An Ode to the Spirit

 

An Ode to the Spirit

In the peaceful places of my life, wherever I may find them, I will search for you. In the midst of the crowd, I will look for you. In the sound of laughter and weeping, I will listen for you. You are around me, within me, beside me, no matter where I am. You are everywhere at once and always. When I go up to the highest point of joy I know, you are waiting for me. When I fall to my lowest point, you catch me. When I am alone in the deep night, you hold me. You are forever, in all places, in every moment. You let me go at the right time. You release me to the open air. You trust me. And I, in all that I do, and say, and believe, trust you. I have since the beginning. I will until the end. You are my creator, my simple truth, what I believe and why I believe, the sum total of my life’s experience. I have made my choice and pledged my love. I am in this with you, in every way I can be, for as long as I can be, until your mystery surrounds me and the next dream begins.

~ Steven Charleston is a Native American elder, author, and retired Episcopal bishop of Alaska. Adjunct Professor of Native American Ministries, Saint Paul School of Theology at OCU, Citizen of Choctaw Nation.

the radiation of a silence that is filled with love

From Jonathan Montaldo:

An excerpt from "Uncaging His Own Voice: Thomas Merton's Inner Journey Toward 'Parrhesia' [Free Speech]

Merton’s essay, “Day of A Stranger” for Ludovico Silva’s magazine "Papeles" is among his best. His essay relates a “day” in Merton’s life at his hermitage. Merton writes in the unexpurgated voice of the self he was excavating to be most true. He speaks of who he has become through his unique monastic journey in three simple, declarative sentences:

What I wear is pants.

What I do is live.

How I pray is breathe.

Merton’s speech, for this one day at least, is terse and impoverished. He distills his voice down into its ordinary communion with all simple beings inhabiting the world:

“What I wear is pants.” (He puts off his monastic robes and the cowl that implicates his distinction and “specialness” from others. He knows himself only as he is, another ordinary man in blue jeans accomplishing ordinary tasks. He sweeps his porch; he tends his fire.)

“What I do is live.” (His vocation is a call to be simple. He needs no other place to go than where he is now. He has no one else to meet. He quiets his pronouncements. He surrenders, to this one day at least, all his grandiose plans. He considers the next task in front of his nose, even just chopping wood, as God’s will for him right now.)

“How I pray is breathe.” (Being grateful to be alive is prayer. Being awake and watching as day breaks, and staying up all night as the stars dance, is his contemplation. He forgets whatever he has written on prayer and prays. He listens to whatever voices in the trees or in the gardens of his mind call out for his attention. Silence harmonizes him; it renders him receptive to the ‘hidden wholeness’ of each thing with every other thing to which his heart connects. Alone in the woods, he listens to the speech rain makes. He plays his small part in the simple ecologies of another day. He realizes, for this one day at least, the way the wind is blowing. And thus he receives the fruits of a sermon by the birds living near his hermitage: they are inviting him to share their liberty, to know the ordinary freedom of those who do not know they have names.)

In a journal entry for July 25, 1963, Merton transcribed in English two notes from the French in an article by M. Moré in the magazine "Dieu Vivant" (12). Merton could have written these words. The two insights he culled from this article are a gloss on the three simple declarations of his "true voice:" “What I wear is pants. What I do is live. How I pray is breathe”. Merton had underlined Moré:

"We don’t ever stop being plagued by words: they devour us… We spend most of our lives editing pamphlets, manifestoes, reports, writing articles, essays, novels. We rush in crowds to conferences whose numbers grow each day in inverse proportion to the interest they hold."

Then, from further down in the article, Merton copied an even more significant insight:

"The witness required of each of us is much more that of a transparency rather than a witness of words—a word, even an exact one, can raise a lot of contradictions, but nothing can resist the radiation of a silence that is filled with love.”

The “radiation of a silence that is filled with love” encapsulates Merton’s hopes for himself as a monk and writer that his life could eventually become a more silent witness to Life's simple, underground inclusiveness, to the “hidden ground of love” that binds us all. (Jonathan Montaldo) 

Link to Merton's essay, "Day of a Stranger" is HERE.

Link to Jonathan Montaldo's "Uncaging His Own Voice" is HERE. 

the heresy of individualism

 

painting of Merton by Jim Cantrell

The heresy of individualism; thinking oneself a completely self-sufficient unit and asserting this imaginary “unity” against all others. The affirmation of the self as simply “not the other.” But when you seek to affirm your unity by denying that you have anything to do with anyone else, by negating everyone else in the universe until you come down to you: what is there left to affirm? Even if there were something to affirm, you would have no breath left with which to affirm it.

