A Prophecy of Paradise: Thomas Merton’s Lectio of Genesis

Feast of St Francis of Assisi

October 4, 2010

SIBA, Iraq — The Shatt al Arab, the river that flows from the

biblical site of the Garden of Eden to the Persian Gulf, has turned

into an environmental and economic disaster. Withered by decades

of dictatorial mismanagement and then neglect, by drought and the

thirst of Iraq’s neighbors, the river formed by the convergence of

the Tigris and the Euphrates no longer has the strength the keep

the sea at bay.

Jalal Fakhir, who with his brothers farms a plot of land that has

been in his family for decades, lost his grape vines, five apricot

trees, and his entire crop of okra, cucumbers and eggplants. The

new date palms he planted two years ago have died; the older ones

have held on, but their branches are yellowing, while the annual

crop of dates has become meager.

Walking in his emaciated groves, he said,

“This used to be paradise.”1

Over fifty years ago Thomas Merton, the ecological prophet,

knew what most of us are just now waking up to.

1

Environmentalist Bill McKibben calls our moment the end of

nature;2 geographer Jared Diamond calls it a civilizational

collapse.3 More ambivalently, geologian Thomas Berry calls it the

end of the Cenozoic Age of planetary flourishing summoning us to

inaugurate an Ecological Age when, for the sake of survival, we

learn a new mode of being on and with and as the Earth.4

How the unique voice of Thomas Merton might name and

address the depth of this ecological crisis now, as prognostications

of planetary disaster prematurely and more alarmingly ripen, is

something we can only infer from his rich legacy; but we can be

sure that he would leave us nowhere to hide from its danger and

urgency, and the very explicit challenge it poses for each and all of

us.

So let us imagine his truth-telling to us were he to compose

“Letters to a Green Liberal”5 facing a green revolution, as he

addressed earlier drafts to the white liberals of the United States of

America a half-century ago, facing a black revolution.6 To read

those “Letters to a White Liberal” with The Earth as referent

instead of “The Negro” is to evoke again Merton’s prophetic voice

writing to a generation facing an unimaginable crisis: nothing less

than the incremental and irreversible collapse of the platforms of

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creation, and the task of re-imagining a survival strategy which

will require a revolution of consciousness and action unparalleled

in human history.

“We live on a planet which has reached the point of extreme

hazard at which it may plunge to its own ruin, unless there is

some renewal of life, some new direction, some providential

reorganization of its forces for survival…

The coming upheaval will soon sweep everything away.”7

(SLIDES?)

Lest Merton’s words sound too apocalyptic let us recall the

contours of our current crisis: half the world’s tropical and

temperate forests are now gone, half the wetlands, a third of the

mangroves, twenty percent of the corals, ninety percent of the large

predator fish, and seventy-five percent of the oceans are fished to

capacity; deforestation of the tropics continues at about an acre a

second, and there are over two-hundred dead zones in the seas;

forty percent of U.S. fish species are threatened with extinction, a

third of plants and amphibians, twenty percent of birds and

mammals, and everywhere Earth’s ice fields are melting; species

are disappearing a thousand times faster than ever. We are in an

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extinction spasm and the world of nature is disappearing by our

own hand.8

Sensing the early signals of what has climaxed as this

environmental impasse, Merton perceived that we are living at the

crux of the greatest revolution in history –a deep elemental boiling

over of inner contradictions and alienations manifesting now as

ecopathology.9 Even in his moment, he sensed our dangerous

proximity to the rim of chaos, and he warned us of potential

planetary end game.10 This is our kairos, he prophesied – and we

fear to accept it.11

The refusal to see this ecological kairos as a summons to a

comprehensive creative revolution on every horizon of human life

– economic, cultural, social, political, spiritual - is the dilemma of

the Green Liberal. In Merton’s eyes, liberals, though perhaps

generous and sincere in their environmental concern, are

essentially a superficial cohort. Preferring “eco-lite,” they have yet

to make the great turn toward deep ecology – a completely new

practice of being human on this Earth.12 Though we recycle,

compost and carbon-off-set, though we have kicked the plastic

bottle and changed our light bulbs – these necessary habits give us

a false sense of optimism, save us from shifting the salvation of the

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planet from the periphery to the radical center as our ultimate

concern.

