Merton seems too heroic. His life too holy. His words too difficult.
This seems medieval, this promise of insight in the silence of a meditation,
It seems irrelevant, this study of contemplation and contemplatives. It
seems useless, this looking away from our busy lives. How holier than thou
these notions seem. How our mundane lives seem disconnected such holy ideas.
Such saintly behaviour seems beyond the ordinary calling of our lives.
After all, these voices speak only after decades of such isolation, after
descending from their mountain-top experience with God. The unending necessities
seem so mundane compared to such things.
Or so it seems.
But then we start to listen. And what we hear is not words read from clay
tablets. We hear familiar things. With a new attention. We hear people
like pretty much like ourselves except that they have been somewhere unfamiliar
to us. But what they tell us doesn't sound unfamiliar, it sounds far too
familiar. They say we are God's children - all of us. And we are told that
the unfamiliar place is the place we are already in. This message doesn't
actually connect very well to us.
We fell into the behaviour of our time - to be so busy that we no longer
heard the still small voice. We understood that we had to work hard. Our
job-jar overflowed at home. Our children's needs grew exponentially. We
seemed to be going to meetings nearly every evening. And the to-do list
at work grew to fill the years ahead as far as we could see. Small wonder
we lost the practice of contemplation.
Perhaps we need also to look around our global village. Listen to others
that have been to the mountains. The first key voice is that of Thomas
Keating with his practice of centering prayer. We have encountered that
earlier in the Spiritual Innovators study, and Paul has brought our attention
to this prayer technique which centers our thought on the holy words of
our own tradition. We have put some weblinks up on this. Because in Christian
society, Keating and contemplation have become very closely associated.
Many persons and many communities have found that Keating has helped them
find the grounding Merton speaks of.
You can listen to Father Keating himself courtesy of the Contemplative
Outreach of Northern California.
In 1996 the Delai Lama returned Thomas Merton's visit, with a visit to
his grave at Gethsemini and to attend a gathering of monks from different
traditions. It was Merton, he said, that changed his mind about christians.
And you'll want to read the inspiring talk of James Alison who only a few
months after 9/11 explains how he was able to transcend the idea of hating
Muslims. This talk is a superb example of how Christian Contemplation leads
to a "way of seeing" which in this case allowed Alison to translate
the talk around him of "clash of civilizations" and "satan"
and other hatreds into the universal love of Christ that could include
muslims.
And if some of this seems medieval and dusty, you'll want to visit Gavin
at his blog - Hit the Back Button to go Forward. Blogging is a new kind
of communication, sharing, soapboxing. Here is an excellent one from a
young chap in Tennessee with very eclectic interests. He looks "backward"
to center his "forward". Visit his blog if only to examine the
sort of environment he has built, and how his interest in "things
methodist" and monasticism and other things grounds his active life
now including youth ministry.
In 1954 Aldous Huxley gave secular expression to these esoteric matters
after his mescaline trip into mystery. His book The Doors of Perception
was a remarkable work. A different sort of mountain. But when a man educated
in both western and eastern traditions of philosophy, religion, art and
psychology describes such a journey it becomes insightful commentary in
rich familiar terms, on the "Mysterium Tremendum". Well worth
reading again. The comments on contemplation are particularly noteworthy,
as with his observations of contemplation vs action. "For in its fullness
the way of Mary includes the way of Martha and raises it, so to speak,
to its own higher power." This short book is now on-line. (16500 words).
As Bochen moves from her chapter on Contemplation to the next on Compassion,
she quotes Merton in an excellent summary of why it is so important to
ground ourselves.
"What is the relation of [contemplation] to action? Simply this. He
who attempts to act and do things for others or for the world, without
deepening his own self-understanding, freedom, integrity, and capacity
to love, will not have anything to give others. He will communicate to
them nothing but the contagion of his own obsessions, his aggressiveness,
his ego-centered ambitions, his delusions about ends and means, his doctrinaire
prejudices and ideas. There is nothing more tragic in the modern world
than the misuse of power and action to which men are driven by their own
Faustian misunderstandings and misapprehensions." ... Contemplation
in a World of Action, Thomas Merton.
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