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| Early winter, 1967 - photo by Ralph Eugene Meatyard |
"The poet and/or contemplative becomes herself a new word for God. In the act of challenge and suspension of the will, of the controlling ego, the life, the concrete identity of the poet and the contemplative, becomes itself Word, becomes itself a communication. It is God acting. Merton's own interest in the Eastern Christian tradition justifies some connections being made between this vision of the poet and the contemplative and the deep-rooted Eastern Christian idea that the 'logos' of each item in the universe is the utterance of the Logos of God in a particular and unique way. And I think back again to the letter to Mark van Doren: [God's] glory in me will be to receive from me something he can never receive from anyone else because it is a gift of his to me which he has never given to anyone else and never will.'
"We are to be 'new words for God' in that sense. And we celebrate Merton partly because of the belief, which I think most Christians share, that the lives of certain people will become, in a very particular sense, 'words for God." This life, this identity, this face, this voice, this 'tonality' of being, becomes a word from God to us, a word God addresses to us."
- Rowan Williams, A Silent Action - Engagements with Thomas Merton, p. 50
Real intelligence is tacit or intrinsically wordless living existence.
ReplyDeleteOur native state of Being is Happiness,Freedom, Pleasure and Delight.
All of your life should be Delight, and when you are so sponataneously Delightful, then every moment of this being, all of its farting and sexing and speaking and eating will be the Delight of God, because it is!
None of this arises separate from God. The notion that it does is a false message. There is not now nor has there ever been the slighest separation between any appearance and the Great One. All of it, and all of its absurdities exist in the Blissful Starry God.
The summation of all this chaotic desiring is the Cosmos. God is the Cosmos. God is the Truth of it, the Substance of it, the Condition of it. God always stands in place as pure Delight, as Love, as Self-Radiant Being, which is also paradoxically our real State and Condition.
God is not elsewhere. All of space contains all of the Truth. Every fraction of matter and every part of light, if penetrated, reveals the Absolute Divine Condition. That which is to be Realized is absolutely and eternally Present, and Omnipresent, All-Pervading. It need not be sought elsewhere. It need not be sought in a particular place inside ourselves or in the world.
The dogma that God is to be sought (and found) within is an expression of an unexamined philosophical point of view. God is no more within, than in the room.
Much clear seeing and knowing. Thank you.
Delete(Why do I forget this and fall into my exile mode again and again?) Why do I need, so much, the love and care of my fellow human beings? My little piece of chaotic desiring includes anguish, longing, tears.