#Christian Mystic: Thomas Merton

[compassionmattersmost]

Rapture: An Inner Experience or a Future Event?

The concept of rapture holds a significant place in many religious traditions, often representing a powerful moment of divine encounter. However, the interpretation of this experience varies widely across spiritual paths. For some, rapture is a future event, a moment of transcendent liberation from the trials of the world. For others, rapture is an immediate, inner experience of union with the…

[thurifer-at-heart]

Thomas Merton on "knowing God"

God is invisibly present to the ground of our being: our belief and love attain to him, but he remains hidden from the arrogant gaze of our investigating mind which seeks to capture him and secure permanent possession of him in an act of knowledge that gives power over him.

We know [God] in so far as we become aware of ourselves as known through and through by him. We "possess" him in proportion as we realize ourselves to be possessed by him in the inmost depths of our being. ... Hence the aim of meditation, in the context of the Christian faith, is not to arrive at an objective and apparently "scientific" knowledge about God, but to come to know him through the realization that our very being is penetrated with his knowledge and love for us.

Our knowledge of God is paradoxically a knowledge not of him as the object of our scrutiny, but of ourselves as utterly dependent on his saving and merciful knowledge of us.

—Thomas Merton, Contemplative Prayer, p.61

[eelhound]

"For whatever is demanded by truth, by justice, by mercy, or by love must surely be taken to be willed by God. To consent to His will is, then, to consent to be true, or to speak truth, or at least to seek it. To obey Him is to respond to His will expressed in the need of another person, or at least to respect the rights of others. For the right of another man is the expression of God's love and God's will. In demanding that I respect the rights of another God is not merely asking me to conform to some abstract, arbitrary law: He is enabling me to share, as His son, in His own care for my brother. No man who ignores the rights and needs of others can hope to walk in the light of contemplation, because his way has turned aside from truth, from compassion and therefore from God."

- Thomas Merton, from New Seeds of Contemplation, 1962.

[dramoor]

“No natural exercise can bring you into vital contact with Him.  Unless He utters Himself in you, speaks His own name in the center of your soul, you will no more know Him than a stone knows the ground upon which it rests in its inertia.”

~Thomas Merton

[eyeoftheheart]

“Faith is the opening of an inward eye, the eyes of the heart, to be filled with the presence of the Divine Light.”

― Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (Toronto: New Directions, 1961), p. 131.

[fierysword]

The darkness has much to teach us of what is important.  It contains its own wisdom and lessons, one of which is silence and quiet and repose... Snow at its best is a kind of covering rendering things one again...

Thomas Merton puts it like this, “love winter when the trees say nothing.”  Silence and nothingness are part of wintertime.  And they speak to our souls, winter speaks to our souls... 

The Divine is to be met in the depths of darkness as well as in the light.  Daring the dark means entering nothingness and letting it be nothingness while it works its mystery on us.  Daring the dark also means allowing pain to be pain and learning from it.  

https://dailymeditationswithmatthewfox.org/2022/12/02/winter-advent-and-honoring-the-dark/

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

"What Christianity most has to offer the world now is not moral guidance or activism or yet another social program; it is a mystical connection to the Source of life. Cultivating that divine-human love affair seems to me the only hope left. Not as some kind of opiate-of-the-people escape from our problems, but as a nonlinear path that leads us deeper into them. Christianity has no exclusive claim on this relationship. It does have a two-thousand-year-old history full of reliable matchmakers: the Desert Fathers and Mothers, Isaac of Syria, Teresa of Avila, Howard Thurman, Simone Weil, Oscar Romero, Thomas Merton . . . the list is long. We can choose our guides. The inner journey into love is taken not for the self, but on behalf of all life.

"The purpose of the early desert hermits", Merton wrote, "was to withdraw into the healing silence of the wilderness . . . not in order to preach to others but to heal in themselves the wounds of the entire world"

From seventh-century Ninevah, in what is now Iraq, Saint Isaac of Syria wrote: "An elder was once asked, "What is a compassionate heart?" He replied: "It is a heart on fire for the whole of creation, for humanity, for the birds, for the animals, for demons and for all that exists."

Christianity will truly come into its own in the Anthropocene, I believe, when it fully embraces that path to compassion, when it refuses to look away from the ecological Good Friday we are inflicting on the world. Only then will our actions, humbled and chastened, flow from compassion rather than from guilt. This requires a shift in vision, a redirecting of our gaze back to the One who loved the world into being and who sustains its every breath."

