The spiritual art of three modern masters: from Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, and Anthony de Mello, Catholics can learn the fine art of Christian living.

DOROTHY DAY 

"HAVE YOU EVER BEEN IN JAIL?"

I was asked this question by a zealous, apostolic, young Catholic. He was suggesting that if I had not yet been imprisoned for my faith, my faith was not very strong. Catholics throughout the centuries have been and still are being imprisoned and martyred for their faith.

I think that my friend was subtly telling me to put up or shut up, or to put my money where my mouth was. Or, as my saintly housekeeper, reflecting rural wisdom, abashedly said, "It takes money to buy good whiskey."

Dorothy Day (1894-1980) could have answered my friend's question in the affirmative, for she had been imprisoned numerous times for her faith. So who is Dorothy Day? Although there are at least 38 books dealing with Day and the Catholic Worker Movement she and Peter Maurin founded, I know of almost no Catholic under 40 who has heard of her. If I mention her name, I get a blank look. Yet she is a saint for our time--and for all time.

Why?

Today there is great concern nationwide about the hungry and the homeless. There are now many organizations that provide food and shelter. People engaged in this work should find Day an inspiration, for she spent most of her long life providing food and shelter to the poor of the slums of the Lower East Side of New York City. She also gave out clothing and visited the sick and the imprisoned.

She didn't just go slumming; she lived with the poor in her tenement, which she called a House of Hospitality. She believed that every parish should have a "house of hospitality," and, indeed, many were established throughout the United States--not by parishes but by lay volunteers who believed in her ideals. There are about 140 Catholic Worker houses now.

The 1970 decade is characterized as the "Me generation" and the 1980s the "greed generation." New York magazine said that "having it all" was the ideal. Day was an antidote to this, for she lived in voluntary poverty. A talented journalist, she could have become affluent, but, like Christ, who had no place to lay his head, she wished to be with the poor, even wearing castoff secondhand clothes. She once told me that she liked receiving gifts, for then she had something to give to someone else. She found freedom in voluntary poverty (not to be confused with destitution).

Because of some fatuous, self-important, authoritarian, insensitive priests and bishops who are distant from the day-to-day problems of people, Catholics are leaving the institutional church by the thousands (even though good, pastoral priests far outnumber the others). Yet Day did not leave; she serenely put up with ecclesiastical officialdom and just went on her way taking care of the poor and teaching the Good News of Christ.

And teach she did. The term lay apostle is not used much anymore, but we all know that we are to teach about Christ, at least by our lives. Dorothy not only taught by her life but also by her monthly paper the Catholic Worker (still only a penny a copy) and by taking the Greyhound bus all over the country to tell of the social gospel (another outdated term, though the gospel by its nature is social). She even came to my small parish in rural Minnesota.

Today, because of the shortage of priests, it is now even more necessary that laypeople assume more responsibility in the church. Day always accepted that responsibility as a layperson. She knew that she was the church just as much as any titled official was. She was part of the teaching church, part of the magisterium, as is every Catholic. Having put her hand to the plow, she did not look back. She was not an uncertain trumpet (1 Cor. 14:8).

And it is significant that she was a woman. The Catholic Church has always been a sexist church, treating women as second-class members. Formerly confined to the convent, the kitchen, and the nursery (all good places), women are now more and more taking leadership roles. Here, too, Day, a valiant woman who just struck out on her own, should be an inspiration.

"We never felt it was necessary to ask permission to perform the works of mercy," she wrote. "Our houses and farms were always started on our own responsibility, as a lay activity." When told by a New York chancery office monsignor to cease publication of the Catholic Worker or change its name, she rightfully refused.

Her spirituality was based simply and solidly on the gospels. Although she was influenced by the severe "detachment" piety of Father John Hugo, she would not have been interested in some of the psychobabble ways of spirituality popping up today. Christ said, "Come, follow me," and she did so directly.

"Reading of Jesus Christ in the New Testament," she wrote, "made me want to put off the old man and put on Christ, as Saint Paul said." Every day she prayed the psalms and read the lessons of the breviary, the prayer of the church, and when possible, went to daily Mass and received the Eucharist. Like the disciples at Emmaus, she found Christ in the breaking of bread.

