thinking

from the Eckhart Tolle website.

learning to engage contemplatively in the dilemma of how difficult it is to live contemplatively

Sculpture by Jeanne Dueber SL

"... Here is a more generous, more robust approach to the dilemma of our ignorance.  This more generous approach consists, not of attempts to overcome our ignorance, but rather of a willingness to gaze deeply within it, learning its ways as we learn to get up with it in the morning and go to bed with it at night.  The tonality of this approach is not about methods of attainment but is the tonality of a willingness to see and accept the dark divinity of our plight of being trapped on the outer circumference of the inner richness of the life we are living. 

"In this humble self-knowledge there is the growing realization that this whole journey of contemplative self-transformation is not simply or primarily about "me" in my private quest for inner peace.  Rather it is about entering into the homelessness of the whole world being uniquely expressed in my experience of it.  Likewise, we begin to discover that the journey of which we find ourselves is not one of rising above or leaving behind our unaware self.  Rather, the journey consists of waking up and coming home to the divinity at once hidden and revealed in the dance of the now so near now so far away, the noble now so Oh-my-God-what-have-I-done stuff of our own life and the lives of those around us.." 

-James Finley, The Contemplative Heart, pp. 39

the contemplative loop

Sculpture by Jeanne Dueber, SL

" ... Sooner or later (usually sooner) our plan for contemplative living leads us directly into all the obstacles, within and without, which undermine our efforts. Those of us who have been on this contemplative journey for very long know full well how ineffective our plans for contemplative living tend to be. We can look back over our shoulder to see a trail of abandoned spiritualities, like so many cars that have run out of gas. Each, for an enthusiastic moment, seeming to be the long awaited point of arrival. Each leaving us, all too quickly, once again a malcontent in discovering ourselves to be, even after all our efforts, our plain old distracted self.

"But the realization of the extent to which our path seems to be paved with the shards of enthusiastic beginnings come to naught is not the only shortcoming to be faced. For this is, as well, the shortcoming of self-absorption. If we are not careful our efforts to commit ourselves to living a more contemplative way of life become suspiciously limited to an exclusionary process of attempting to rise above or leave behind all that is broken and lost within ourselves and others. In such approach our very efforts to overcome our ignorance become sublimated variations of the ignorance we are attempting to overcome."

- Jim Finley, The Contemplative Heart,  pp. 38-39

The lived experience of Church (we don't do this alone)

What is the lived experience of truly encountering the Church?

It is an experience of being loved unconditionally by a group of people who draw an unknown strength from their relationship together in the name of Jesus Christ.  It is an experience of coming home, of finding one’s place in the universe and in one’s own skin.  It is what we have always looked for without knowing it.  It is the delight and pain of being accepted by those who can see through us and know us better than we know ourselves.  It is the realization that we can be who we are because we are called by the experience itself to become who we are.  We can accept ourselves and everything that has happened to us and every thing we have done and not done.   

Thus, a Christian community is a group of people who seek to love one another as Jesus loves: incarnated unconditional love - mercy.  But true mercy only exists when we truly confront the sin and evil within us, calling it by name and helping each other to know truth about ourselves.  It is by sharing that unconditional life-giving love that the Church announces Jesus Christ to the world. 

- Martha Driscoll, OSCO (from the Gethsemani Visitors Center)

Resurrection

"Yes, it is always a difficult, a dark word that scarcely can be tolerated by our ears — that word “resurrection.” That is to say, it is not necessarily hazy. What it really means is clear — too clear, plain — only too plain. It means what it says: something mighty, crystal-clear, complete. It signifies: that the world, that is life with its imprisonments and tragedies of sorrow and sin, life with its doubts and unanswered questions, life with its grave-mounds and crosses for the dead, a unique enigma, so immense that all answers are silent before it. Nothing, absolutely nothing can one do to stop it; everything is too insignificant to fill up this vacuum. Admit it; it negates everything; there is no way out! There might be the possibility of a miracle happening — no, not a miracle, but the miracle, the miracle of God — God’s incomprehensible, saving intervention and mercy, the all-inclusive renewal that leads from death to life that comes from him, God’s creation-word, God’s life-word — and that means resurrection from the dead! Resurrection, not progress, not evolution, not enlightenment, but what the word means, namely a call from heaven to us: “Rise up! you are dead, but I will give you life.” That is what is proclaimed here, and it is the only way that the world can be saved take away this summons, and make something else of it, something smaller, less than the absolute whole, less than the absolute ultimate, or less than the absolutely powerful, and you have taken away all, the unique, the last hope there is for us on earth." 

-- Karl Barth, “Jesus is Victor.” In “Come Holy Spirit,” p 148-50.

When we choose to pray ...

When we choose to pray we accept the invitation to come and see who this God of goodness is, and to come to see who we are as God’s cherished one.  Prayer is an essential way of kindling and developing this relationship.  If we are going to have quality prayer, we will need to take time to stay with the Holy One in prayer, to become familiar with the depth of Love in the center of our being.  As we increasingly commit ourselves to keeping this relationship alive and thriving, not only is more of God’s essence revealed; we also come to know more our own true self 

Trusting anyone with our shadow side is difficult to do.  In prayer we risk allowing our whole self to be revealed and known.  As we do so, we grow in our ability to be our bare-bones-self with God.  This does not happen automatically.  Growth in trust requires deliberate choices to spend time with the Other, humbly opening up, believing that all of who we are will be received with merciful kindness. 

Joyce Rubb, Prayer
(from the Gethsemani Visitors Center)

Gethsemani, the Visitor's Center

There is a new Visitor's Center at Gethsemani. I didn't notice it when I was here last year (Pentecost 2012) but I think it has been here for awhile, at least a couple of years. I almost passed it by this year as well, but for a call of nature. The gift shop is typical, nothing special, but the rest of the center is very worthwhile.

There is a good little film about the Trappist life, and Gethsemani in particular, made by Louisville film maker, Morgan Atkinson. In the film the monks acknowledge that their lives are for us.

There is a room with many photos of the monks and quotes from them and others about the nature of contemplative life.

I was glad that the center didn't focus on Merton at all. He was just a monk among many here.

A statue of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, the best known and most influential Cistercian of all time, is there to greet you at the entrance:

Born into a knightly family in 1090, he entered Citeaux at the age of twenty two, bringing with him a group of thirty relatives and friends whom he had previously convinced to join him in leading a more serious Christian life.  At the time of Bernard's entry, Citeaux was beginning to grow and had just made its first foundation (La Ferte, 1113).  The influx of this large group made further expansion possible, and, in 1115, Bernard was chosen to lead Citeaux's fourth foundation, Clairvaux. 

An inspired teacher and a consummate artist with words, Bernard is known as the "last of the Fathers" and a Doctor of the Church.  His own monastery so prospered under his leadership that, at the time of his death in 1153, Clairvaux had made sixty-eight foundations. 

Bernard's field of activity gradually expanded beyond his own abby, and he found himself involved - for better or worse - in theological controversies and ecclesiastical and political affairs.  Among his monks and in his public life Bernard was considered a saint in his own lifetime.  He was canonized in 1174 and officially proclaimed a Doctor of the Church in 1830.

These monks carry a profound legacy.   

I love the stillness that permeates everything at Gethsemani.  I come away changed, knowing the world from a much quieter and simpler place. I love seeing the monks here, living their hidden prayer-lives. Sometimes I wake up in the early morning hours and think of them singing their psalms in the early darkness and I know that we are not all going to hell in a hand basket, despite the news. Life is holy.