Archive for the 'thomas merton' Category

Going beyond words

Published
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Ken
on October 16, 2007
in biblical interpretation, christianity, god, judging others, mysticism, religious pluralism, theology, thomas merton and tolerance
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One of my daughter’s favorite movies is The Incredibles. Since I work at home and watch her most of the time, it’s very convenient that I, too, enjoy this movie because we watch it over and over and over. I’ve started paying attention to some of the dialog and there are some very good lines. One is when Helen Parr, aka Elastigirl, visits Edna to see the new supersuits she made. Helen is unaware of everything which precipitated Edna’s making the suits and so is totally lost as Edna starts talking about them. Edna then says:

Yes, words are useless! Gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble. Too much of it, darling. Too much. That is why I show you my work. That is why you are here.

Thomas Merton, talks about the same thing in Echoing Silence:

True communication on the deepest level is more than a simple sharing of ideas, of conceptual knowledge, or formulated truth. The kind of communication that is necessary on this deep level must also be “communion” beyond the level of words, a communion in authentic experience which is shared not only on a “preverbal” level but also on a “post-verbal” level.

The “preverbal” level is that of the unspoken and indefinable “preparation,” “the predisposition” of the mind and heart, necessary for all “monastic” experience whatever.

Now, perhaps I’m stretching the point, but I would consider some religious experiences — the Eucharist, for example — to be “monastic” experiences since these are reflective, contemplative, personal, yet shared and participatory. Merton continues (with emphasis added):

This demands among other things a “freedom from automatisms and routines,” and candid liberation from external social dictates, from conventions, limitations, and mechanisms which restrict understanding and inhibit experience of the new, the unexpected. The monk who is to communicate on the level that interests us here must be not merely a punctilious observer of external traditions, but a living example of traditional and interior realization. He must be wide open to life and to new experience because he has fully utilized his own tradition and gone beyond it. This will permit him to meet a [disciple] of another, apparently remote and alien tradition, and find a common ground of verbal understanding with him. The “post-verbal” level will then, at least ideally, be that on which they both meet beyond their own words and their own understanding in the silence of an ultimate experience which might conceivably not have occurred if they had not met and spoken. This I would call “communion.” I think it is something that the deepest ground of our being cries out for, and it is something for which a lifetime of striving would not be enough.

Language is limiting. Language is controlling. Edna was unable to describe to Helen the experience and wonder of making the supersuits because there was no common ground of understanding. Helen might as well have been talking a different language altogether. Her biases and assumptions did not allow her to understand. It didn’t fit into her mental model of the world. But that does not mean that Edna’s experiences were invalid or wrong or false. There was no language that could bridge the two world-views. But the experience itself could.

And this is exactly where the trouble lies in religions. Looking at the words, it may seem, for example, Islam and Christianity are mutually exclusive. And so we use these incompatible words as dividers between the two. We demand that they say the right words about their experiences of their God. That they describe their God with just the right adjectives — the same adjectives that we use to describe our God: “God cannot be God unless God is a Triune God, eternally existing in three persons …” Only then, is their experience of their God “correct.” Furthermore, if they don’t use the correct verbiage then they are heretics and eternally damned and sometimes worse.

But let’s take the very trite example of two people witnessing an event taking place in this physical world. You will get different stories, different explanations, different emphasis. In short, incompatible, mutually exclusive words. In fact, this very idea is often used to defend the Gospels. Just look at the resurrection story and see how many “different” accounts there are and how these “different” accounts for merged.

So, if we cannot agree on the words to describe an event in this physical world, how much less can we agree on the words to describe the ineffable, numinous experience of God?? And how can we hold others at fault for using their own words which make sense to them but not us? The key is to go beyond our own traditions and meet in non-verbal communion.

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Rely on God for every thing????

Published
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Ken
on October 10, 2007
in god, jesus, money, quotes and thomas merton
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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!