~ Fred Bahnson

[Ian Sanders]

[julianmaddock]

Authority and Tradition

I have been pondering how authority and tradition work together. I have thought for many years that spiritual direction offers an opportunity to relocate the locus of authority from without to within. I mean by this that, rather than constantly looking to scripture, church tradition, books on theology and spirituality, or teachers, preachers, and leaders to learn about God, a person…

[beguines]

hii i love your blog!! what do you think is a good book to start to read about christian mysticism?

it depends on where your interest lies—history, theology, practice. i highly recommend martin laird's into the silent land, a sunlit absence, and an ocean of light, all of which discuss contemplative practice. dorothee soelle's the silent cry: mysticism and resistance. most works by thomas merton are very accessible. julian of norwich's revelations of divine love. all of st. john of the cross' work but particularly his poetry. belden c. lane's ravished by beauty: the surprising legacy of reformed spirituality for a protestant take on christian mysticism; it is, in fact, surprising (though i would advise caution about some of lane's other work). howard thurman's deep is the hunger. the wiley-blackwell companion to christian mysticism, the oxford handbook of mystical theology, bernard mcginn's essential writings of christian mysticism—the latter being a good primer on the classic christian mystics.

[locustheologicus]

I was finally given the opportunity to obtain and read Thomas Merton's autobiography, "The Seven Storey Mountain." This is an amazing story of one man's search for truth and wisdom in the mid-20th century. It's a great read for anyone who is a seeker of philosophical/theological truths and who is non-judgementally open to the experiences of the world.

Merton eventually becomes an ascetic monk, but this lifestyle does not remove him from the experience and beauty of the world. He passionately absorbs the world and the relationships he develops. Initially, he is a philosophical atheist who struggles to find meaning in this world; what Catholicism and monasticism eventually offer is not a departure or deprivation from this world. Instead, he is able to center himself on God, the ultimate source of Truth and Love. This allows him to balance the experience and relationships he encounters. This book is an amazing journey of one man's reflective pursuit towards truth, beauty, happiness, and meaning.

One passage I want to share in this post is in chapter three, when he undertook his personal journey as an adolescent who just lost his father. He finally encounters the world of prayer and has a mystical experience that will eventually (although not immediately) change him. At that moment, he encounters sacred scripture. Until then, he enjoyed the poetic and philosophical musings of D.H. Lawrence whose religious exposition was tainted by a right-wing political affiliation. Evidently, this author was in favor of dictatorship and social order. This ideological orientation would color his religious lens. Merton recognizes this after he finally reads the Bible for the first time and sees this poet's fallacy. As Merton describes it:

One evening, when I was reading these poems, I became so disgusted with their falseness and futility that I threw down the book and began to ask myself why I was wasting my time with a man of such unimportance as this. For it was evident that he had more or less completely failed to grasp the true meaning of the New Testament, which he had perverted in the interest of a personal and home-made religion of his own which was not only fanciful, but full of unearthly seeds, all ready to break forth into hideous plants like those that were germinating in Germany's unweeded garden, in the dank weather of Nazism.

This passage highlights for me the concern I have for the emerging Christian nationalism that Merton saw developing in Europe of the mid 1930's. His journey towards the truth is to be free of the ideological perversions that filter religious interpretation and to read the joy of the Gospel himself in order to authentically find God in the story of Jesus, the story of service, healing, forgiveness, and reconciliation. This is not the Gospel narrative of Christian nationalism.

The purpose of Christianity is to find the deepest meaning of who you are by connecting oneself with the source of both our entire being and the whole of creation. Scripture and the beauty of our tradition imparts this wisdom on us. Do not let the perversion of Christian nationalism and its hatred for our diverse world defile the beauty of our Christian faith and the movement that Jesus and the early church started. Take time to go to the source and rediscover what it means to truly be a disciple of Christ.

May the wisdom of Merton's experience be a spiritual guide for us in these troubled times.

[hieromonkcharbel]

"If I can unite in myself the thought and the devotion of Eastern and Western Christendom, the Greek and the Latin Fathers, the Russians with the Spanish mystics, I can prepare in myself the reunion of divided Christians. From that secret and unspoken unity in myself can eventually come a visible and manifest unity of all Christians. If we want to bring together what is divided, we cannot do so by imposing one division upon the other or absorbing one division into the other. But if we do this, the union is not Christian. It is political, and doomed to further conflict. We must contain all divided worlds in ourselves and transcend them in Christ". (Thomas Merton)

[compassionmattersmost]

Bob Marley: A Christian Mystic in the Rastafarian Tradition

When we think of Christian mystics, names like St. John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, and Thomas Merton often come to mind. These individuals, through their writings and lives, embodied a deep and profound connection with the divine, often expressed through personal, mystical experiences of God. However, the notion of Christian mysticism is broader than traditional Catholic or Protestant…

[thurifer-at-heart]

The character of emptiness, at least for a Christian contemplative, is pure love, pure freedom. Love that is free of everything, not determined by any thing, or held down by any special relationship. It is love for love's sake. It is a sharing, through the Holy Spirit, in the infinite charity of God. And so when Jesus told his disciples to love, he told them to love as universally as the Father who sends his rain alike on the just and the unjust. "Be ye perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect." This purity, freedom and indeterminateness of love is the very essence of Christianity.

