I’ve been on the road for four days and four nights. Each day has found me somewhere between Western New York and Southwestern Georgia. Each night I’ve retired in a different motel. I’ve seen some lovely sights. Lots of beautiful spring flowers. I’ve seen lovely azaleas, rhododendrons, dogwoods, apple blossoms, and flowers I can’t even name. I’ve seen hundreds of people, thousands of cars and trucks as I’ve motored on over two thousand miles of roads. I’ve been to Allbany, GA; Plains, GA; Clemson, SC and tonight I’m in Winchester, VA. Tomorrow I plan to visit Holy Cross Abbey. Continue reading “On the road”
Counting the cost
Today marked the 4,000th American soldier killed in combat in Iraq. Colonel Dan Smith has a well written piece at Quakers Colonel. I also read a well written piece my Michael Moore at CommonDreams. It is more than a sad story. It is the tragic death of the American Democracy. We’re taxed to death to pay for their war machine and what money they can’t wring out in taxes is beaten out of us at the gas pumps. I think the country as we knew it is dead. We have no voice in our government. Word that Exxon deliberately under produced to drive up prices brings no response from the government. It’s no surprise and none of the candidates can do a damn thing about it. The election is just a sham, policies will remain the same. They are all just figureheads for the war machine.
Thomas Merton sums up my thoughts best.
“I am against war, against violence, against violent revolution, for peaceful settlement of differences, for nonviolent but nevertheless radical changes. Change is needed, and violence will not really change anything: at most it will only transfer power from one set of bull-headed authorities to another.” Thomas Merton
We do not live for ourselves
I’ve often heard this especially from Fr. Dan Riley at Mt. Irenaeus, but today this gentle reminder came in the mail from the Merton Institute.
To live for oneself alone is to die. We grow and flourish in our own lives in so far as we live for others and through others. What we ourselves lack, God has given them. They must complete us where we are deficient. Hence we must always remain open to one another so that we can always share with each other.–Seasons of Celebration: 229–Thomas Merton.
In all things..
We must in all things seek God. But we do not seek Him the way we seek a lost object, a “thing.” He is present to us in our heart, in our personal subjectivity, and to seek Him is to recognize this fact. Yet we cannot be aware of it as a reality unless He reveals His presence to us. He does not reveal Himself simply in our own heart. He reveals Himself to us in the Church, in the community of believers, in the koinonia of those who trust Him and love Him.
Seeking God is not just an operation of the intellect, or even a contemplative illumination of the mind. We seek God by striving to surrender ourselves to Him whom we do not see, but Who is in all things and through all things and above all things.
Thomas Merton. Seasons of Celebration. (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1950): 223-224.
True Sanctity
True sanctity does not consist in trying to live without creatures. It consists in using the goods of life in order to do the will of God. It consists in using God’s creation in such a way that everything we touch and see and use and love gives new glory to God. To be a saint means to pass through the world gathering fruits for heaven from every tree and reaping God’s glory in every field. The saint is one who is in contact with God in every possible way, in every possible direction. He is united to God by the depths of his own being. He sees and touches God in everything and everyone around him. Everywhere he goes, the world rings and resounds (though silently) with the deep harmonies of God’s glory.
Thomas Merton. Seasons of Celebration. (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1950): 137
I’m going to listen
What is Lent? Today I got up at 5:30 am and headed for the gym. It was raining hard. As I ran I could hear the rain beating on the roof of the gymnasium and I was reminded of Thomas Merton who said,
It will talk as long as it wants, this rain. As long as it talks I am going to listen.
So whenever it rains its a call to holiness for me. It’s an invitation to think of Merton and contemplation. The sound of rain is beautiful. Rain washes over us and over the land and I think it’s like grace, except that we can see it. God’s grace is all around us. It isn’t just on Ash Wednesday or during Lent. It isn’t just Sunday, but on Monday and Tuesday too.
We just have to look for it. I’m trying to look for it more.
An expanding universe
Thomas Merton gives voice to a recurring thought of my own and that is the Word in a world where we understand more than when the words were first recorded.
I must get to know something of modern physics. Even though I am a monk, that is no reason for living in a Newtonian universe or, worse still, an Aristotelian one. The fact that the cosmos is not quite what St. Thomas and Dante imagined it to be has after all some importance. It does not invalidate St. Thomas or Dante or Catholic theology, but it ought to be understood and taken into account by a theologian. It is futile to try and live in an expanding universe with atomic fission an ever present possibility and try to think and act exclusively as if the cosmos were fixed in an immutable order centered upon man’s earth. Modern physics has its repercussions in the monastery and to be a monk one must take them into account, although that does nothing whatever to make one’s spirituality either simple or neat.
Thomas Merton. A Search for Solitude. Edited by Lawrence S. Cunningham (San Francisco, HarperSanFrancisco, 1996): 132
True Solitude
I will give you what you desire. I will lead you into solitude…Everything that touches you shall burn you, and you will draw your hand in pain, until you have withdrawn yourself from all things…Do not ask when it will be or where it will be or how it will be: On a mountain or in a prison, in a desert or in a concentration camp, or in a hospital or at Gethsemani. It does not matter. So do not ask me, because I am not going to tell you. You will not know until you are in it. But you shall taste the true solitude of my anguish and my poverty and I shall lead you into the high places of my joy and you shall die in Me and find all things in My Mercy which has created you for this end…That you may become the brother of God and learn to know the Christ of the burnt men.–Thomas Merton, Seven Storey Mountain
These words mean more to me today than they did when I first read them twenty-nine years ago. In a few days on the Feast of the Epiphany I will mark an anniversary of another sort. It was the time of my first visit to Piffard, New York and the Abbey of the Genesee. Often I have pondered these words and over the years their meaning has changed, but they continue to animate my life and I’m grateful to Thomas Merton, the Trappist monks of Genesee Abbey and the breath that leads me forward.
Conjectures of Thomas Merton
In looking for another famous quote from Thomas Merton’s, Seven Storey Mountain, I happened upon a quote from Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander which is just a powerful and insightful given the current political and cultural climate.
For myself, I am more and more convinced that my job is to clarify something of the tradition that lives in me, and in which I live: the tradition of wisdom and spirit that is found not only in Western Christendom but in Orthodoxy and also at least analogously in Asia and in Islam.” –Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, Thomas Merton.
I have been reading and listening to the Seven Spiritual Laws of Success by Deepak Chopra and I’m impressed at this analogue as Merton calls it. A contemplative heart and soul resides in all mystics regardless of their faith tradition. It is a point on which we could all agree.
Merton spoke of this when he referred to Thich Nhat Hanh as “my brother.”
The new man
For the “new man” everything is new. Even the old is transfigured in the Holy Spirit and is always new. There is nothing to cling to, there is nothing to be hoped for in what is already past-it is nothing. The new man is he who can find reality where it cannot be seen by the eyes of the flesh-where it is not yet- where it comes into being the moment he sees it. And would not be (at least for him) if he did not see it. The new man lives in a world that is always being created and renewed. He lives in this realm of renewal and creation. He lives in Life.
Thomas Merton. “A Search for Solitude.” Journals, Volume 3. Lawrence S. Cunningham, editor. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997: 269