Le Point Vierge

A crucially important concept for Merton is “Le Pointe Vierge,” which literally

means “the virgin point,” though ultimately, the term cannot be translated.7

For him, it is “a metaphor for the place deep within that is the point of our encounter with God.”8 Merton noted the concept of le pointe vierge through reading Louis Massignon, a French scholar who wrote on the Sufi tradition.9 Merton writes, “Massignon has some deeply moving pages in the Mardis de Dar-es-Salam: About the desert, the tears of Agar, the Muslims, the ‘point vierge’ of the spirit, the center of our nothingness where, in apparent despair, one meets God—and is found completely in His mercy.”10 Massignon focused on encountering God in the depths of one’s being, a concept which evoked in Merton a desire to experience God in such a way within himself.

Monica Weis explains that Merton’s concept of le point vierge holds a surplus of meaning.11 It can signify, as in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, the break of dawn, the cusp of light and darkness—the moment of transition. As Merton writes,

The first chirps of the waking day birds mark the ‘point vierge’ of the dawn under a sky as yet without real light, a moment of awe and inexpressible innocence, when the Father in perfect silence opens their eyes. They begin to speak to Him, not with fluent song, but with an awakening question that is their dawn state, their state at the ‘point vierge.

7

Monica Weis, The Environmental Vision of Thomas Merton (Lexington, Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky, 2011), 60.

8

Christine M. Bochen, Thomas Merton Essential Writings (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books), 60-61.

9 _{Weis, 60.}

10 _{Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty bystander (Garden City, New York: Image Books, 1966), 151;}

(Hereafter cited as CGB).

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Their condition asks if it is time for them to ‘be.’ He answers ‘yes.’ Then, they one by one wake up, and become birds. They manifest themselves as birds, beginning to sing. Presently they will be fully themselves, and will even fly. 12

Indeed, in this “most wonderful time of day,” all creation, in its innocence, asks once again for permission “to be,” as on the very first morning of creation. Le

point vierge can also mean a “moment of poise,” when anything is possible and

the outcome may hold cosmic implications, such as in Shakespeare’s A

Midsummer Night’s Dream, “when fairy magic can alter the expected rhythm of

the world.”13

The still point within ourselves wherein we encounter the divine has its counterpart in nature, which, in every singular and minute detail, discloses something of the holy within the ordinary, in that “mysterious, cosmic dance,” in which “the Lord plays and diverts Himself in the garden of his creation.”14

Merton asserts that if we can only let go of any preconceived notion of what it all means, we can follow God in this dance.

We do not have to go very far to catch echoes of that game, and of that dancing. When we are alone, on a starlit night; when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children; when we know love in our hearts; or when, like the Japanese poet Basho we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash—at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all

values, the ‘newness,’ the emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves evident, provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance.15

12

Merton, CGB,131.

13 _{Weis, 60-61.}

14 _{Merton, New seeds, 296; see also Jason M. Brown, “Thomas Merton, Wildness and the sacramental}

Power of Place,” ed. Deborah Pope Kehoe and Joseph Quinn Raab, The Merton Annual, Studies in Culture, Spirituality, and Social Concerns, Volume 29 (2016): 86- 87.

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It is at the center of our being—le point vierge—that we enter that dance with the rest of creation. And it is the “sustaining spark of divinity within that allows us to recognize our unity with each other and with God’s self.”16

Finally, Merton’s spiritual awakening at the intersection of Fourth and Walnut in Louisville in March 1958 demonstrates another instance of le point

vierge. Here he experienced a profound awakening to his unity with all the other

pedestrians on that street corner, and saw them all “walking around shining like the sun.”17

In this moment, he saw into “the secret beauty of their hearts . . . where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes.” In this awakening, he recognized that his own solitude belonged as much to them as to himself, and was thus disabused of any illusions of difference or separation from them. He, like all the others, was “a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate.”18

This epiphany led Merton to the recognition of the divine spark within all people:

At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us. It is so to speak His name written in us, as our poverty, as our indigence, as our dependence, as our sonship. It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven.19 16 _{Weis, 62.} 17 _{Merton, CGB, 157} 18 Ibid. 19 _{Ibid., 158.}

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For Merton, this moment of epiphany disclosed the reality of the divine within the human, marking the moment of his “return to the world” and thereby

transforming his understanding of his own vocation to monastic life.20 As he wrote to Pope John XXIII in the autumn of that year, “this poor world has a right to a place in my solitude.”21

To enter into the realm of contemplation one must be prepared to engage the concrete realities of this world rather than retreating from them, and thus to see the world at large through a sacramental imagination. Merton came to see that “the whole world and all the incidents of life tend to be sacraments—signs of God, signs of God’s love working in the world.”22 Through this event, he had become deeply conscious that he was not separate from other human beings, all of whom carried that sacred spark within, and therefore, he shared the responsibility for building a just future for all.23