Never mind how he might have addressed the climate

skeptics, deniers and obstructionists, had he lived to compose his

“Letters to a Green Liberal,” Merton would expose a logic and

praxis of optimistic pretending and denial about the real

dimensions of this crisis. Liberal campaigns of clean coal, green-

commerce, eco-tourism offset by carbon credits simply mask the

underlying intention to maintain the operative paradigm of growth,

progress, consumption, security, material comfort at the expense of

creation. The Green Liberal has no intention to disturb congenial

relations with the totalitarian entities of our time which lull us into

inertia by subsidizing our every human need: the unregulated

corporations on which the survival of our current world form

depends and the economic, political and psychological agreements

that protect them. So we might hear him address us:

1 NY Times June 13, 2010

2 Bill McKibben3 Jared Diamond4 Thomas Berry The Great Work5 “Letters to a Green Liberal”6 “Letters to a White Liberal”7 (SD: “LWL” P 11; 37)8 (ftnt Summarized from Gus Speth Bridege at the End of the World)9 elemental boiling over10 Rim of chaos11 (CGB 66-67)12 Deep Ecology

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“Now, my liberal friend, here is your situation: You, the

well-meaning liberal, are right in the middle of all this

confusion. You are in fact a (consuming and wasting)

catalyst. On the one hand, with your good will and your

ideals, your fine hopes and your generous, but vague,

love of (this Earth)… you offer a certain

encouragement to a transforming environmental

movement (and you do right, my only complaint being

that you are not yet right enough) …

You will not support all that this green revolution

demands, but you must support some of them to

maintain your image of yourself as a liberal…but your

material comforts, your security, and your congenial

relations with the establishment are much more

important to you than your rather volatile idealism, and

… when the game gets rough you will be quick to see

your own interests menaced by (more radical green)

demands. You will sell the Earth down the river to

protect yourself.

When we come face to face at last with concrete reality,

and take note of some unexpected and unlovely aspects

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that you have hitherto considered only in the abstract,

you yourself are going to be a very frightened mortal.

You are going to see that there are more than ideas and

ideals involved in this struggle to save the Earth…

And you are going to realize that what has begun in this

environmental crisis is not going to be stopped, but that

it will lead on into a future for which the past, perhaps,

offers little or no precedent. … when you see that the

future is entirely out of our hands and that you are

totally unprepared for it, you are going to fall back on

the past, and you are going to end up in the arms of the

conservatives…

These are frank and brutal facts, my good friend. But

they are the facts on which you must base your future

decisions. You must face it. This upheaval is going to

sweep away …the old (life) style … And your

liberalism is likely to be out the window along with a

number of other entities that have their existence

chiefly on paper and in the head….The psychological

adjustment (to a green revolution) alone will be terribly

demanding. Will you prefer your own security to

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everything else, and be willing to sacrifice The Earth to

preserve yourself? What are you going to do?13

LISTEN MY SOUL

Merton clearly understood that the only way out of any

extreme impasse is for everyone to face and accept the difficulties

and sacrifices involved, in all their seriousness, in all their

inexorable demands. An authentic green revolution will require a

death and a decision: the death of the alienated consumptive self

by the definitive refusal to participate in those activities which

have no other fruit than to prolong the reign of greed, cruelty and

arrogance in the world – our unconscious but ubiquitous daily war

against “the innocent nations” of the Earth.14 We must see it and

denounce it, Merton tells the Green Liberal, and this

“denunciation” will be regarded as a political act. There will be

push-back; yet he urges us to the moral obligation of more militant

dissent.