The true way is just the opposite: the more I am able to affirm others, to say “yes” to them in myself, by discovering them in myself and myself in them, the more real I am. I am fully real if my own heart says yes to everyone.

--Thomas Merton

Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, p 143

a light that is always ultimately personal

 

The following is from Jonathan Montaldo, promoter of the Merton legacy and teacher of the monastic contemplative tradition. See MONKSWORK.

Paul Evdokimov, the eastern orthodox theologian, has written that “A saint is striking because of a countenance unique in the world, because of a light that is always ultimately personal. He or She has never been seen before.” 1

Thomas Merton’s countenance, too, has never been seen before and the light from his spiritual legacy for us is ultimately personal. He will have no successors.

He wrote in his journal after a formal “Day of Recollection” on the Feast of the Guardian Angels, October 2, 1958:

“My vocation and task in this world is to keep alive all that is usefully individual and personal to me, to be a ‘contemplative’ in the full sense and to share it with others, to remain as a witness to the nobility of the private person and [the private person’s] primacy over the group.” 2

Thomas Merton’s literary vocation to love the world by speaking out to it courageously, his monastic vocation to listen intently as the world spoke back, and his whole life’s urgency to live in and for Truth, is his enduring legacy. Those who read his words with respect will honor him, now in their own time, by enacting their own vocations to “fearless speech” and by living out their own “courage for truth”. Continuing our own inner journeys toward spiritual liberty is more important than any bows we make to the dead spiritual master. 3

Honoring Thomas Merton’s compassionate transparency demands that we, who claim to hear his voice, should stand on our own feet, find the pitch of our true voices, open our lips, and sing. 4

[JM, England, 2012]]

1. Paul Evdokimov Woman and the Salvation of the World. Anthony P. Gytheiel, translator (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1994: 47-48.

2. A Search for Solitude: 221.

3. Paraphrasing a remark of Robert Cole’s in reflecting on his mentor Eric Erickson.

4. "The sense of the sacred, of the 'numinous' without which there can hardly be any real or living religion, depends entirely on our ability to transcend our own human signs, to penetrate them and pass beyond their manifest intelligibility into the darkness of mystery, to grasp the reality they can suggest but never fully contain. The mere repetition of consecrated formulas is not, therefore, holiness itself. But words are the only normal keys by which we can unlock, for one another, the doors of the sanctuary and direct one another into the Holy of Holies where each of us must enter the sacred darkness in love and in fear, to find the Lord alone.” Thomas Merton The New Man: 88

The Joy of Celebrating Thomas Merton

A view of the house where Thomas Merton was born on January 31, 1915. Prades France.

Photo by Jim Forest.

This post, celebrating Thomas Merton's birthday, has been offered by a reader, Cristóvão de S. Meneses Júnior, president of “Associação Thomas Merton”. Thank you, Cristó!

"The joy of celebrating Thomas Merton is, for a legion of admirers, an enthusiastic opportunity to give thanks to the Lord for the clues found in his books for a different spiritual path: prayer is no longer a rigid technique or static devotional practice; instead it becomes a loving way to remain in the presence of God and to be one substance with His Will."

___

THE JOY OF CELEBRATING THOMAS MERTON

The sign of Aquarius and the “last day of January” reminds us that we have already taken 106 turns around the sun since 1915, the year of a great and pointless war. It was in this space-time, “under the shadows of certain French mountains”, in little Prades, in a house on the corner of Rue du 4 Septembre and Rue du Palais-de-Justice, that the cry of artists Ruth and Owen’s first son echoed. So was born Thomas James Merton.

Sign; War; Mountain; Corner: keywords that would outline the profile of the boy born this day. Who will this boy be? What would or could stop this young man? How did he become a New Man?

We have read and reread Merton's books for decades, familiarizing ourselves with the power of his intellect and literary gift, with an enchantment by his intense and ardent inner life, and humanized by his contradictions. It is the absurd and the Grace personified: his childhood – youth - adult life is a catalytic vortex of all who look within and truly seek God.

