Who Travels With Me

I have finished Sophfronia Scott’s wonderful book. The Seeker and the Monk.  It is a book that links the lives of Scott, who is a writer by vocation, and Thomas Merton, the late monk by vocation.  Scott is a still-young African American writer who left her very poor home in northeast Ohio to attend Harvard.  From there she earned a Master of Fine Arts and has found a way to make a living writing down her thoughts.  A few years ago, a friend introduced her to Merton, the Kentucky monk who died in 1968.  In her imagination, she and Merton became conversational buddies and the book is the result.

I am pretty familiar with Merton, so I have read her book with some interest.  She does a good job of mining Merton’s journals and some of his other writings to pick out timely topics and both give Merton credit for dealing with these in ways that still make sense.  And she takes him to task for being shortsighted and at places inadequate for today’s generation.  She is bright, engaging and sees the world from a very different vantage point than I can.  I appreciate her insights.  

One piece that drew my attention comes with her usual aplomb.  She shares a story of Merton’s interaction with a young monk at Gethsemani, his Kentucky monastery.  John of the Cross, the young monk, was struggling with his faith and the life of the monastic community.  Merton did not share the details, but did comment that the superiors seemed unable to deal creatively with the situation.  The superiors pulled the power card and tried to make the young monk conform.  Merton comments, “But in the end it is the old fear of originality, of the person who has ‘got something,’ who realizes that mere conformity would be an infidelity to God and to grace…” (87) 

We learn that John of the Cross left the monastery.  That is a telling story.  However, I also like Scott’s commentary.  She notes that “Merton demonstrated the importance of respecting God’s presence in someone no matter how it shows up.”  That seems like good advice for today’s divisive, polarized society we all know.  She finishes this section by commenting, “How you must have missed you friend, Thomas.”  My heart is touched.

Cleverly, Scott uses this as the backdrop to develop her idea.  She shares a story of carpooling to go hear some spiritual speaker in her area.  She confesses, “The talk lit me up, and on the way home, the people in the car with me had a spirited conversation.” (87-8). She says the car conversation expanded her thinking and “helped shape my thoughts for an essay I eventually wrote on the talk and why it had so moved me.” (88) I would have been ok had Scott left it at that.  Most of us probably have had a car ride or some similar experience.

But she goes on.  She informs us “A few days later, I was surprised to learn the people in one of the other cars didn’t discuss the talk on the drive home---at all.”  She says she is glad she was not in that car!  I laughed.  She adds, “If I had been in that car, I would have been frustrated, sitting and staring out the window and feeling like a flower bud closed tightly because the air was too cold for it to bloom.”  She is a graphic writer.

She learned something from this incident.  She allows that “I came to understand, with compassion, how most people deal with their lives and spirituality: they simply don’t engage.  They don’t attend to the interior life, to the questions and ideas that arise.”  That is both true and profound---profoundly sad.  I love her final commentary on the situation.  “They didn’t want to think about the spirituality that might turn their lives upside down.”  I really appreciate that because Scott reminds me that I have spent much of my life thinking about the spirituality stuff, as students sometimes call it.  Maybe I got in the right car of life!

Scott tells us, “I still think about those car rides and about how grateful I am that I landed in one car and not the other.”  Then she offers the clincher: “I still think about how much it matters who travels with me.”  That is a great punch line.  Choose well your travel partners.  At one level, we all know this truth.  Who are your influencers?  Perhaps at one point in life, they are role models.  Sadly, today our heroes tend to be sports stars and entertainers.  

Choose the people with whom you travel.  Life is a journey.  We will travel with some folks.  Choose well.  Like me, you can probably list some of the most important travel mates you have had.  Some took me places I should not have gone.  I shudder to think some of the people who traveled with me went to places I should not have taken them.  

I like the image of life as a car ride.  Look around and pay attention to the travel mates.  If you are not happy with your situation, ask the car to stop and get out.  Find another ride.  Be grateful for the travel mates who have dealt well with you.  Write them a note and thank them.  Be more attentive to the younger ones in your life car and serve them well.  Maybe there is someone in the car who is a seeker.  Be helpful and patient.  Maybe that is what Merton was for Scott---a travel mate.  

After all, she entitled the book, the seeker and the monk!