“We must dare to pay the dolorous price of change, to grow a

new (Earth). Nothing else will suffice!15

13 (“LWL” SD p 33-37)ftnt)14 Innocent nations15 (LWL SD P 9)

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But, as Merton notes to Rachel Carson in 1963 – the same

year as his “Letters to a White Liberal”- our environmental

predicament can be a providential crisis.16 What we now call

“catastrophic climate disruption” may occasion an extinction phase

of such global proportion to shock us into awakening.17 This

kairos of decision might offer a kairos of healing, a summons to be

born again as a new kind of human species – constructive, creative,

collaborative with the processes of life. This kairos –Merton says -

can be not just humanity’s hour, but Earth’s hour, God’s hour.18

As ever, Merton startles us and sobers us. But what does he

offer to encourage us for the revolution we Green Liberals must

take up? Two very helpful things: a confession and a prophecy.

In his preface to the Japanese edition of Seven Storey

Mountain, Merton confesses that his youthful rejection of the

modern world arose from a self-righteous blame game that let him

shift his shame for his squandered life onto the troubled masses. In

time his rejection of human folly was transformed by a humble

identification with it, in a purgative dialogue of deep compassion

and evangelical resistance.19

16 Letter to Rachel Carson17 catastrophic climate disruption18 God’s hour19 HR SSM Japanese ed

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I have learned, I believe, to look back into that world with

greater compassion, seeing those in it not as alien to myself,

not as peculiar and deluded strangers, but as identified with

myself… In freeing myself from their delusions and

preoccupations I have identified myself, none the less, with

their struggles and their blind, desperate hope of happiness.

But precisely because I am identified with them, I must

refuse all the more definitively to make their delusions my

own. I must refuse their ideology of matter, power, quantity,

movement, activism and force. I reject this because I see it to

be the source and the expression of the spiritual hell which

(we have) made of (our) world.20

Scathing as his probable letters to Green Liberals might be, Merton

stands beside us even as one of us, admitting his own sense of

powerless collusion and inarticulate response in the face of a world

out of control. His confession continues in a letter to Czeslaw

Milosz where he admits in the sight of God:

I do not protest enough, and … the protests I generally make

are always beside the target. I have the impression … I am

always indignant about something vague and abstract, and

not about something more concrete which I really hate and 20 (HR 63)

10

which I cannot recognize. It is absurd to rave vaguely about

“the world” the “modern age” the “times.” … What I get

back to, and here you can tell me if my examination of

conscience is correct, is that in actual fact my real guilt is for

being a bourgeois. I am …the prisoner of my class…21

How consoling that even Thomas Merton accepts without

pharisaical pretense the fact of his own captivity in the cathection

of the mass mind that informs the mindlessness of our modern

world-building, creation-destroying enterprise. Perhaps more

importantly he renounces the bitterness and soul corrosive

cynicism and despair which such inevitable complicity might

generate. We can therefore imagine him rehearsing his “Letters to

a Green Liberal” not as bludgeoning accusation and judgment, but

as illuminating prophecy.

It is better to prophesy than to deride. To prophesy is not to

predict but to seize upon reality in its moment of highest

expectation and tension toward the new. This tension is

discovered not in hypnotic elation but in the light of everyday

existence.22

21 ( STB 67 cm ct)22 RU 159

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LISTEN MY SOUL

Prophecies are not answers; they are provocations. And for

Merton the medium of prophecy is poetry. So “before the message

the vision; before the sermon, the hymn; before the prose, the

poem:”23 the ecological prophecy as poem, or more aptly: as

theopoem. The term “theopoetic” was coined by Stanley Hopper

to imagine a kind of theological composition at the end of

metaphysics, expressive of a post-modern mode of religious

imagination.24 It is a genre of religious discourse that moves

theology beyond systematics and dogmatics toward a horizon of

poetic insight and intuition, where one researches strategies for

making meaning when there are no fixed meanings, or where

meaning is in eclipse.25 It is, as Scott Harris notes, a diverse and

evolving kind of writing that invites more writing, whose

narratives lead to other narratives, whose metaphors encourage

new metaphor, whose confessions invoke more confessions, and

whose conversations invite more conversations - but ever

remaining poisis: an inventive, intuitive, and imaginative act of

composition.26

23 Theopoetics Before…24 Stanley Hopper25 (Scott Harris in Theopoetics in Cross Currents p ??)26 Invites more writing etc

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By this definition, Thomas Merton was clearly a pioneer of

the praxis of theopoesis ever before the movement began -

ostensibly with the 20th century’s version of “The Death of God.”

