Thomas ​Merton...interior poverty

When in the soul of the serene disciple
With no more Fathers to imitate
Poverty is a success,
It is a small thing to say the roof is gone:
He has not even a house.
Stars, as well as friends,
Are angry with the noble ruin.
Saints depart in several directions.
Be still:
There is no longer any need of comment.
It was a lucky wind
That blew away his halo with his cares,
A lucky sea that drowned his reputation.
Here you will find
Neither a proverb nor a memorandum.
There are no ways,
No methods to admire
Where poverty is no achievement.
His God lives in his emptiness like an affliction.
What choice remains?
Well, to be ordinary is not a choice:
It is the usual freedom
Of men without visions.

Richard Rohr’s Commentary:

Merton's best-selling early autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, published in 1948, is a first half of life statement and a classic, which has never gone out of print.
 
The following poem, "When in the Soul of the Serene Disciple," [1] written by Merton ten years later in 1958, shows all the signs of a man in an early second half of life, although he was only in his mid-forties. The freedom illustrated here might be exactly where your spiritual journey is going to lead you. I hope so.
 
This poem has spoken to me from the first time I read it in Merton's hermitage in 1985. I offer it to you as a simple meditation that you can return to again and again to summarize where this journey leads us. Today we will focus on the first half of the poem, with my commentary in italics.
 
When in the soul of the serene disciple
 
At the soul level, and with the peacefulness of time
 
With no more Fathers to imitate
 
When you have moved beyond the "authoritative," the collective, and the imitative, and you have to be your True Self
 
Poverty is a success,
It is a small thing to say the roof is gone:
He has not even a house.
 
When you have made it all the way to the bottom of who you think you are, or need to be, when your humiliating shadow work never stops, and when your securities and protective boundaries mean less and less, and your "salvation project" has failed you
 
Stars, as well as friends,
Are angry with the noble ruin,
Saints depart in several directions.
 
When you have faced the hurt and the immense self-doubt brought on by good people, family, and even friends who do not understand you, who criticize you, or even delight in your wrongness
 
Be still:
There is no longer any need of comment.
 
The inner life of quiet, solitude, and contemplation is the only way to find your ground and purpose now. Go nowhere else for sustenance. 
It was a lucky wind
That blew away his halo with his cares,
A lucky sea that drowned his reputation.
 
This is the necessary stumbling stone that makes you loosen your grip on the first half of life and takes away any remaining superior self-image. (Merton is calling this crossover point "lucky" and surely sees it as part of necessary and good suffering that the soul needs in order to mature.)
 
Here you will find
Neither a proverb nor a memorandum.
There are no ways,
No methods to admire
 
Don't look forward or backward in your mind for explanations or consolations; don't try to hide behind any secret special way that you have practiced and now can recommend to all! (As we preachy types always feel we must do.) Few certitudes now, just naked faith.
 
Where poverty is no achievement.
His God lives in his emptiness like an affliction.
 
This is nothing you have come to or crawled down to by effort or insight. You were taken there, and your "there" is precisely nothing. (That is, it is "everything," but not what you expected everything to be!) This kind of God is almost a disappointment, at least to those who were in any way "using" God up to now. There is nothing to claim anymore. God is not a possession of any type, not for your own ego or morality or superiority or for control of the data. This is the nada of John of the Cross and the mystics, and this is Jesus on the cross. Yet it is a peaceful nothingness and a luminous darkness, while still an "affliction."
 
What choice remains?
Well, to be ordinary is not a choice:
It is the usual freedom
Of men [and women] without [their] visions.
 
In the second half of the spiritual life, you are not making choices as much as you are being guided, taught, and led--which leads to "choiceless choices." These are the things you cannot not do because they are your destiny and your deepest desire. Your driving motives are no longer money, success, or the approval of others. You have found your sacred dance.
 
Now your only specialness is in being absolutely ordinary and even "choiceless," beyond the strong opinions, needs, preferences, and demands of the first half of life. You do not need your "visions" anymore; you are happily participating in God's vision for you. With that, the wonderful dreaming and the dreamer that we were in our early years have morphed into Someone Else's dream for us. We move from the driver's seat to being a happy passenger, one who is still allowed to make helpful suggestions to the Driver. We are henceforth "a serene disciple," living in our own unique soul as never before, yet paradoxically living within the mind and heart of God, and taking our place in the great and general dance.