Roll Over Menno

He likes Thomas Merton’s idea that “Christians are always beginners.” He’s had Richard Foster in to speak to students at the Mennonite Brethren Biblical Seminary (MBBS) campus.

“Waldo Hiebert’s lifestyle exhibits one more tension or polarity: the seeking of solitude to strengthen the inner life, as opposed to the desire to be with other people, either to learn or to serve. He entitled the first {10} of a series of messages to the 1981 Pacific District Conference “Living from an Inner Center.” This center, he said, is indispensable to spiritual growth. It is marked by silence and solitude and is incompatible with our modern pre-occupation with noise and busyness…For Waldo, authenticity is found within, in that deep silent inner center…One of his “stations” on the journey into joy was a silent retreat at Bass Lake with a seminary group—24 hours of silence and meditation, the purpose of which was a fresh experience with God…

In his address to the Wichita conference, entitled “One Greater than Menno,” he said; “it is not possible to identify Mennonites by merely identifying them with Menno Simons. For a proper identification of the Mennonites we must speak of Jesus, the Savior and Lord of the church. We are more than Menno people, we are indeed a people of God.”

- Waldo Hiebert
http://www.directionjournal.org/article/?501

If this is what he truly believes, then perhaps Mr. Hiebert needs to be filled in on a few things. Like who Richard Foster and Thomas Merton are. (See last post)

If they quote them, they are reading them. If they have them in as speakers, they admire and respect them. The result is obvious. And Mr. Hiebert is only one example. Many of the Mennonites not only identify with Menno these days, they also identify with contemplative mystics, dead or alive, like Thomas Merton and Richard Foster. (See Reiki, Thomas Merton and Richard Foster.)

See why this might make Menno roll over in his grave…

The following is from Mystical Deception File (Noah’s Dove):

“Thomas Merton, a Trappist Monk and Catholic Mystic who before he died saw no contradiction between Zen and Christianity. He commended Hindu, Taoist, Buddhist, and Islamic mystics as “those who had experienced…union with the God of truth and love.”* - Harvey D. Clayton, S.J., Christian Mysticism, The Future of a Tradition, p.238-241.

Quoting Jacob Needleman (p.110), Lost Christianity, (a Bantam New Age Book):
In the quarter of a century that Merton lived as Trappist monk at Gethsemani, Kentucky, he delivered a tremendous body of written work dealing with Christian mysticism, the contemplative tradition, monasticism, and the Eastern religions, particularly Zen, which he felt had a crucial role to play in the West by revealing the contemplative, mystical core of normal human life and therefore of the Christian tradition as well.

One of Merton’s last essays, “The New Consciousness,” begins, “Christian renewal has meant that Christians are now wide open to Asian religions, ready, in the words of Vatican II, to “acknowledge, preserve and promote the spiritual and moral goods” found among them.*

But “it is not that simple.” Merton proceeds to list the strong activistic, secular and anti-mystical tendencies that militate against the recovery of contemplative Christianity in the West. Zen, to Merton is the best hope because it rejects all doctrinal dispute and offers itself as something completely unclassifiable in familiar Western theological, moral or philosophical terms. “The real drive of Buddhism is toward an enlightenment which is precisely a breakthrough into what is beyond system, beyond cultural and social structures, and beyond religious rite and belief… What this means then is that Zen is outside all structure and forms.” *(Zen and the Birds of Appetite, pp. 4-5).

Zen according to Merton, offers us the pure act of seeing, pure consciousness. It is this, Merton writes, that is the real meaning of knowledge in meditation and contemplation leading to salvation in Christ.”

“The deepest level of communication is not communication, but communion .. . . It is beyond words . . We are already one.”

…additional quotes by Merton:

“And in the last public utterance of his life, delivered on the day of his death in Bangkok, he said: ‘And I believe that by openness to Buddhism, to Hinduism, and to these great Asian traditions, we stand a wonderful chance of learning more about the potentiality of our own traditions, because they have gone, from the natural point of view, so much deeper into this than we have.” quote from the book, Lost Christianity by Jacob Needleman, p.112.

Toward the end of his life, Merton developed an interest in Buddhist and other Far Eastern approaches to mysticism and contemplation, and their relation to Christian approaches. He was attending an international conference on Christian and Buddhist monasticism in Bangkok, Thailand, when he was accidentally electrocuted on 10 December 1968.

According to a website dedicated to Merton:
In 1968 a meeting occurred in the Himalayas between the two most influential monks of the 20th century, a meeting that would shape the dialogue between the worlds of East and West a meeting between His Holiness the XIVth Dalai Lama and Thomas Merton. Shortly thereafter Merton unexpectedly died prompting the Dalai Lama to commit the remainder of his life to fulfilling Merton’s wish of bringing the worlds of East and West together in compassion. This commitment resulted in the historic Gesthsemani Encounter in 1996 at the Abbey of Gethsemani, home of the late Thomas Merton, attended by His Holiness the Dalai Lama and world leaders of the Eastern and Western religious traditions.”

———————

Mr. Hiebert says we need to speak of Jesus, the Savior and Lord of the church. He says the Mennonites are a people of God. Okay then. Prove it. How about starting by getting rid of all those Thomas Merton books? Like they did in the book of Acts:

And many that believed came, and confessed, and shewed their deeds. Many of them also which used curious arts brought their books together, and burned them before all men: and they counted the price of them, and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver. So mightily grew the word of God and prevailed.
Acts 19:18-20

UPDATE: Read the latest about Thomas Merton by Ray Yungen, HERE.