Merton too wrote at times in the absence of God sensed not so

much as dead, but unintentionally murdered, the collateral road kill

of the scientific consciousness and technological hubris that has

intensified our estrangement from the vitality of creation arising

from the ground of ineffable Being.27

Yet Merton’s mystic eye could see that the divine mystery

had simply gone underground somewhere, hiding in the umbrage

of the world’s dark night, appearing and disappearing in the

quantum field of human imagination. Merton perceived divinity

ever resurrecting and shape-shifting beyond the violent campaigns

of human enterprise, the idolatrous fictions of secular ideologies,

and dogmatic drag of religious pretensions imposed upon its

encompassing primordial immanence and innocence. If

contemporary theopoets may be viewed as post-modern

“apologists for the vocation of straying toward an infinite

nothing,”28 Merton was their scout, exploring horizons where he

might perceive “the dance of the Lord in emptiness,” the vagrant,

exiled God, and story on.29

27 (ftnt LE 108) 28 apologists etc29 Dance of the Lord in emptiness…

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So however misused and abused, Merton still experienced

religious imagination as a viable mode of theopoesis. The

Christian imagination, especially, held the power to spell out an

ever renewing vision of reality, an apo-cataphatic oscillation of

intuition in formlessness and form that always proposed a story of

beginnings:30 “a new start, a new creation, where the world gets

another chance.”31 Merton understood that in each new age

Christian theopoetics must be reshaped in direct relation to the

imagination of the time, meet the dreams and nightmares of the

age, offer anew its sacred myths and their salvific meanings.32 And

this Merton did in a variety of interlacing and interfacing motifs

that became deeply inscribed on the tapestry of his literary legacy.

How grateful we are for it now, in this moment of theopoetic

drought when the loudest voices proffering a discourse of meaning

are the sometimes strident and sterile purveyors of a new wave of

atheisms which seem to deny our inarticulate hunger for plenitude,

transcendence, beauty, ecstasy and being itself.33 And the

countervailing neo-orthodoxies that offer a parody of salvific

pathways, seem at times a maze of romantic fantasies and

historical dead-ends. Both polarities imaginally cancel each other

out leaving us bereft of vision in this “night of our technological

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barbarism.”34 Both lack the luminous energy of theopoesis, and so

keep us arrested in an eclipse of imagination engendered by

incomprehension of our ecological impasse. So there has to be

more poetry, Merton says: for “exploracion.”

Exploration by poetry is the kind most needed now, Merton

will insist - drama too, art, music, dancing, seminars, silence. He

assures Miguel Grinberg that someone has got to listen to the

immense silence …of vegetables and plants: “all the other silences

have become full of wrecked cars, busted stoves and sewing

machines, junk lying around unable to speak.”35 It is, he says, “the

Edenic office of the poet” to speak on their behalf;36 to speak a new

revifying language, calling creatures by their true names, honoring

their mystery, reverencing their destiny: for “all real valid poetry

(poetry that is fully alive and asserts its reality by its power to

generate imaginative life) is a kind of recovery of paradise.”37

Thomas Merton’s theopoesis was an expression of this

Edenic office at the service of recovering paradise poetically and

politically, imaginally and actually – and he researched its various 30 Deignan Merton as sacramentalist31 (LE 128) 32 (AW 106). 33 (ftnt AW). 34 Technological barbarism35 (CT to Miguel Grinberg 199) 36 Edenic office of the poet37 (LE “The Paradise Ear” Louis Zukofsky p 128)