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Merton on Sophia

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Ken
on October 1, 2007
in quotes, sophia and thomas merton
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The beauty of all creation is a reflection of Sophia living and hidden in creation. But it is only our reflection. And the misleading thing about beauty, created beauty, is that we expect Sophia to be simply a more intense and more perfect and more brilliant, unspoiled, spiritual revelation of the same beauty. Whereas to arrive at her beauty we must pass through an apparent negation of created beauty, and to reach her light we must realize that in comparison with created light it is darkness. But this is only because created beauty and light are ugliness and darkness compared with her. Again the whole thing is in the question of mercy, which cuts across the divisions and passes beyond every philosophical and religious ideal. For Sophia is not an ideal, not an abstraction, but the highest reality, and the highest reality must manifest herself to us not only in power but also in poverty, otherwise we never see it. Sophia is the Lady Poverty to whom St. Francis was married. And of course she dwelt with the Desert Fathers in their solitude, for it was she who brought them there and she whom they knew there. It was with her that they conversed all the time in their silence.

Thomas Merton, Echoing Silence

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“Please return to the highlighted route”

Published
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Ken
on September 20, 2007
in god, mindfulness and thomas merton
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About 6 or 7 years ago, I was driving a rental car with one of those “new fangled” GPS navigation systems. I typed in my destination and was off, dutifully following the turns dictated by the system. Near my destination, however, I made a wrong turn and the system said, “Please return to the highlighted route.” Well, I tried and tried and tried but it kept repeating, “Please return to the highlighted route. Please return to the highlighted route.” I don’t remember exactly what happened but it may have involved a power button and a large piece of folded paper with strange markings on it.

Flash forward to last week in my wife’s new car with a GPS navigation system. Again, I made a turn not on the calculated route but this time the system said, “Recalculating route … Go straight about 2 miles and turn …” Ahhh, so much better!

I’m reading Echoing Silence by Thomas Merton and, in one of his letters to Mark Van Doren, Merton says:

I can no longer see the ultimate meaning of a man’s life in terms of either “being a poet”or “being a contemplative” or even in a certain sense in “being a saint”(although that is the only thing to be). It must be something much more immediate than that. I—and every other person in the world—must say: “I have my own special, peculiar destiny which no one else ever has had or ever will have. There exists for me a particular goal, a fulfillment which must be all my own—nobody else’s—& it does not really identify that destiny to put it under some category—’poet,’ ‘monk,’ ‘hermit.’ Because my own individual destiny is a meeting, an encounter with God that He has destined for me alone. His glory in me will be to receive from me something He can never receive from anyone else—because if is a gift of His to me which he has never given to anyone else & never will. My whole life is only that—to establish that particular constant with God which is the one He has planned for my eternity!”

Many people say, along with Merton, that God has a purpose for our lives. That Merton goes further to say God receives something unique from each one of us is wonderfully non-mainstream. But in regard to this purpose for my life, I’m wondering which GPS system God is like. Is he sitting up in heaven watching me live my life and noticing all my wrong turns and yelling down at me at the top of his lungs “Turn left now. Now! Oh, you missed it, again! Please return to the highlighted route, you dumb ass.” Or is he patiently recalculating my route with each wrong turn I make?

And is he changing my destination along the way? Suppose my purpose was to enter seminary and become the next Billy Graham. Obviously I’ve missed that turn a long way back. Does my life still have a purpose? Perhaps plan B, C, or D has been invoked? Of course, God could have accounted for all my missed turns and planned my route accordingly. But wouldn’t that make my life’s purpose my plan instead of God’s plan? And are plans B, et al., secondary in importance and glory?

Perhaps my purpose is a simple one: give someone a cup of cold water or a meal; visit a sick friend; or give someone in need some clothing. I wonder if Billy Graham’s purpose was not to be the speaker that he was—perhaps that was incidental to his real purpose of feeding one hungry woman or giving a moment’s counsel to one confused man. And when I fulfill my purpose, what then?

Too many questions, I guess. Perhaps I’ll just know when I make a correct turn. Or perhaps I’ll fulfill my purpose and be none the wiser. I guess the only thing to do is to be open to and mindful of life and the world around me. If I go through life preoccupied with my self and my work and my finances and my commitments and me me me me, then I’m surely going to miss a lot of turns and a lot of opportunities. If I’m not mindful of other than me then I’ll never even see that thirsty woman over there let alone give her a drink of water.

