like a Thomas Merton—to move from that an individual who is deep in prayer and aware of the events of the world, to one who acts on behalf of the world. And I'm very interested in the type of person that takes the next step on one who begins to act and therefore raise attention and begin to reshape the world by invoking new insights and ideas.

Dan: Yeah, I think that is the question, isn't it? Why don't we have more Mertons, we might say. For all the people who identify as people of faith, why aren't there people taking that next step more regularly? It's a good question. The first thing that comes to mind for me is there's a way, especially in kind of religious circles, that the word prophetic gets overused in the same way that I think in some church circles, the term pastoral gets overused. Like, well, everything becomes pastoral, right? But I think Merton, in some response to your question, I would say that Merton was prophetic in the biblical sense, in the sense of the Hebrew prophets, which Jeremiah is one of my favorite illustrations of this. And in fact, Merton, while giving a series of retreat lectures to the Sisters of Loretto in Kentucky, actually invokes this as a model for religious life, the example of Jeremiah.

And basically, there's that passage early in Jeremiah. God calls Jeremiah to be a prophet, to announce the good news, to announce the return to the covenant, which really ruffles the feathers, obviously, of the powerful, his family and friends abandoned him. And then we get to that passage in chapter 20 that's well-known where he says, you duped me Lord, and I let myself be duped. And then the next line is Jeremiah says, if I just shut up if I just close my mouth, things will go back to normal and everything would be fine. And I think there's an honesty in that nostalgia. Like, if I go back to just living my life, mind, my own business, everything would be okay. But then Jeremiah says, "But your word oh Lord, was like a fire within me," and he can't be quiet.

4

And I think for Merton, I'm thinking also of Saint Bonaventure. Bonaventure has that notion of prophecy as tied to becoming a person of scripture. And I think for Merton, the more God's story, the more the story we could expand to that fourth and walnut experience in '58 of the interconnectedness of the universe, the more that becomes our story, the more we can't unsee it, we can't put that fire out within us. So in Merton's case, I think he follows that sort of pattern. And to your question about why aren't there more people like that? I think the same reason there aren't more prophets. All the Hebrew prophets tried to get out of it. No one wants to do that job, you know? No one wants to be that person because it's very discomforting.

Ilia: It is, right. It puts you on the inside of the outside and the outside of the inside, and you're kind of in a unique position in that way because I think prophets and see the world from a different center. You mentioned Bonaventure, and I do want to discuss a little bit the Franciscan tradition, which you and I share, and a deep love for this very rich tradition. And yet, two things. One, what can this, and you've written a lot about Scotus’ Haecceitas and human dignity, which is an extremely important point today. I've written a lot about creation, so have you, in Francis—I do worry about this kind of remaining completely rooted in the medieval tradition. And I wonder about how do we translate traditions to be living traditions and not just historical traditions. So, what are your thoughts about that?

Dan: Yeah. Well, first of all, I'm entirely sympathetic. I agree with you completely about the danger of the kind of stasis of historical analysis where everything's kind of kept in a tight little hermetically sealed Tupperware container, you know? And it's like, well, we can open it up and look at Thomas, or we can open it up and look at Bonaventure or Scotus, and maybe we take it out and kind of look at it, but then we put it away. I'm thinking, if Pope Francis uses that language of the tradition in theology as being kind of a museum of artifacts, and he is like, that's not what it is. It's a living tradition. So in that sense, I completely agree. I'm the first to confess, including in books I've written about Scotus, where I say like, I am not one of those people. I'm not strictly speaking a historian or historical theologian, although I have training in that area. For me, I'm interested in exactly

5

your question, Ilia, which is, what is the wisdom? Because there is certainly wisdom in all epics and all periods that we can bring into conversation with us today. What is useful? Maybe it's lenses through which to view things that appear novel to us. Maybe it's a reminder that things have always been something that might be surprising to us today.