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vocabularies in a variety of poetic scriptures. Admittedly, he came

to Gethsemani with Thoreau in one hand, John of the Cross in the

other, and the Bible opened to Apocalypse,38 suggesting his

troubling sense of dark nights and end-time, which quickened his

longing for the salvation of wilderness. As his monastic practice

deepened, Cistercian life became a comprehensive theopoesis in

the rhythmic and performative reading of a transformative sacred

story from dawn till dark each and every day. In time, his deepest

lectio was not a prophecy of impasse and endings, but a prophecy

of beginnings, as “The Book of Beginnings” gradually became his

most sustaining scripture read as theopesis and translated anew in

his own theopoetics.

The early chapters of Genesis … are precisely a poetic

and symbolic revelation of God's view of the universe

and of His intentions for man. The point of these

beautiful chapters is that God made the world as a

garden in which He himself took delight. He made man

and gave to man the task of sharing in His own divine

care for created things. He made man in His own

image and likeness, as an artist, a worker, homo faber,

as the gardener of paradise.39

38 bible open at apocalypse39 Merton Genesis

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Merton did not seek to make dogmatic or doctrinal theology out of

the mythopoiesis of Genesis. Rather, he stayed in the story, lived

inside it and worked with it like a narrative koan that was

interpreting him to himself and the world, its true meaning, and

divinity, its true mystery. His notes on Genesis prepared for his

novices between 1956-1957, give insight into the way he did the

work of understanding the form and linguistic criticism of this

ancient creation myth, while reading it through the lens of

monastic and patristic interpretation.40 Such a contemplative

reading of Genesis – the very purpose of lectio divina 41 -

awakened a second naiveté that drew him into rich poetics of

understanding the mysteries of God and creation and our own

sublime destiny and tragedy and potential recovery in it all.42 He

worked into the provocative and evocative world of myth, learning

to crack their codes and mine their depths for psychic energy and

power, for insight and wisdom. Even more, he learned in dialogue

with the sacred text how to make his own theopoetics an answer to

Heidegger’s provocative question: can language bring being to

appearance? Can it be revelatory?43

40 Novitiate Notes on Genesis41 lectio divina42 second naiveté Paul RIcoeur43 Heidegger’s question re language and being

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Merton’s poesis is richly revelatory, almost inexhaustively

so, and if Merton has a redemptive word to address to The Green

Liberal in the kairos of an impending green revolution, it is his

illuminating and empowering prophecy of paradise. The recovery

of paradise is perhaps Merton’s most lucid and repetitive theme,

reiterated throughout his literary corpus in multi-helix meditations

that directly address our ecological impasse. The interlacing

stories of Adam and Prometheus, the archetypal self-alienating

embezzlers of life, interface with the evangel of Christ the New

Human, who learns to creatively receive as gift the burden of

conscious being and becoming in communion with our Source; and

– episodically appearing - the parabolic Prodigal Son, loosing and

finding himself, laboring to come home.44

LISTEN MY SOUL

To Merton’s eye, the most obvious charism of the modern

human species is our destructiveness - our capacity to build a

world, stunning in its present achievement, overshadowed by our

wanton willingness to destroy it. Why, Merton wonders; what is at

the root of our pathological rebellion against life itself? Through

the lens of Genesis, he traces the roots of our psycho-pathology to

the ground of a primordial anxiety and doubt: the fear of radical 44 The New Man etc

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entrustment to the paradoxical abundance and impermanence of