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More on experience v. theology

Published
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Ken
on July 30, 2007
in buddhism, christianity, mysticism, quotes, theology, thomas merton and zen
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Thomas Merton, again, from Zen and the Birds of Appetite:

The best we can say is that in certain religions, Buddhism for instance, the philosophical or religious framework is of a kind that can more easily be discarded, because it has in itself a built-in “ejector,” so to speak, by which the meditator is at a certain point flung out from the conceptual apparatus into the Void. It is possible for a Zen Master to say nonchalantly to his disciple, “If you meet the Buddha, kill him!” But in Christian mysticism the question whether or not the mystic can get along without the human “form” (Gestalt) or the sacred Humanity of Christ is still hotly debated, with the majority opinion definitely maintaining the necessity for the Christ of faith to be present as ikon at the center of Christian contemplation. Here again, the question is confused by the failure to distinguish between the objective theology of Christian experience and the actual psychological facts of Christian mysticism in certain cases. And then one must ask, at what point do the abstract demands of theory take precedence over the psychological facts of experience? Or, to what extent does the theology of a theologian without experience claim to interpret correctly the “experienced theology” of the mystic who is perhaps not able to articulate the meaning of his experience in a satisfactory way?

Everyone espousing a particular theology needs to have a way to distinguish those who believe the same from those who don’t. For the mystic, there is a certain language that is shared which makes no sense to outsiders. For the “theologian without experience” the theology must take on a rigid belief system which must be intellectual since there is no experiential basis. This external theology then requires adherence to sacraments, creeds, and behaviors. This is precisely why mystics have been questionable, at best, and often outcasts. The two theologies have nothing in common and there is a one-way path of communication. The mystic can interpret the other theology in terms of her experiences and thereby gain from participating in the sacraments, creeds, and behaviors. But there is no such understanding going the other direction. The non-experiencing theologian cannot understand the mystic’s theology any more than he can understand a joke told in a foreign language. Therefore, he has no ruler by which to measure the mystical theology’s closeness to his own. The easiest thing to do is condemn her.

And a little later …

On the other hand, let us repeat that we must not neglect the great importance of experience in Christianity. But Christian experience always has a special modality, due to the fact that it is inseparable from the mystery of Christ and the collective life of the Church, the Body of Christ. To experience the mystery of Christ mystically or otherwise is always to transcend the merely individual psychological level and to “experience theologically with the Church” (sentire cum Ecclesia). In other words, this experience must always be in some way reducible to a theological form that can be shared by the rest of the Church or that shows that it is a sharing of what the rest of the Church experiences. There is therefore in the recording of Christian experiences a natural tendency to set them down in language and symbols that are easily accessible to other Christians. This may perhaps sometimes mean an unconscious translation of the inexpressible into familiar symbols that are always at hand ready for immediate use.

Two things for me here but the second will be the subject of its own post. First is the idea that since “experience must always be … reducible to a theological form that can be shared” then there is “a natural tendency to set them down in language and symbols that are easily accessible to other Christians.”

I agree that if you are going to share experience with everyone then it must be reduced down to something concrete that can be passed around. And this is somewhat of a problem for me because by solidifying an experience, you lose so much and gain so little because it’s impossible for someone to partake in your experience who has not had the same experience (or similar) herself. Just imagine trying to share the experience of the color red with someone who has been blind since birth.

But making it “easily accessible” is the real problem for me. If it’s easy then it’s not so precious. I’ve talked on this topic before but I’m coming to realize that this is one of the bigger “issues” I take with Evangelical and Fundamental Christianity. (I hesitate using such adjectives as I know there is a wide range of Evangelicals and Fundamentalists and what I’m saying does not apply to everyone. What I really mean to do is describe the type of Christianity/Christian I am referring to by my description. The old “if the shoe fits …” and it’s up to you to decide if I’m referring to you or not.) But back on point. “Easily accessible” requires a formula. It does not allow for differing experiences of the same thing where these experiences are not trivially reconciled. Everyone must follow the formula or risk being labeled as a heretic.

This leads to legalism and fanaticism, and lends itself extremely well to hypocrisy. As long as you appear to be following the formula, toeing the line, then you are in the right. If you deviate from the formula, it is obvious and are a prime candidate for rebuke or retaliation from those in the right. Worse still, those who only appear to be correct are the ones who most vehemently require absolute compliance from the rest of us for it somehow alleviates the self doubt they secretly harbor. It’s their shadow being projected on others.

It is in such a legalistic context that the sacred symbols of our experience of Christ become the battle grounds of theologians who cannot admit the validity of formulae different from their own. The precise meaning and interpretation of the sacraments, for example, overshadow the experience and actually insulate the Christian from the full experience of Christ. The focus is so strongly fixated on the external details that the experience itself is lost. Whether the bread and wine actually become the body and blood of Jesus or whether they represent the body and blood or whatever should be a distant second in importance to the experience itself of partaking in the death and resurrection of The Christ.

