I was on Route 1 nearing the turn for Mt. Irenaeus when suddenly I spotted three deer entering the roadway about a tenth mile ahead. One looked normal and the other two looked different. From a distance they almost looked like fawns, but then as I got closer I realized that two of the deer were albino. I have never seen anything like that, but here on Sunday morning as I neared Mt. Irenaeus I saw three deer. Continue reading “Angels in our midst”
Thoughts on prayer
Yesterday, I wrote about what makes a monk. It was a popular post and even invited a response. I am a contemplative and maybe could even claim to be a mystic or at the very least attracted to mysticism. I love to sit in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament. Holy Thursday is approaching quickly. The celebration of the Liturgy of the Lord’s Supper is one of my favorites. I’ve often wished that I had been among the disciples that evening.
During Lent I try to do something positive. This year I’ve made a commitment to two periods of contemplative prayer each day. So far I’ve been able to sit. Sitting is not always easy and each time I’ve tried to stay with the sacred word I’ve chosen. In the past I’ve given up because I didn’t think I was accomplishing much, but I have noticed that I’m more upbeat and more relaxed and I’m drawn each morning and evening to stay with the practice.
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.”
Listen to the rain
A couple of nights ago I woke up to the sound of rain and I thought of Thomas Merton. Whenever it rains I think of Merton.
I came up here [to his hermitage] from the monastery last night, sloshing through the cornfield, said Vespers, and put some oatmeal on the Coleman stove for supper. It boiled over while I was listening to the rain and toasting a piece of bread at the log fire. The night became very dark. The rain surrounded the whole cabin with its enormous virginal myth, a whole world of meaning, of secrecy, of silence, of rumor. Think of it: all that speech pouring down, selling nothing, judging nobody, drenching the thick mulch of dead leaves, soaking the trees, filling the gullies and crannies of the wood with water, washing out the places where men have stripped the hillside! What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone, in the forest, at night, cherished by this wonderful, unintelligible, perfectly innocent speech, the most comforting speech in the world, the talk that rain makes by itself all over the ridges, and the talk of the watercourses everywhere in the hollows!
Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it. It will talk as long as it wants, this rain. As long as it talks I am going to listen.–Thomas Merton. “Rain and the Rhinocerous” in Raids on the Unspeakable. New York: New Directions Publishing Co., 1964: 9-10.