The Secret Country
Newsletter for June 27, 2025
Last week I was in Denver, Colorado, for the 19th General Meeting of the International Thomas Merton Society (ITMS). Having been a Merton reader since purchasing Zen and the Birds of Appetite from the gift shop of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., at age seventeen, it was a special blessing to spend several days in the company of other “Mertonians” who value the Trappist’s commitment to contemplation and radical openness to the world.
During the conference I had the opportunity to present a guided meditation, “The Radial Imagination,” that used selections from Merton’s translations of Latin American poetry and correspondence with Latin American poets to pray on the question of what it means to inhabit a place where one has never physically been. Through the radiance of the poetic symbol that transcends language, Merton was able to journey to what the Ecuadorian poet Jorge Carrera Andrade called “the secret country, the country that is everywhere, the country that has no map because it is within ourselves.” Here he encountered a spiritual solidarity, a friendship, a communion “which undermines the power and arrogance of the great of this world, which seeks to separate men in the power struggle.”
Merton’s journey of the imagination, of binding new relationships through the hidden harmonies of prayer, is paramount in this moment of global discord. We need to visualize ourselves in the place of the other, the one who is distant and oppressed, and begin from there to recite the words of the psalms or the lineaments of our own petitions—to feel another’s hurt, to pray for but also with. Merton expressed as much to the Russian poet Boris Pasternak at the height of the Cold War in 1958, when the two men’s countries were set to decimate each other:
[T]he great business of our time is this: for one man to find himself in another one who is on the other side of the world. Only by such contacts can there be peace, can the sacredness of life be preserved and developed and the image of God manifest itself in the world.
There is much to mediate on in this phrase of the sacredness of life being “preserved and developed.” It implies a sense of cultivation, a need to traverse the boundaries of our interior geographies so that we might hold less fixedly to our exterior ones. This is why Merton famously said that “the root of war is fear”: an infectious distrust of everything and everyone, including ourselves, that is inevitably sublimated into violence. In an essay in New Seeds of Contemplation, he offers a corrective:
If we can love the men we cannot trust (without trusting them foolishly) and if we can to some extent share the burden of their sin by identifying ourselves with them, then perhaps there is some hope of a kind of peace on earth, based not on the wisdom and the manipulations of men but on the inscrutable mercy of God.
This is the end goal of the journey into the “secret country.” It is not just finding a place of like-minded souls, but of embarking on a prayer adventure that recognizes our complicity in sin and endeavors to transform it. This requires a mixture of boldness and humility—the former to set forth into undiscovered regions and relationships, the latter to offer up what we find to the “inscrutable mercy of God.” As Merton wrote in his 1963 “Letter to Pablo Antonio Cuadra concerning Giants”: “It is my belief that we should not be too sure of having found Christ in ourselves until we have found him also in the part of humanity that is most remote from our own.”
Michael Centore
Editor, Today’s American Catholic
Great piece on Merton Michael! I so love his writing and wisdom.