I would like to see Day canonized (it need not be costly), not for her sake (she obviously doesn't need it) but so that more people could learn about her and her spirituality. We live now in an almost despairing world, full of violence, war, hatred, racism, and conflict. I was impressed by Day's serenity in the midst of all of this. There was a reassuring calmness about her. Even when jailed for her opposition to war, she did not go into a rage.

Among those who knew her or of her, she was the cause of many vocations to the priestly and religious life, and she inspired many people to perform the works of mercy. We cannot let her slip away, for she showed that living the gospel is possible today.

When Christ suggested to the young man that he sell his possessions and give them to the poor, the young man turned away sad (Matt. 19:21-22). Day did not turn away sad. She accepted Christ completely.

To discover Day's spirituality, it is best to read her writings: The Long Loneliness, her autobiography; Loaves and Fishes, her account of the Catholic Worker; Therese, her biography of the Little Flower; and articles by her in A Penny a Copy. These books are true spiritual reading. Any Catholics confused in their faith, embittered by their experience in the church, or needing guidance or inspiration in following Christ should read them.

Day persevered to the end of her life at the age of 86 in 1980. She was last jailed at the age of 76 for supporting Cesar Chavez' farm workers. Many may find it easier to pray to this saint of our time rather than a saint of a distant time and a foreign culture.

Friend and partner of the poor,

Guiding spirit for the Catholic worker,

Heart always open to the unwanted,

Early, often lonely, witness

in the cause of peace and conscience,

Eloquent pattern of gospel

simplicity--

Dorothy Day, disciple of the Lord:

May we continue your gift of self to

the needy and your untiring work for

peace!

THOMAS MERTON 

I WOULD VENTURE THE GUESS THAT SINCE HIS DEATH in 1968, Father Thomas Merton has served as the spiritual director to tens of thousands of people. In Thoughts in Solitude, Merton says, "My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going.... Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so." Why would so many find guidance from a Trappist monk, nearly 25 years dead, who confessed that he had no idea where he was going?

One practical reason is that this monk, who was committed to silence, said so much, so well. Merton published some 30 books in his lifetime. A score and more have been published posthumously, including selections from his thousands of letters. More letters and personal journals are to come. We can even hear his winsome voice on recordings of his talks to fellow monks.

Merton is available to us in a profusion and excellence rare among live spiritual directors or dead saints. Many of the letters are in fact words of direction to a variety of lay and clerical correspondents. In selections from his journals, such as The Sign of Jonas, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, A Vow of Conversation, and the Asian Journal, I find in Merton's reflections on his journey guidance signals for my own. This silent monk remarked for us on the spiritual life like a cosmonaut reporting continuously to Mission Control. We read him profitably, not as TV spectators but as fellow explorers.

But this explorer of the dark regions claimed to have no idea where his life was going, unsure even that he was following the will of God. Far from finding Merton's admission of "unknowing" reason to abandon him, I have found the uncertainties, the glitches in his "program," to be what makes him a valuable guide.

I grew up with a spirituality that portrayed saints sailing along smoothly in their spiritual life once they had experienced conversion. They might have had trials, but their "perfection trajectory" was locked in. Merton, like most of us, was never able to rest in the sense that his spiritual life was settled and safe. As Father William Shannon observed in his biography of Merton, The Silent Lamp, "He digs so deeply into raw humanity that his words will reach men and women for ages to come."

Merton certainly yearned for the smooth path, as we all do. He even thought he'd found it more than once, only to discover another glitch. His still powerful, though problematic, autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, tells of his conversion to Catholicism at age 23 from a classically dissolute youth and of his entrance into the Trappist monastery of Gethsemani, Kentucky. He expected a different planet where he could renounce the world, including his ambition to be a famous writer, and spend his life in undisturbed solitude and penance.

In almost no time at all, Abbot Frederic Dunne ordered him to write his autobiography, which became a best-seller. It made Merton a famous writer. Yet, he cried, "Peace, peace!" But there was little peace. Merton's dissatisfaction tempted him to leave the Trappists for the obscure hermit life of the Carthusian Order. Unable to see the road beyond his dissatisfaction, the young monk stayed faithful to his special Benedictine vows of stability (remaining in his monastery) and conversio morum, the continual willingness to allow God's grace to "change one's ways."

