Summer
Snippets: Resources for Contemplative
Prayer
We all
have favorite sayings, concepts or quotes tha ground how we look at our lives.
We learn them at our mother’s knee, in high school, or pick them up along the
way as we grow in wisdom. In these summer snippets I have shared many of those
that ground my life of contemplative prayer. This weekend I would like to share
a sampler of an individual whose thoughts and writings in large part are
responsible for my becoming a priest and growing in a life of contemplative
prayer. Thomas Merton (January 31, 1915 – December 10, 1968) was an Anglo-American Catholic writer and mystic. A Trappist monk of the Abbey of Gethsemani, Kentucky, he was a poet, social
activist, and
student of comparative religion. Merton wrote more than 70
books, mostly on spirituality, social
justice and a
quiet pacifism, as well as scores of essays and reviews, including his
best-selling autobiography, The Seven Storey
Mountain (1948), which sent scores of
World War II veterans, students, and even teen-agers flocking to monasteries
across the US.
The
following are some of my favorite of his quotes:
Ø “A man cannot enter into the deepest center of himself and
pass through that center into God, unless he is able to pass entirely out of
himself and give himself to other people in the purity of selfless love,” New
Seeds of Contemplation p. 64.
Ø “In prayer we discover what we already have. You
start where you are and you deepen what you already have, and you realize that
you are already there. We already have everything, but we don’t
know it and we don’t experience it. Everything has been given to us
in Christ. All we need to is experience what we already possess,” Thomas
Merton/Monk: A Monastic Tribute, p. 80.
Ø “We should not look for a ‘method’ or ‘system,’ but
cultivate an ‘attitude,’ an ‘outlook’: faith, openness, attention, reverence,
expectation, supplication, trust, joy. All these finally permeate
our being with love insofar as our living faith tells us that we are in
the presence of God, that we live in Christ, that in the Spirit of God we ‘see’
God our Father without ‘seeing.’ We know him in
‘unknowing.’ Faith is the bond that unites us to him in the Spirit
who gives us light and love,” Contemplative Prayer, p.
94.
Ø “When we lose our special, separate cultural and religious
identity—the ‘self’ or ‘persona’ that is the subject of the virtues as well as
the visions, that perfects itself by good works, that advances in the practice
of piety—(it is then) that Christ is finally born in us in the highest sense,” Zen
and the Birds of Appetite, p. 12.
Ø “At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which
is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark
which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God
disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind
or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of
nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in
us. It is in everybody.” Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander p.
142.
Ø
“For
each of us there is a point of nowhereness in the middle of the movement, a
point of nothingness in the midst of being: the incomparable point, not to be
discovered by insight. If you seek it you do not find
it. If you stop seeking, it is there. But you must not
turn to it. Once you become aware of yourself as a seeker, you are
lost. But if you are content to be lost you will be found
without knowing it, precisely because you are lost, for you are, at last,
nowhere,” Cables to the Ace or Familiar Liturgies of Misunderstanding, p.
58.
Ø
“There
should be at least a room, or some corner where no one will find you and
disturb you or notice you. You should be able to untether yourself
from the world and set yourself free, loosing all the fine strings and tensions
that bind you, by sight, by sound, by thought, to the presence of
others… There, even when they do not know how to pray, at least they can
still breathe easily. Let there be a place somewhere in which you can
breathe naturally, quietly, and not have to take your breath in continuous
short gasps. A place where your mind can be idle and forget
its concerns, descend into silence, and worship the Father in
secret. There can be no contemplation where there is no secret,” New
Seeds of Contemplation pp. 81-83.
Ø
“A
person is a person insofar as each has a secret and a solitude of their own
that cannot be communicated to anyone else. I will love that which
most makes them a person: the secrecy, the hiddenness, the solitude of their
own individual being, which God alone can penetrate and understand.
A love that breaks open the spiritual privacy of another in order to lay open
all their secrets and besiege their solitude with importunity, does not love
them: it seeks to destroy what is best in them, and what is most intimately
theirs,” No Man is an Island p. 258.
Ø
“Feel
free to do nothing, without feeling guilty… This is what the Zen
people do. They give a great deal of time to doing whatever they
need to do. That’s what we have to learn when it comes to prayer.
We have to give it time,” Thomas Merton/Monk: A Monastic Tribute, pp.
81-82.
Ø
“What
do we want, if not to pray? O.K., now pray. This is the
whole doctrine of prayer in the Rule of St. Benedict. It’s all
summed up in one phrase: ‘If a man wants to pray, let him go and
pray.’ That is all St. Benedict feels it is necessary to say about
the subject. He doesn’t say, let us start with a little
introductory prayer, etc., etc. If you want to pray, pray,” Thomas
Merton/Monk: A Monastic Tribute, pp. 84-85.
Ø
“The
best way to pray is: stop. Let prayer pray within you, whether you
know it or not. This means a deep awareness of our true inner
identity. It implies a life of faith, but also of
doubt. You can’t have faith without doubt. Give up the
business of suppressing doubt. Doubt and faith are two sides of the
same thing. Faith will grow out of doubt, the real
doubt. We don’t pray right because we evade doubt. It
is in these two ways that we create a false identity, and these are the two
ways in which we justify the self-perpetuation of our institutions,” Thomas
Merton/Monk: A Monastic Tribute, pp. 87-88.
Ø
“…
whatever you do, every act however small, can teach you
everything. Provided you see who it is that is acting,” Thomas
Merton, Learning to Live, University on the Heights, p. 10.
Ø
“It is
in deep solitude that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my
brothers and my sisters. The more solitary I am, the more affection I
have for them. It is pure affection, and filled with reverence for
the solitude of others. Solitude and silence teach me to love my
brothers and my sisters for what they are, not for what they say,” The
Sign of Jonas, pp. 261-262.
As
with a Whitman’s Sampler, I hope at least one of the “chocolates” in the box touches
a desire within you.
Fondly,
Father Nicholas
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