Punctum Saliens

Thomas Merton, in Echoing Silence, writes:

Naturally, while sometimes you are very quiet and happy because God is very obviously with you, with a presence & blessedness you never imagined possible, at other times this is not so. Then you try to pray or think of Christ and your mind instead of filling with peace, fills with slogans, He-she jokes, movies so bad you had forgotten them by the self-protective work of your own subconscious mind. You think of million dollar advertising ideas, and this makes you very ashamed, and bored, & disgusted. This is a trial common to our life, & has good effects, one of the principal of which is to make you love God not only for His obvious gifts, but realizing clearly, by His apparent absence, how infinitely preferable He is to everything else. That this absence is only apparent is clear from St. John of the Cross, and all the others, & everybody here knows it perfectly well, and really, you feel bad some days, but it is nothing to the bad days you had outside, in the world.

This really stopped in my tracks when I read this: “how infinitely preferable He is to everything else.” According to Merton it’s not a tough decision with God coming in at 51%. It’s a hands down victory. God is infinitely preferable to everything else!! How many of us can say that? I can’t. If we saw God as infinitely preferable to a satisfying job, fashion, a new romance, football, financial security, sex, coffee, the latest high-tech gadget, then Jesus’ call to sell our possessions, leave our families, and suffer injury & injustice would be a no-brainer.

Then Merton says that the bad days when God seems absent are “nothing to the bad days you had outside, in the world.” That’s another tough one. If I think about the worst days of my life, I’m not sure that the days I was pining for God would make the list. Now, I had bad days where God was absent. Believe you me. I remember begging God, pleading with him to make himself known to me. He didn’t and eventually I served him with divorce papers. But were those the worst days I’ve experienced? I don’t think so.

Then Merton continues:

Also, as soon as this is done with, your mind unexpectedly fills up with the presence of God twice as real and twice as holy as before. For another result of these temptations is to make you very docile, very detached from your own opinions and judgments & way of doing things, and then you rely on God for the smallest things, for every thing. And this is peace, because God gives everybody everything, & the only reason each person doesn’t have more is that he gets in God’s way, trying to get things with our own dumb will.

Docile and detached from our own opinions and judgments. Hmmmmm. In how many people do I see this? It seems to me that the greatest self-proclaimed Christians are some of the most opinionated and judgmental people around. And how many of us rely on God for every thing? I know I don’t. Hell, if I relied on God for every thing I’d quit my job and blog 16 hours a day. Instead we got to get up and make the donuts. Money doesn’t grow on trees. The car ain’t gonna fix itself.

But can you imagine relying on God for every thing? Just think about that. That’s got to be like being a kid on summer vacation again. Mom makes your breakfast, lunch, and dinner. No job. No school. Dad buys your clothes. You get driven everywhere. All you have to do is play and watch TV. If that’s not peace, I don’t know what is. But the trick is really and truly relying on someone else. For every thing. For most of us, our control-freak nature takes over and tries to do God’s job. Then all we end up doing is worrying and all that ends up doing us giving us heartburn, insomnia, and ulcers.

Oh, to have faith. Life would be so much easier!