"Stay put and change your life" could sum up the spirituality of Merton. By staying put at Gethsemani, Father Louis (Merton's religious name) eventually experienced the solitude and contemplation he craved--but in God's good time and in God's own way.

Through the very experience of contemplation, which can, as he wrote to one lay correspondent in Contemplation in a World of Action, "come in the window unheeded," Merton found himself transformed from "the stereotype of the world-denying contemplative" to a "self-questioning human person" like each of us, who "struggles to cope with turbulent, mysterious, demanding, exciting, frustrating, confused existence in which almost nothing is really predictable."

From the communion of contemplative solitude, Merton saw the oneness of the earth and its inhabitants, without borders between political, ethnic, or religious communities. Ordered to stop writing about the nuclear-arms race for major publications, he obeyed but wrote about it in letters to friends. His ideas appeared in documents such as Pope John XXIII's Pacem in Terris.

For years he sought for permission to live as a hermit at Gethsemani, which was finally granted in 1965. Merton's hermitage became a gathering place for fellow explorers. For those same years he sought for permission to travel outside of Gethsemani to meetings concerned with monastic and church renewal, which was also finally granted.

He died on Dec. 10, 1968 of accidental electrocution at a monastic gathering in Bangkok, part of a pilgrimage to the East, the culmination of more than a decade of dialogues with masters of the traditions of Eastern wisdom.

"Paradoxically, I have found peace because I have always been dissatisfied," Merton wrote. He described his life as a "mystery which I do not understand, as though I were led by the hand in a night where I see nothing, but can fully depend on the Love and Providence of Him who guides me." Those of us who know dissatisfaction and dark roads can thank Providence that Merton has explored this cosmos before us and has reported so well of the Love that guides the mystery that is each of our lives.

By tender mercies of our God, the dawn from on

high will break upon us, to give light to those who

sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to

guide our feet into the way of peace (Luke 1:78-

79).

ANTHONY DE MELLO

I NEVER MET THE MAN, AND I NEVER MADE ONE OF HIS retreats. I never read anything he wrote, and I never studied his curriculum vitae. I've never talked to anyone who talked to him, and I've never heard one of his tapes. But few people have had a greater impact on my life. Anthony de Mello was not a designer of spiritual systems. He was not a lawgiver. He was not a cheerleader for a collection of esoteric spiritual exercises. No, de Mello was a teller of ancient stories, whose stories rearranged the human landscape. It is in the stories that he told that I met de Mello and knew at once that he was unforgettable.

Father Anthony de Mello, a Jesuit psychologist-spiritual director, is a spiritual figure of our time who will not soon be forgotten in ages to come. De Mello brought something to Western spirituality that had been mightily absent. De Mello brought all of us back into contact with the East, a treasure too long forgotten by too many. What I found in de Mello's stories that enrich contemporary spirituality is the quality of timelessness.

In the mechanistic West, it is not our style to look for wisdom. What we want in life is far more likely to be fixes than insights. Let others philosophize if they will; we push buttons and make adjustments and act. Consequently we do not sit comfortably with the idea that pain is protective, that suffering is meant to be a symptom of a basic disorder in us and not an irritating inconvenience meant for quick cures and total elimination. We do not tolerate headaches; we do not brook opposition. We know what we want, and we get what we go for. The name of the game is "The World According to Me."

Into that worldview, as religious with its exercises as it is secular with its technology, de Mello brought a completely different attitude toward life. De Mello dedicated his work to the teaching of four basic principles: consciousness, wholeness, faith rather than belief, and spirituality.

For de Mello, presence and consciousness are the keys to life. In one of his stories, disciples ask the Holy One to teach them the secret of life. Because it was the Day of Silence, the master took a piece of paper and wrote just one word in reply, "Awareness." The disciples read the word and looked at one another in consternation.

"Master," they continued, "Could you explain this a little more?"

The Holy One took another piece of paper and this time wrote two words, "Awareness. Awareness."

The disciples were clearly perturbed. "Holy One," they persisted. "Can't you please explain more about what you mean by awareness?"

The Holy One looked up from the prayer rug exasperated and this time wrote clearly and distinctly. "When I say 'awareness,' I mean, Awareness! Awareness! Awareness!"