And so I think for instance, like going back to even way before the Middle Ages and the Franciscan tradition of Augustine of Hippo, he had this concept of the seminales rationes, these ideas of like the little seeds of reason or logic or knowledge that kind of predate as it were that require growth in attending. So like, that there may be something of wisdom here, a seed of an idea that isn't quite fully grown, but maybe in the centuries that follow, as human knowledge expands, as more clarity comes to us, as more conversation unfolds across cultures, then maybe we can tend to that and something fruitful will arise. And that's where I think the Franciscan tradition in particular for two reasons. One is that generally speaking, I think there is wisdom that's retrievable as long as we understand its dynamism and not kind of insist on a stasis. That's the problem I think with the dead kind of fundamental theology that informs so much of Christian, especially moral thinking today. It relies on a fundamental theology that is—it's not even scholastic. I mean, Thomas Aquinas would be horrified as with things people claim are Thomistic but it's a neo- scholasticism, and that itself is problematic. But I do think the second thing in the Franciscan tradition is, and I'm preaching to the choir here, you're the greater expert on Bonaventure than me, but like Bonaventure and so many of the Franciscan scholastics who understood theology as a practical science, that it's meant to be lived, it's not meant to be static. And I think that is inspiring for us today too, and we can do something with that.

Ilia: Yes, I think that's a really important point. Every once in a while I mention that to my students, that for Bonaventure, theology was the road to holiness, or what I would call wholeness. But we over intellectualized theology as well. We have a very heavily scholastically informed, philosophic modern philosophy informing theology, and it's become a little bit abstract quite honestly. And I think part of the reason why younger

6

generations aren't just flocking to theology is because it just seems a little vague, like concepts of God or spirit or heaven or hell or whatever we're talking about. And we're living in a kind of a renewed, empirical age of experience, where that experience is ongoing change, it's shifting boundaries.

Robert: Theological insights and religious guidance have lost certain touch with the experience of new generations navigating technology, globalism and ecological crises. So, how much can centuries old wisdom contribute meaningfully to the global problems of today? Next, Ilia asked Dan his opinion about the church's handling of the ecological crisis and theological challenge posed by evolution. Support for a Hunger for Wholeness comes from the Fetzer Institute. Fetzer supports a movement of organizations that are applying spiritual solutions to society's toughest problems. Consider getting involved at fetzer.org.

Ilia: Pope Francis wants to see Catholic theology play a major role in renewing ecological consciousness, developing an echo sphere, the ecological person. And I wonder, is this really feasible? Is this really viable? I mean, we can look to St. Francis of Assisi as the model of ecology, but Francis of Assisi made some very radical choices in his life. He played up as a bird singer or as we always quip in the tradition, right? He wasn't born in a bird bath type thing. So, I think sometimes in wanting to shift the boundaries and allow theology to play that dominant or vibrant role today, we too have to make some radical choices. I think Francis' single heartedness, his God-centeredness, the same way Claire Assisi, they were pretty clear on what was shaping their lives, what their lives were about, and then the difficulties. And I think sometimes we want this kind of ecological sustainability, but without shifting our mediocre comfortable lives. We just want to remain in the comfortable center and go to Costco and buy trade fair coffee and all will be well. And I don't think it's that at all. So what's your—I know you've done a lot of thinking and writing in this area, so where are you on say Francis as model and patron saint of ecology and the reality in which we find ourselves in today?

7

Dan: Oh, for sure. I take a very strong and very critical view of this from Francis, the figure of Francis in particular. It's funny, just recently, I was privileged to be in conversation with the renowned historical theologian, Bernie McGinn, who we both know, and we were talking about Francis and Claire as mystics. And one of the things we talked a bit about was the Canticle of the creatures. And I think he has a very good interpretation of it. But I challenged, I kind of responded and said, well, actually, I think it's a little bit more radical even. And what I mean by that is that there's a sense of cosmic agency in the Canticle that is real and serious and not a caricature and not romantic, and not merely poetic. And this is something I know you've written about and have taught. It's something that seems quite clear to me when we take Francis kind of seriously.

