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This week I got an email from a major Canadian news organization.

“News is changing on an hour-by-hour basis,” it (under)stated. “You need reliable access to a trusted news source to stay informed on how these changes will affect you and your community. Get the latest breaking news…”

It raises an important question: How do we engage with the news in a healthy way, particularly when the news is full of moment-by-moment mind games? Do we need to know every incremental update always, or is there a more sensible way of taking in “the news?”

“I’m beginning to see this as a spiritual discipline for being alive in this time,” wrote On Being journalist Krista Tippett on her Substack recently. “It is not to be confused with disengagement or passivity. It may be an essential tool for sanity, and a key to discerning and sustaining a sense of agency for the time ahead.”

This predicament has me thinking about Thomas Merton, one of my formative influences. A Catholic monk and writer, Merton was cloistered away in the hills of Kentucky. But he was profoundly engaged in the questions of his day in the 1950s and '60s: civil rights, the Vietnam war, nuclear weapons.

I discovered Merton as a journalism student in Calgary, where I'd pick up Merton's books from a used bookstore, Baskerville Books, in Kensington. This always lit up the shopkeeper, which I enjoyed. “Ah, the Zen Catholic!” he'd say with a smile. Then, riding the bus from home to college every day, I'd have lots of time to read Merton's reflections on everything from Buddhist-Christian dialogue to journalism.

Merton took a dim view of “the news“ and what it was doing to society.

“The greatest need of our time is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds and makes of all political and social life a mass illness,” wrote Merton in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. “Without this housecleaning we cannot begin to see. Unless we see we cannot think. The purification must begin with the mass media. How?”

He did not have a definitive answer. But Merton diagnosed the problem in a way that resonates today, describing our endless social media feeds long before they were invented.

“Where each new announcement is the greatest of announcements, where every day's disaster is beyond compare, every day's danger demands the ultimate sacrifice, all news and all judgment is reduced to zero,” wrote Merton in Raids on the Unspeakable. “News becomes merely a new noise in the mind, briefly replacing the noise that went before it and yielding to the noise that comes after it, so that eventually everything blends into the same monotonous and meaningless rumour.”

I can’t think of a better description of our current “information environment,” as it's sometimes called now.

On one level, you would get the impression that Merton had little use for journalism. But the reality was that he was tremendously informed by it, unusually attentive (for a monk) to the goings on in the wider world, and prolific in his engagement with these problems.

“Certainly events happen and they affect me as they do other people,” he wrote in Faith and Violence. “It is important for me to know about them too, but I refrain from trying to know them in their fresh condition as 'news.' When they reach me they have become slightly stale. I eat the same tragedies as others, but in the form of tasteless crusts.”

Merton was on to something. As Tippett suggests, it's not a matter of choosing between complete disengagement or constant overstimulation. That is a false choice. Maybe we could use fewer breaking news updates and more of Merton's “tasteless crusts.” For Merton this was books and magazines; the modern equivalent may be the daily newspaper. (I get, and recently have new appreciation for, the Globe & Mail.) Or the slow local journalism of The Sprawl!

The issue, then as now, wasn’t whether or not to be informed. It was a question of how. You don’t cut out the wider world, but nor do you let yourself get pulled in so many directions at once that you choke off what Merton called “the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.” One needs both for what's ahead.

Merton could, at times, be derisive from his place in the monastery. “I have very little idea of what is going on in the world, but occasionally I happen to see some of the things they are drawing and writing there and it gives me the conviction that they are all living in ash cans,” he wrote in New Seeds of Contemplation.

But one of his deepest spiritual insights occurred not in the peace of the monastery, but the tumult of the city, smack-dab in the middle of one of his so-called “ash cans.” This was where, in 1958, he experienced a profound revelation.

“In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the centre of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers,” Merton wrote.

Reading this in Calgary and swept up in it, I used to imagine one day starting a publication called Fourth & Walnut, referencing the intersection where Merton experienced his illumination. Instead, I ended up with a local Calgary publication called The Sprawl. Go figure!

This week, spiralling downward while working at home, I realized it does no good to sit alone and refresh the news constantly. I made myself get out.

It wasn’t a Mertonian epiphany, but I got a coffee, sat outside and watched the world go by for awhile. I felt the sun shining on my back and experienced the simple good of the day. It doesn't make headlines but this too is true.

And the news? It will still be there, whether I read it now or later. “To 'fall behind' in this sense is to get out of the big cloud of dust that everybody is kicking up, to breathe and to see a little more clearly,” Merton wrote.

This week marks seven years since the first Sprawlcast episode came out and aired on CJSW 90.9 FM. Seven years! I am glad to still be partnering with CJSW on the show. I am grateful to my podcast audio editor, Mike Tod, for suggesting the idea of the show in the first place. And I am especially grateful to everyone who has listened and/or read—particularly those who have pitched in to support The Sprawl's slow journalism along the way.

I am always encouraged by the notes that people write when they sign up as Sprawl members. Here are a few from this month:

If you value the work The Sprawl does for Calgary, and want to contribute to journalism locally, please pitch in to support our work! We'd love to welcome you aboard.

Jeremy Klaszus is founder and editor of The Sprawl.