The Hell of Mercy

In Thomas Merton’s small, but very penetrating book, Contemplative Prayer, which appeared shortly after his death, we are confronted with an aspect of the spiritual life which we easily tend to forget or ignore. It is dread. One would not expect a man who has lived a deep spiritual life for 27 years in a Trappist monastery to write about dread. One would expect him to write about purity of heart, peace, and inner harmony as the fruits of a long life of prayer and contemplation. But Merton wrote about dread, and it is obvious from his powerful analysis that his words were born from his own spiritual struggle. He writes:

Dread is an expression of our insecurity in this earthly life, a realization that we are never and can never be completely “sure” in the sense of possessing a definitive and established spiritual status. It means that we cannot any longer hope in ourselves, in our wisdom, our virtues, our fidelity. We see too clearly that all that is “ours” is nothing and can completely fail us. In other words we no longer rely on what we “have,” what has been given by our past, what has been acquired. We are open to God and to his mercy in the inscrutable future and our trust is entirely in the emptiness where we will confront unforeseen decisions. Only when we have descended in dread to the center of our nothingness, by his grace and his guidance, can we be led by him, in his own time, to find him in losing ourselves. (Contemplative Prayer, page 101)

Anyone who really wants to understand Merton and through him the development of the spiritual life, needs to take these words very seriously. In our contemporary society there is a strong temptation to “use” the spiritual life as a way to the experience of inner harmony and peace. Often it seems that self-fulfillment, self-realization, and self-attainment are the ultimate goals of the spiritual journey. Many new spiritual movements seem to have made the circle their main symbol. But Thomas Merton reminds us that not the circle but the cross stands at the end of our life journey. The agony of Jesus in Gethsemane and his cry on the cross, “God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” reveal an awesome reality which we would gladly deny.

Is Thomas Merton then leading us into morbidity? No. I think that his final statement of dread shows his courage to go all the way in his lifelong struggle to unmask illusions. The greatest illusion of all is indeed that a lifelong asceticism, filled with prayer, contemplation, fasting, and charity, can give us a claim on inner peace, comforting light, and a secure sense of God’s presence. It is this illusion that can lead us to spiritual pride and destroy all that we set out to gain. Merton powerfully describes the fate of the one who cannot let this final illusion go:

It is natural for one in this case to dread the loss of his faith, indeed of his own integrity of religious identity, and to cling desperately to whatever will seem to preserve the last shreds of belief. So he struggles, sometimes frantically, to recover a sense of comfort and conviction in formulated truths or familiar religious practices. His meditation becomes the scene of this agonia, this wrestling with nothingness and doubt. But the more he struggles the less comfort and assurance he has, and the more powerless he sees himself to be. Finally he loses even the power to struggle. He feels himself ready to sink and drown in doubt and despair. (Contemplative Prayer, page 99)

Dread is seeing that “all that is ‘ours’ is nothing,” including “our spirituality,” and that we are totally, absolutely, and without reservation dependent on God’s mercy. Dread is indeed the final stage of losing ourselves. That is why Merton could call dread “the hell of mercy,” an expression he found in the 12th century Cistercian Isaac of Stella. It is the hell of purification in which we are liberated from every bit of our illusion of “having it together” and are made totally naked in the presence of God’s infinite mercy. It is the final destruction of self- sufficiency and self-complacency and opens us to the existential realization that only God is God.

This has nothing to do with morbidity. On the contrary, it is the hard way to see God and ourselves in truth. That is the final purpose of our life and the ultimate goal of our existence.

Copyright © 2007 Estate of Henri J.M. Nouwen. (www.HenriNouwen.org). Originally published in Sojourners. Henri J. M. Nouwen, whose books include Genesee Diary, which describes his own seven months in a Trappist monastery, taught pastoral theology at Yale Divinity School and was a contributing editor for Sojourners when this article appeared.