This silent cloister prophet drew the attention of the world, writing on the most diverse subjects, anticipating essential issues in the social and ecclesial realms. His New Seeds of Contemplation, for example, planted in the Church the universal call to holiness, an intention ratified and updated by Pope Francis in the Gaudete et Exsultate (2018). His pioneering movement in the dialogue with other religious traditions and the criticisms of capitalist society's consumption reverberate in Evangelii Gaudium (2013). The Supreme Pontiff's formal recognition of the “extraordinary American” would come from the historic speech he made at the United States Congress in September 2015, when he notes that Thomas Merton “remains a source of spiritual inspiration and a guide for many people.”

The joy of celebrating Thomas Merton is, for a legion of admirers, an enthusiastic opportunity to give thanks to the Lord for the clues found in his books for a different spiritual path: prayer is no longer a rigid technique or static devotional practice; instead it becomes a loving way to remain in the presence of God and to be one substance with His Will.

It is now noticeable in Brazil, a new generation of charmed readers, and, therefore, interested in the message of the Trappist monk. Here is the secret, Merton had a gift in which he excelled: that of causing the reader a feeling of closeness and identification, providing us with the keys to his spiritual progress - which is also ours: Love as our true destiny, which must be revealed by the One we love!

The experience currently developed by the Thomas Merton Association in Brazil, and also in Portugal, of fostering reading groups through videoconference has given breath to the spiritual life of some dozens of people isolated by the pandemic. The testimonies and shares at each meeting show the depth and gratitude to the spiritual mentor: “Thomas Merton illuminates the steps towards my purpose in life”; "He has a modern view of Christianity"; "Merton represents a lighthouse for a boat long lost in a dark storm ..."; “I was touched by his restlessness”; "Merton represents a spirituality that translates the Mystery into the language of the soul"; “He is the icon of the human being rooted in God”; "It is the openness of heart and mind that fascinates me in Thomas Merton"; “Merton represents to me a contemporary spiritual master who knows the profound realities of the human being and is sensitive to the transcendent mystery”; "Merton represents to me a clearing in the dense bustle of contemporary life"; "It represents the Spirit of God breathing more time for spirituality and less of church-ism... more silence locked in my room and less hallelujah-ism, more listening to God and less of deviant worldliness from the only thing that matters."

In such bitter times, marked by successions of annoyances, Thomas Merton's legacy, as J. C. Ismael rightly points out, "deserves to be remembered by the generation that loved him and known by the one that ignores him."

May the phenomenon that emanates from the life-work-example of the Trappist monk, which unites us around Christ, be the invitation to the ball of the great cosmic dance, it will then culminate when the vastness of the entire Universe hears the eternal refrain: “Love has won, Love is victorious.”

Cristóvão de S. Meneses Júnior is president of “Associação Thomas Merton”.

Our Times are Apocalyptic

(Twitter/ICAN Australia)

“There is no need to insist that in a world where another Hitler is very possible the mere existence of nuclear weapons constitutes the most tragic and serious problem that the human race has ever had to contend with. Indeed, the atmosphere of hatred, suspicion and tension in which we all live is precisely what is needed to produce Hitlers.

“It is no exaggeration to say that our times are Apocalyptic, in the sense that we seem to have come to a point at which all the hidden, mysterious dynamism of the “history of salvation” revealed in the Bible has flowered into final and decisive crisis. The term “end of the world” may or may not be one that we are capable of understanding. But at any rate we seem to be assisting in the unwrapping of the mysteriously vivid symbols of the last book of the New Testament. In their nakedness, they reveal to us our own selves as the men whose lot it is to live in the time of a possible ultimate decision.”

Thomas Merton, Nuclear War and Christian Responsibility, an article that appeared in Commonweal Magazine

Note: On January 22, 2021, the U.N. treaty declared that the manufacture, possession, use or threat to use nuclear weapons is illegal under international law, 75 years after their development and first use. The Beginning of the End for Nuclear Weapons

Voices of Nonviolence - a blog where I explore what Nonviolence means for the person and The People.

those for whom there is no room

"Christ’s place is with those others for whom there is no room. 

His place is with those who do not belong, 

who are rejected by power, because they are regarded as weak, 

those who are discredited, 

who are denied the status of persons, tortured, exterminated. 

With those for whom there is no room, Christ is present in this world. 

He is mysteriously present in those for whom there seems to be nothing but the world at its worst…

It is in these that he hides himself, [the people] for whom there is no room.”

-- Thomas Merton

Raids on the Unspeakable (p 72-73)