And so, on the one hand, I mean, I'll be a little bit constructively critical of Pope Francis and Laudato si, which is that I think he has one foot in this sort of, kind of radical ecological cosmic vision of Francis of Assisi, right? Obviously, the encyclical takes the title from the opening of that Canticle. Yeah, but he at the same time, maintains this kind of human separateness, as David Clough would say, like this us outside of reality, of nature of creation. And I think until we, as a species, until we as individuals and a community, and especially as a community of faith, the church, take very, very seriously both the kind of biblical understanding in Genesis 2, that we are ha adama, that we are the earth, we are from the earth, and understand that we are part of this, an interdependent, interconnected, woven in history and time, then nothing's going to change. And so this is where I say like, I think Francis of Assisi still, his insight, the kind of power of his theological and spiritual proclamation in the Canticle is quite striking and not fully appreciated yet.

I'm reminded of an expression that I first encountered in the writings of a womanist theologian named Melanie Harris, and she talks about eco memory and the needing to get back in touch with—in the way I'm thinking about it in light of Francis and the Canticle is that, like so many of our indigenous siblings and other traditions, ancient traditions, we have lost sight, I think, in the Latin West and in the Christian West of that fundamental

8

truth that I think Francis understood, even as it was less articulated, even in his own time, right? He's in the 13th century, there was still this sort of like, we might say like proto industrial revolutionist, proto technological sort of context where there was still this separation, certainly not as radical as like the 19th century to the present, but like he was also not a prehistoric figure as it were. So I think that's one thing that I think hasn't been fully actualized, even though I think Laudato si and Laudato Deum move in that direction, certainly moves a church in that direction, in the conversation, perhaps in that direction, but I'd say we have to take it a step further.

Ilia: Going back to what you were saying about Francis, I mean, he did live in the time of heathenism, so gnosticism, dualism very much prevalent in his own time. And again, from my own perspective, I think Francis came, we can interpret him today in light of consciousness. He came to a new level of awareness within himself sort of like what Merton speaks about. It's kind of what we call today, a level of integrated consciousness that propels him into this paternal relationship with creation. I think you're absolutely right. And I think Laudato si holds this ideal out for the church and the world. But we're so far from there, quite honestly, and there's just a lot that hasn't taken place, even theologically in the church.

I mean, I once gave a paper at Catholic University, this is years ago when Laudato si’ first came out, and basically I critiqued the anthropology of Laudato si' which is still pretty medieval. I mean, it's that medieval metaphysic. So we have ourselves, yes, we're part and parcel this interdependent world, but we're also special. We're brother and sister to everything, but we're also—we have a special vocation. We're unique as image of God, and this doesn't work. And one of the things, and of course from my own perspective is everything you're saying here from indigenous spiritualities is also what science is telling us. And I think one of the huge gaps, and why I think the church cannot get to where Pope Francis wants to go is, we really must accept modern science and the descriptions of nature as science now falls out to it. And that would begin first with evolution, which is no longer a theory.

9

So anyone who wants to keep arguing that evolution is a theory really should just just take a long, long break because it simply is not, and therefore we have no idea, absolutely none what evolution means for us, what it means for us as humans, what it means for the church, what it means for theology. We have no understanding how space and time, for example, even from the cosmological perspectives, have been radically altered in the 20th century. So we are with a patchwork theology, quite honestly, somewhere between middle ages, maybe 20th century, and we're trying to make sense of it in the 21st century, and it doesn't work. It's like having a quilt and trying to figure out, what's the most central square here in this quilt? And it doesn't work. I mean, I find it a very incoherent theology overall in terms of the world we actually live in today. And so, while I want to applaud Pope Francis, I think he's a remarkable man, honestly, deeply prophetic. But at the same time, the church wants to hold on to patriarchy, it wants to hold onto its hierarchy, it wants to hold on to a metaphysics of being, and it can't do that. You can't have it all. You're going to have to let go of something. And I don't know if we can take that theological risk.

