As far as I know, C.S. Lewis mentioned Thomas Merton at least twice in his letters. Writing to Dom Bede Griffiths on 12/20/61, Lewis asked him, “Have you read anything by an American Trappist called Thomas Merton? I’m at present on his No Man Is an Island. It is the best new spiritual reading I’ve met for a long time.” Then, in his Letters to An American Lady, he writes to Mary on 12/23/61 and says, “I’ve been greatly impressed by the work of an American Trappist called Thomas Merton – No Man Is An Island. You probably know it?”

Merton’s was “the best” spiritual writing to Lewis and it “greatly impressed” him. I’ve not read No Man Is an Island, but I am reading through New Seeds of Contemplation and have found it very helpful. Maybe it’s because I’m an Enneagram 4, but I have such a love-hate relationship with myself.

Merton talks about how a tree glorifies God by being a tree. The bluebird praises God by flying. The ocean worships her Creator by “her majestic dance”. No other tree is like the Norwegian spruce in my backyard, and no other tree in the world will be exactly like it. And that’s well and good for the rest of God’s creatures. God makes the raccoon and the river and the melting snow without asking them or consulting them and they’re perfectly fine to be as God intended.

But with humans, it’s different. I can either be myself or not. I can wear a mask and be someone other than who God created me to be, but not without consequences. I was born into this world in a mask. That is to say, I was born into sin. The great challenge and beauty of the Christian life is to cooperate with God’s drawing me back to who I am really.

If I never become what I am meant to be, but always remain what I am not, I shall spend eternity contradicting myself by being at once something and nothing, a life that wants to live and is dead, a death that wants to be dead and cannot quite achieve its own death because it still has to exist.

What scares me is that I recognize exactly what Merton is describing. I’m aware of my mask, my false self. The way out of my mask is to become aware of and “identified with Him in Whom is hidden the reason and fulfillment of my existence.” My true self is only found in Christ alone.

As important as understanding your false self is for Merton, equally important is the awareness of any false gods in your mind. Most alarming to me is that, for a long time, an idol lived alongside my idea of God. Like a parasite, it lodged itself and fed daily. There was a dread of having to get up each day to try and be a Christian. And in spite of what I knew or even what I taught others, I would still wake up to old failures and fresh condemnation instead of new mercies. Like Merton’s man in a mask, I would seek to “placate the insatiable little god in [my] own heart.”

“Our idea of God tells us more about ourselves than about Him,” Merton claims. And that’s true. Rather than taking God’s idea of God as found in Scripture, I’d built up an idea of God as someone who couldn’t witness my next failure. Day by day, this idea of God was constantly watching for how I wouldn’t become a better version of myself (that false self that doesn’t really exist).

I’ve wondered sometimes why the apostle John ends his first letter with the command, “Little children, keep yourselves from idols.” It seems out of place and off theme from the rest of the epistle. But as I’ve thought about it these last couple of days, it makes a lot of sense. John tells the Church about a Father who lavishes love on his children, the Son who advocates for those children when they sin, and the Spirit who testifies to the truth in his children.

That is the God of Scripture. That is the triune Godhead that sings over us while we sleep and delights to give good gifts. That is the Divine Being who loves unconditionally because we are found in his Beloved Son.

Any other “God” is an idol. From experience, I’ve found that it is so easy to slide from the reality of who God is into the arms of an idol. And if that idol is dressed up like the God of the Bible, it’s all the more insidious and harder to distinguish. I think that’s at least part of the reason why 1 John ends with that warning. Keep yourself from idols because it’s too easy for them to slip into your head.

This calls for a sort of holy atheism. More on that later at some point probably.