—Thomas Merton, Contemplative Prayer, p.73

[eelhound]

"For it is God's love that warms me in the sun and God's love that sends the cold rain.

It is God's love that feeds me in the bread I eat and God that feeds me also by hunger and fasting.

It is the love of God that sends the winter days when I am cold and sick, and the hot summer when I labor and my clothes are full of sweat: but it is God Who breathes on me with light winds off the river and in the breezes out of the wood. His love spreads the shade of the sycamore over my head and sends the water-boy along the edge of the wheat field with a bucket from the spring, while the laborers are resting and the mules stand under the tree.

It is God's love that speaks to me in the birds and streams; but also behind the clamor of the city God speaks to me in His judgments, and all these things are seeds sent to me from His will. If these seeds would take root in my liberty, and if His will would grow from my freedom, I would become the love that He is, and my harvest would be His glory and my own joy. And I would grow together with thousands and millions of other freedoms into the gold of one huge field praising God, loaded with increase, loaded with wheat.

If in all things I consider only the heat and the cold, the food or the hunger, the sickness or labor, the beauty or pleasure, the success and failure or the material good or evil my works have won for my own will, I will find only emptiness and not happiness. I shall not be fed, I shall not be full. For my food is the will of Him Who made me and Who made all things in order to give Himself to me through them.

My chief care should not be to find pleasure or success, health or life or money or rest or even things like virtue and wisdom — still less their opposites, pain, failure, sickness, death. But in all that happens, my one desire and my one joy should be to know: 'Here is the thing that God has willed for me. In this His love is found, and in accepting this I can give back His love to Him and give myself with it to Him. For in giving myself I shall find Him and He is life everlasting.'

By consenting to His will with joy and doing it with gladness I have His love in my heart, because my will is now the same as His love and I am on the way to becoming what He is, Who is Love. And by accepting all things from Him I receive His joy into my soul, not because things are what they are but because God is Who He is, and His love has willed my joy in them all."

- Thomas Merton, from New Seeds of Contemplation, 1962.

[leonbloder]

Learning To Chill

The late Fr. Thomas Merton was a Trappist monk, author, poet, theologian, and scholar who embraced Christian mysticism but was heavily influenced by Eastern religion and philosophy.

He has also been one of my great spiritual mentors for nearly two decades, and his work still informs my own in so many ways.

In his translation of the work of the 4th-century Taoist philosopher Chuang Tzu, Merton included the following poem about the kind of person who has achieved the correct balance in life:

He takes in past and present, Without sorry for the past Or impatience with the present All is in movement. He has experience Of fullness and emptiness. He does not rejoice in success Or lament in failure The game is never over Birth and death are even The terms are not final.

In Chuang Tzu's mind, a life of ambition and prosperity is a life of servitude and perpetual longing for the next best thing.

According to Tzu, one could be rich or poor and choose to live an open-handed, abundant life by genuinely seeing the absurdity of living life with a scarcity mindset.

It didn't matter what state you were in as long as you got the joke.

I use the term "joke" because that's how Tzu would have seen finding one's identity: how far up the corporate ladder you could climb, how many cars you could own, which prep schools your kid got into, and the like.

The type of person Tzu describes in the above poem could best be described as "sanguine," "even-handed," or, to use a term my 13-year-old coins daily, "chill."

I can see why Merton was drawn to this thinking and found so many connections between Tzu's and Jesus' teachings.

Jesus taught his followers that constantly worrying about one's status, material possessions, riches, or power were futile exercises and would lead away from God's purposes and peace.

He taught his followers to look to nature for inspiration---to "consider the lilies" and how beautiful they were because God sustained them.

Jesus urged them to watch the sparrows and realize that even those tiny birds were known by God, and it grieved God when even one of them died.

"How much more," Jesus asked his followers, "do you think God cares for you?"

The kind of surrender that Jesus encouraged his followers to embrace was not a halfway surrender. It was a complete surrender to God and God's purposes, knowing that they were loved and cherished no matter what befell them.

Like the man in Chuang Tzu's poem, they could become at peace in the ebbs and flows of life. They could, for all intents and purposes, chill.

May each of us find within us the strength to trust and surrender to God today and every day from this day forward.

And may the grace and peace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with us all, now and forever. Amen.

[fierysword]

“God is neither a “what” nor a “thing” but a pure “Who.”  God is the “Thou” before whom our inmost “I” springs into awareness. God is the I Am before whom, with our own most personal and inalienable voice, we echo, “I am.”

Thomas Merton from New Seeds of Contemplation