Being, offered and reclaimed in every breath. Whether noted in

biblical metaphors of disorienting intoxication from tasting the

perversion of inversion – trading places with God - or in classical

metaphors of guilty subversion of divine generosity - Merton’s

meditations explore the consequent dispersion of consciousness in

the rupture of an constitutive covenant with the source of self-

giving Life. Our tragedy is our original misperception that we

need to steal what is freely given; and doubting the One, we make

of ourselves many and strange gods.45

The commandment to make no graven image was designed to

protect us from our inveterate temptation to make gods in our own

image, gods in which we can objectify and venerate divinely given

powers we found in ourselves.46 We become our own god, a

technological wizard who has stolen the energy of life for

ourselves alone, with everything else as object and resource to

subsidize the project of reimagining paradise on our terms. The

reign of the unredeemed human becomes the desecration of

everything else, for to be a creator outside of the living God is to

fall into magic.47 Merton sees us playing at a demonic parody of

creation and redemption in the self-idolatry of our own technical

45 (ftnt NSC 229)

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genius;48 he sees us unveiling and displaying divine powers that are

meant to remain secret, powers meant to be employed in the care

and minding of creation, not its plundering.49 In the pull of these

forces, we loose our balance and fall into a disorienting inner

darkness. We loose our cosmic sight and insight, our sense of

seeing it all whole. Ignorant of our innate, original wisdom, we

blunder around aimlessly in the midst of the wonderful works of

God.50 And “paradise weeps in us.”51

For Merton, then, the crisis of the planet is the crisis of the

person. Having lost orientation by dislocation from a theopoetic

“paradise,” we forget how to walk and talk with the Creator in the

garden; we forget that our original vocation is to be its caretaker

and governor. In this exile we wander somnambulant, become

robotic, thrash about for life where it is not. For how can we, who

have not being, of our own, be being for ourselves? We forget that

we must ask for permission to be each dawn, be composed again

from Earth’s clay, receive the life-breath so as to live and forgo our

anxious, breathless striving to exist.52 This quickening breath

cannot be stolen like a fire, Merton teaches, it can only be received

46 cf Merton47 (LE 367),48 (HGL 507) 49 unveiling the powers50 cosmic insight51 Paradise Weeps in us52 permission to be

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in the contemplative practice of opening again and again to the

breath of life, the Spirit of Livingness, that restores us as the New

Human.53 Therefore, Merton’s prophecy is not just about paradise

lost, but more mercifully about paradise regained, for paradise is

always present in us; we do not recover Paradise: we become

Paradise.54 Paradise is simply the self, he assures us, but the radical

self in its uninhibited freedom…no longer clothed with an ego.55

Such a self is God’s new paradise,56 a state of being in which

everything is ours on one condition: it is not stolen, but received as

gift.57

LISTEN MY SOUL

The Christian theopoetic of the one who became God’s

paradise is storied in the revelatory mystery of Christ Jesus – the

incarnate Word of Life - the heart of Merton’s meditation on The

New Man.58 In it we hear Pauline echoes of an expansive, cosmic

Christology in which Jesus – as icon of Imago Christi - is

celebrated as creation’s happy ending.59 Christ is not just

humanity’s redeemer, but our evolver from within, the very form 53 See LE 25454 (NM 161)55 L&L 856 NM 16157 NSC 229)58 TNM59 Ev Avoglia

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of our potential divinity which it is our destiny to actualize.

Though Merton does not reference him, one can hear another

Thomas, the Gnostic Evangelist, voicing Jesus’ warning: “if you

bring forth what is within you, what is within you will save you;

but if you do not bring forth what is within you, what is within you

will destroy you.”60 Ironically, it is this very divine potential –

mistakenly perceived by Adam as originally withheld and therefore

coveted - which must be realized and actualized, as the

evolutionary mandate of our nature. And Christ, the New Adam –

the New Earthling – embodies its terrible beauty, its wisdom that

must be humbly learned, not parodied; received in a progressive

and purgative transformation of our nature, not stolen as an act of

adolescent resistance to the travail entailed in our spiritual re-

birth.61

In the Christian tradition, the womb for gestating the New

Human is the holding ground of contemplation. Only in the dark

light of contemplative recovery do we begin to consciously suffer

the quickening contractions of those conflicting forces operative

within us: centrifugal and centripetal; a life wish and a death wish;