Clearly, coming to see the holy in the daily was, for de Mello, one of the essentials of life. It was awareness, he taught, that made us capable of growth, able to understand others, willing to be made new again. A capacity for the present, de Mello made clear, was the secret to happiness because it saved us from the hurts of the past and the tyranny of a fearful future.

Second, de Mello taught that we lose happiness when we make it dependent on anyone or anything else. "Holy One," the disciple pleaded. "Help me to be free."

And the elder said to the disciple, "First find out who has put you in chains."

A week later, the disciple returned. "Holy One," the disciple reported, "no one has bound me."

"Then," the Holy One said, "from what do you need to be liberated?" At that moment of enlightenment, the disciple suddenly became free.

The point is made. De Mello was clear about the fact that the secret to happiness is that it lies within us. Happiness, he taught, is measured not by what happens to us but by our ability to find satisfaction within ourselves. The fact that we attach happiness to things outside ourselves, outside our own control, in other words--this house, that job, these clothes, those friends, that recognition--is precisely what makes happiness impossible.

Third, de Mello maintained that we must be open to unlearning everything we have ever known in life if we are going to be able to grow from one place to another. "How shall I attain Eternal Life," the disciple asked the Holy One.

"Eternal life is now. Come into the present," the Holy One replied.

"But I am in the present now, am I not?" the puzzled disciple persisted.

"No," said the Holy One, "you are not."

"But why not?" The disciple demanded.

"Because you haven't dropped your past," the Holy One said.

"But why should I drop my past? Not all of it is bad," the disciple insisted.

And the Holy One replied clearly and firmly, "The past is to be dropped not because it is bad. The past is to be dropped because it is past."

Obviously de Mello was no conserver of a pious and plastic religiosity. To go through life with an open mind and challenge the truisms in the light of new questions is a sign that our faith is greater than our beliefs. Beliefs, de Mello taught, trap us into close-minded positions, but faith assures us that it is God who is really the faithful One. Faith tells us that God will once again and always see us through.

Finally de Mello taught that if we are really going to be spiritual people that we will have to stop seeking "perfection" and start seeking enlightenment, an awareness of the sacredness of the most mundane. "Help us to find God," the disciples begged the Holy One.

"No one can help you there," the Holy One said.

"But why not?" the disciples demanded to know.

"For the same reason that no one can help the fish to find the ocean," the Holy One said.

God is, indeed, everywhere for de Mello--in darkness as well as in light, in the ordinary life lived with extraordinarily consciousness, in the sacred center of a creation that is secular to its marrow. It is in the separation of life into categories of the holy and the unholy, the spiritual and the material, the earthly and the heavenly that the human soul gets divided as well.

It is the loss of a holy viewpoint that turns my ragtag, messy, disorganized, judgmental life unholy. De Mello brings us back to the secret: life is enough for us. It is not something to be endured on the way to something better. It is the stuff of which the transformation is made. Life itself, not religion, is the substance of spirituality.

A wareness, unlearning, faith and spirituality are rarefied perspectives in a culture that prizes being out of its senses and in control and being right and religious. Religion, de Mello pointed out in clear and unequivocal terms, "is not necessarily connected with spirituality." Clearly, spirituality for de Mello is the ability to live whole and happy in the now, expecting nothing, demanding nothing, grasping nothing, and so becoming open to all things.

The very thought of going through life openhanded is chilling to the Western mind, which may, of course, be precisely why we need it so much, consider it so difficult, and find it so unforgettable.

De Mello brought to a mechanistic world a commitment to a contemplative heart, a passionate soul, and a conscious mind--qualities that change a world, attributes that never die. And to do it, he told us stories.

He told us stories that made us wiser than ourselves. He told us stories that broke down the barriers of our souls. He told us stories that cast light into dark and realized the simple for its profundity and the pompous--even in religion--for its calculating attempt to turn the sacred into a product rather than a prophetic presence.

It is precisely these qualities that flamed out of him with consummate conviction and disarming humor to become a living light that is far beyond who he was as a person, where he lived, what he did, where he went in life. It is in those things that his life will live on, even for those of us who never met him, never heard him, never followed his life's particular meanderings.

De Mello said once, "You are never so good as when you have no consciousness that you're good. A good is never so good as when you have no awareness that you're doing it." By his own measure then, as unaware of us as we were of the person of him, Anthony de Mello may well have done his best work on those, like myself, who never knew him.