{"id":952,"date":"2024-02-09T07:43:05","date_gmt":"2024-02-09T07:43:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2024\/02\/09\/me-and-merton\/"},"modified":"2024-02-09T07:43:05","modified_gmt":"2024-02-09T07:43:05","slug":"me-and-merton","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2024\/02\/09\/me-and-merton\/","title":{"rendered":"Me, Merton, Vows, and Ecclesiology"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Merton\"<\/a>I study everything, join nothing. He studied everything, but joined the Trappists. Therein one root of one of his inner conflicts. <\/span>His natural bent was to range freely over the cartography of the mind, but he voluntarily accepted intramural enclosure physically, intellectually, and spiritually. He took vows of poverty, chastity, obedience, and stability. My impression from study of the seven volumes of his magnificent Journal, wherein one meets the man himself as opposed to the 'organization man,' is that the first and second vows were easy for Merton to keep. You might wonder about the second, but there is only one lapsus carnis<\/em> known to us, so well known in fact that it needs no commentary from me. But he chafed under the vow of obedience which demanded of him that he submit to his intellectually inferior superiors.  Stability<\/a>, too, he found difficult given his gyrovagal and maverickian tendencies. The temper of the times, the fabulous and far-off 'sixties, did nothing to tame the gyrovagus<\/em> in him.<\/span><\/p>\n

One of the underlying questions is whether the truth, absolute and eternal, can be captured and owned by any one temporal institution and any one system of dogmas.  Well, why not? If God can become man, a particular man, why can't the absolute and eternal truth be correspondingly 'incarnated' in a particular church with its particular and exclusive set of rites, rituals, and dogmas?  If the God-Man established a church, what more could you want by way of ecclesiological validation?<\/span><\/p>\n

But which church did he establish? The RCC?  <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Would it be in keeping with Protestant principles that some Protestant denomination lay claim to being the one, true, holy, catholic, and apostolic church?  I'm just asking!  In this blog I conduct my education in public and try to seduce people into helping me do so.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I study everything, join nothing. He studied everything, but joined the Trappists. Therein one root of one of his inner conflicts. His natural bent was to range freely over the cartography of the mind, but he voluntarily accepted intramural enclosure physically, intellectually, and spiritually. He took vows of poverty, chastity, obedience, and stability. My impression from … Continue reading “Me, Merton, Vows, and Ecclesiology”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[178,413,73,358],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-952","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ecclesiology","category-mavericks","category-merton-thomas","category-monks-and-monasticism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/952","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=952"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/952\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=952"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=952"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=952"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}