creativity and destructiveness; perverse and subtle impulses to turn

things upside down, to scar what is benign and beautiful; the

60 The Gospel of Thomas61 TNM 161

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refusal to evolve, to love. It is in contemplative ascesis that we

learn to relax the Promethean / Adamic impulse to anxiously grasp

at what is already given, and release our addiction to self-idolotry;

in contemplative practice we learn again the Ednic habits of

thanksgiving and praise.62

The real purpose of asceticism, then, is the healing of our

relation to creation in which we begin to perceive divinity hiding

as if not distant creator but companioning creature, playing in the

cosmic garden unseen.63 It is in the deep labor of natural

contemplation that the sensorum of the new human being is

renewed. Taking time to “breathe and look around,” 64 we are

ravished by the biotic wonders unfolding everywhere. We move

from hubris to humilitas and learn again the earthy ways of our

true nature.

When we come home again to our original paradise mind we

take up the task of restoring what we have damaged, we set our

hearts and hands to a new creation. With Merton we find ourselves

in complete and deep complicity with nature: “that nature and we

are very good friends, and console one another for the stupidity

62 LE 25463 NSC 22964 Breathe and look around

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and the infamy of the human race and its civilization.”65 We begin

to perceive the hidden wholeness where every small thing becomes

necessary, “for when the All is gratuitous every small thing is seen

to be wanted, to be important, to have its own unique part in the

big gift of all things to each other.”66 In time we recover our own

center as “the teeming heart of natural families.”67

But as Merton’s prophecy makes clear, the gestation of such

a New Human Being is a long and arduous interval – proceeding

only with our deep agreement. Yet we are conceived, each of us as

we will, a mystical embryo carried in the womb of the theophanic

cosmos: “small beginning, no power, tireless patience of the seed

in the ground” of becoming - not seeds of destruction but seeds

borne of contemplation: seeds of the tree of life.68

As Merton closes this imaginal letter to a Green Liberal he

riddles us: “I would be writing something about the new man but

the new man has no title and leaves not trace…”69 And the only

trace Merton leaves is the light of prophecy, and urgency, and

clemency: this last theopoetic exortation on the verge of a green

65 CM letter66 (Zukofsky LE 131 )67 Teeming heart68 TM CT 19969 Grinberg

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revolution which, if we have the will and the soul, could return us

to Eden as if for the first time:

“Let us obey life and the Spirit of Life that call us to be the

gardeners and governors of Paradise, and we shall harvest

the fruit for which the world hungers – fruits of hope that

have never been seen before. With these fruits we shall calm

the resentments and the rage of man. … We are the children

of the New Earth. We are the ministers of the new wisdom

that is needed to heal the Earth …”70

“So, my dear Green Liberal, do believe me in deep union and

agreement with the forces of life and hope that are struggling

for the renewal of the true cultural and spiritual vitality of the

"new work" we must now take up … But the forces of life

must win. And Christians – and Green Liberals in particular,

must rediscover the truth that the Cross is the sign of life,

renewal, affirmation and joy, not of death, repression,

negation and the refusal of life. We must not refuse the

providential opportunities that come to us in the midst of

ecological darkness… The ferocities of mankind mean

nothing to the hope of light, the hope of a New Earth…

preserve your hopes…”71

70 RU 159-160 “Message to Poets” 71 ??

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As prophet of Paradise, Merton assures us that we ourselves

are the body of hope and hope believes in spite of what may be

unfolding now at the end of the Cenozoic Age; with ecological

confidence he tells us our hope does not need to be pushed

anymore than the grass does.72 He closes with this signature of

hope, his Letter to a Green Liberal, assuring us that the new

consciousness will keep awakening: “I know it… New

consciousness. …(the Paradise mind). Courage and joy. Big

abrazo for everybody.”73

LISTEN MY SOUL

72 (CT 204 MG )73 TM to MG Oct 28, 1966

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