Dan: Well, no, I think you're exactly right. And what comes to mind, it seems so churchy on the topic, but the expression Jesus uses in the synoptics of, it's like taking new wine and putting it into old wine skins. Like yeah. If the wine skins, if the container is going to be a kind of participatory metaphysics as understood by a medieval retrieval of Aristotle, then you're not going to get anywhere, that it's going to bust. And I think this is where we find ourselves. Where the rubber hits the road for me in a lot of my work more recently is around gender and gender identity and around trans issues in society and in the church. And again, we go back to this kind of static, a-historical claim about how the world is, that's dependent on exactly what you said, a kind of expectation. It's a retrofitting of a mirror image of a kind of western European male cleric, cisgendered person, and everything else that is judged against that. And I think about this to expand this more maybe ecologically or even in the family of creation, just keeping it to the earth for a minute, I think about this going back to the fact that we are all creation, that we are creatures too.

10

I'm reminded of the great primatologist, Franz de Waal. I just learned passed away very recently, and I'm a huge admirer of his work. And one of the things that I've been thinking about is, in the early 20th century, you had one of the greatest kind of phenomenologists and critics of so-called onto-theology—I'm thinking of Martin Heidegger, right? And yet Heidegger,'s own philosophy want human beings at the center in such a way that we were dasein, we created meaning in the world, we were world makers. And he said that non- human animals were poor in world, right? And then other aspects of creation were just nothing in effect, right? They were just objects. But what ethologists, like Franz de Waal and others have pointed out is actually, no other creatures are profound world makers. They make meaning, they form societies, they exercise agency; it's just because they don't speak our language or relate to us. If human and human male and human cis male, et cetera is the standard, well then everything else becomes other. And that's just one aspect of I think, the inadequacy of repeating the same old sort of theological claims. Are there insights? Is there wisdom in some of that medieval and even ancient theological tradition? Absolutely. But I think of the old definition for heresy, the kind of old shorthand, which is having part of the truth and mistaking it for the whole truth. And I think that's what happens is like, people are unwitting heretics who want to maintain this kind of static, kind of limited metaphysical sort of paradigm.

Ilia: Yeah, I completely agree. Except for I think we just maybe rely a little bit too much on the wisdom of the past, because if we understand emergence, evolutionary emergence, the past is in the present. The whole idea is, we're here precisely because of the past and not in spite of the past. The past is not something that's behind us. It is us as we're looking toward in this moment towards future unfolding. And therefore, I think what I find is a lack of, first of all, creativity. I find a lack of insight in terms of imagination, in terms of what we can become. And therefore, there's a deep fear. And I find particularly within even more, I might say even Catholic theology, more than in some strands of, say, post-Evangelical Protestant theology, where I find because they're not tied to a magisterium, I think the Protestants have just a freer reign. You know, say open a relational theology to begin to

11

deconstruct God and reconstruct new images of God in a new way of theologizing that is much more liberating. I find Catholic theology very narrow in Philistine sometimes because it wants so desperately to hold onto the past and create this continuity.

In fact, biology does not work in those continuous ways. It works in both discontinuous ways. In other words, there are leaps sometimes within biological evolution where new things really do emerge, and whatever came before is taken up in some way in that newness. But it really is new. And I think that's the one thing we just, in theological circles, we just haven't gotten our heads around. New is really new. And it's not just relying on the past, hoping that we'll do justice to the Augustines and Thomas Aquinas's. It's that we just, here's a deep, deep fear. And at that same fear runs, I think, in the fact that we cannot, in any way tamper with the patriarchy or the hierarchy of the church. Deep, deep fear that where are we to create just even a slight crack in it that it will tumble, and that will be the end of us, and we'll be judged harshly and whatever else will follow from that. And the whole thing becomes just ridiculous, quite honestly. And it's actually the wording of what theology can do. I think the power of theology to be transformative, to go back to what we were talking about before, you know that it can lead us to a new wholeness, but not in this way.

Robert: Thanks for joining us for the first part of our conversation with Dan Horan. Next week, Ilia and Dan ask, “what's getting in the way of our own theological imaginations?” For more of Ilia's own theological imagination and essays, consider visiting christogenesis.org. On behalf of the Center for Christogenesis, I'm Robert Nicastro. Thanks for listening.

12