Merton's book and SRF leaders

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The postulant who has come to the monastery looking for something may not necessarily be looking for what we think. Yes, of course, si revera Deum quaerit. "Does he truly seek God?" But what entitles me, as novice master, to imagine that my particular way of seeking God is the only way possible and that my spirituality, my prayer, my idiosyncrasies, my monastic likes and dislikes, my interpretations, are normative for all monks of all time? Such an assumption teaches, louder than any words, that I have no humility myself and am therefore disqualified from trying to teach it to another. I do not have the elementary humility to respect his own personal integrity, his uniqueness, his differences, his own singular and personal need. p. 96-97

One who dedicates himself to God by vows today finds himself committed for life to a massively organized, rigidly formalistic institutional existence. Here everything is decided for him beforehand. Everything is provided for by rule and system. Initiative is not only discouraged, it becomes useless. Questions cease to have any point, for you already know the answers, since they imply a firm decision to ignore your questions. Obedience then no longer consists in dedicating ones's will and love to the service of God, but almost in the renunciation of human rights, needs and feelings in order to conform to the rigid demands of an institution. The institution is identified with God and becomes an end in itself. ...the young monk who has serious problems with a life that may seem to him increasingly fruitless and even absurd, may be forcefully told that he is failing in Christian faith and verging on apostasy!...

The most tragic misunderstandings have arisen from this attitude which, in some cases, one must frankly admit it, savors of gross superstition and arrogance. In any event, it has led to the ruin of many monastic vocations which seemed to be in every respect serious and genuine. One feels that if there had been a little flexibility, a little humaneness shown--if the monk, when he began to have trouble with the life, had been allowed a change of scene or a more genuinely human relationship with his brothers--he might have adjusted to the life after all. Unfortunately, there still exists such a grave fear of the austere institutional image being tarnished by concessions that vocations are sacrificed in order to preserve a monastic facade. p. 20-21

The endemic disease of monasteries and of sects is that people in them do so much to save their souls that they lose them: not in the sense that they are damned for being good, but in the sense that they concentrate on such particular, limited aspects of good that they become perverse and singular. This singularity begets blindness and deafness to Christ. The tense concentration of sect or monastery on some completely peripheral concern can give an impression of heroic faith--but so can the feat of engraving the Lord's Prayer on a pinhead. Fidelity to tedious but predictable rule can become an easy substitute for fidelity, in openess and risk, to the unpredictable word. But the whole point of monastic "desert" life is precisely to equip the monk for risk, for walking with God in the wilderness and wrestling with Satan in vulnerable freedom.

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