Found this on The Dish today. Merton keeps on giving ...
“There must be a time of day when the man who makes plans forgets his plans, and acts as if he had no plans at all.
There must be a time of day when the man who has to speak falls very silent. And his mind forms no more propositions, and he asks himself: Did they have a meaning?
There must be a time when the man of prayer goes to pray as if it were the first time in his life he had ever prayed; when the man of resolutions puts his resolutions aside as if they had all been broken, and he learns a different wisdom: distinguishing the sun from the moon, the stars from the darkness, the sea from the dry land, and the night sky from the shoulder of a hill,” – Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island.
Beth, I'm catching up on the blogs. I like this one. It is so hard not to have plans, even in meditation there are plans that come and go, sometimes about the meditation itself. I like Fr Louie's advice nonetheless. In particular, the last lines encourage mindfulness. The second paragraph reminds me of Lax's "waiting".
ReplyDeleteI'm starting to realize that letting go of plans (and thoughts in general, they are always some kind of planning or manipulation of data of some sort for me) can happen at any time - not just times of meditation - but any time. The more I notice myself thinking and then "not-think", the more I get pulled into a more silent and embracing reality that is somehow all around me. Lax is a master at pulling one into this kind of astute consciousness. Sometimes I think that too much "study" or even "practice" of meditation is misleading. I think that's probably why Merton never said much about the practice of meditation.
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