CRS = Cash Register Synchronicity – Consumer Recreation Services – The Game – God – 26
3-10-2020
1. 2:26 pm: Invoice# 9477 – Total $22.77 – Subtotal $22.46
2. 2:55 pm: Total $30.55
3. 4:39 pm: Items 27 – State Tax 1 $0.72 – Total $72.35 – Invoice# 0072
4. 7:17 pm: Total $17.04
5. 7:37 pm: Items 37 – Total $119.63 – Invoice# 9618
6. 7:39 pm: Subtotal $39.16 – State Tax 1 $0.06 – Total $39.22 – Invoice# 9620
7. 8:01 pm: Items 16 – Change $12.16
8. 7:47 pm: Total $8.47
9. 7:49 pm: Total $18.49
10. 6:27 pm: Total $62.72 – Items 22
11. 8:09 pm: Total $236.55 – Items 55
12. 2:25 pm: Items 29 – Total $79.39 – State Tax 1 $1.08
“The world about him looked like a desert. Merton lived in the midst of it but had the strength and power to remain true to the spirit of truth in himself. His belief in love and truth helped him remain involved in the social and political misery. But there was more. I recall a comment from John Eudes Bamberger, a monk and psychiatrist, who was both Merton’s student and physician in Gethsemani. As Bamberger noted, one of Merton’s characteristics that made him both a fascinating and irritating personality was his capricious manner of judgement. He could sometimes assert seemingly contradictory things about a situation, one after the other. He first called the monastery his favorite home, and later he asserted that it was in fact no place where he could be rooted and established. In one conference he called Rilke the most fantastic poet of this century, and a few weeks later in another conference he said: ‘He was awfully limited’ (Continuum, Summer 1969, 235).
Merton himself was conscious of this characteristic. In his introduction to Seeds of Contemplation, he warned readers not to stop with one strong statement, but to allow it to be relativized by another strong statement, which they would find elsewhere. It was this dialectic that once in a while led Merton into difficulties. The other monks could not always understand him, and the young monks he supervised were sometimes confused by this feature of his teaching. When Merton on one day would assert exactly the opposite from the previous day, his listeners were irritated and said that they didn’t know what he was worth.
This characteristic could suggest a cynicism that shunned every involvement, paralyzing a thought, an idea, or a suggestion by constantly asserting the opposite. Those who constantly say at the very moment they start to become enthusiastic, ‘But you can also look at it from the other side,’ will never get moving, and instead of guilty bystanders will become bitter cynics. But Merton did not become a cynic.
When he saw how the America of his time, uprooted by violence and confusion, was completely missing the chance of reform and was threatening to land in a dangerous polarization of power, he did not turn away in bitterness and disappointment. Instead he more and more went for advice to sages from the East, for whom contradictions and paradoxes do not lead to bitterness but to truth. He sought from them a better understanding of the situation of the West.
Therefore we now must turn to Merton’s studies of the Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu and Zen Buddhism in order to see how he perceived the relation between Buddhism and Christianity.”
– Encounters with Merton (1972) by Henri J.M. Nouwen; pages 110-112
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