Furthermore, the “easily accessible” formula not only insulates but actually works to prevent the experience because the experiencer has outside constraints on how the experience is to be realized. What one does and how one thinks is dictated by the formula and so one is not free to experience the sacraments, for example, apart from the well-defined, specific, ritual set down by the theologians. It’s like painting by number where you are told exactly what color to use where. That’s not really painting at all. There’s no feeling in it. There’s no connection with the work. There’s no real experience of painting.

The second point is the “set them down in language and symbols” part. Merton has an excellent passage on how we use language which is germane to this point and will be posted later.

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Merton pegs Fundamentalism

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Ken
on July 19, 2007
in christian fundamentalism, faith, fear, fundamentalism, judging others, theology and thomas merton
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Thomas Merton from Zen and the Birds of Appetite:

At the same time, Christian experience itself will be profoundly affected by the idea of revelation that the Christian himself will entertain. For example, if revelation is regarded simply as a system of truths about God and an explanation of how the universe came into existence, what will eventually happen to it, what is the purpose of Christian life, what are its moral norms, what will be the rewards of the virtuous, and so on, then Christianity is in effect reduced to a world view, at times a religious philosophy and little more, sustained by a more or less elaborate cult, by a moral discipline and a strict code of Law. Experience of the inner meaning of Christian revelation will necessarily be distorted and diminished in such a theological setting. What will such experience be? Not so much a living theological experience of the presence of God in the world and in mankind through the mystery of Christ, but rather a sense of security in one’s own correctness: a feeling of confidence that one has been saved, a confidence which is based on the reflex awareness that one holds the correct view of the creation and purpose of the world and that one’s behavior is of a kind to be rewarded in the next life. Or, perhaps, since few can attain this level of self-assurance, then the Christian experience becomes one of anxious hope—a struggle with occasional doubt of the “right answers,” a painful and constant effort to meet the severe demands of morality and law, and a somewhat desperate recourse to the sacraments which are there to help the weak who must constantly fall and rise again.

Is this Christian Fundamentalism or what! The Bible is “absolute truth” and we should be most concerned with who’s getting it right and who’s getting it wrong. Jesus is coming back any day now so screw the environment. Morality is dictated by God in the Bible and everyone, regardless of religious beliefs, should follow this moral “law.” Christians should focus on what they’ll get in heaven. The more they are persecuted on earth the greater their reward. This gives them a “license” to do whatever they want because they perceive all persecution (even that inflicted on them for being just plain jerks) as building up rewards in the hereafter. The Fundamentalist’s Christianity is a world view and nothing more. It is legalism at it’s finest.

As Merton says, “experience of the inner meaning of Christian revelation will necessarily be distorted and diminished.” Despite their bully tactics and overall hubris, you really must feel sorry for these poor souls. They totally miss the point yet insist they are the point. But this insistence comes at a price: as a Christian, they are told that they should have “a feeling of confidence that one has been saved, a confidence which is based on the reflex awareness that one holds the correct view of the creation and purpose of the world and that one’s behavior is of a kind to be rewarded in the next life.” Yet, many cannot “attain this level of self-assurance” and it is precisely because it is out of their reach that they put on the show of confidence.

The code of conduct for the Fundamentalist is a bar set too high for it dictates not only overt actions but covert thoughts and motives which are damn near impossible to control yet extremely easy to fake. They truly are like the child who lashes out at others to compensate, in some futile way, for the abuse they receive at home. The Fundamentalist cannot live up to expectations and so points out others’ flaws to draw attention away from themselves.

And because they are focused on all this finger pointing and name calling, they miss the “living theological experience of the presence of God in the world and in mankind through the mystery of Christ.” God is too busy inflicting punishment on the sinners to be present in the world. Christ is not a mystery to them because they have him totally figured out and are able to weed out sinner from saint with their “x-ray” vision (which really doesn’t penetrate much past a person’s hair, tie, and Bible translation).

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Experience v. theology

Published
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Ken
on July 17, 2007
in buddhism, christianity, mysticism, theology, thomas merton and zen
. 1 Comment

I recently finished Thomas Merton’s Zen and the Birds of Appetite. Extremely highly recommended. Especially good was his introduction to Wu’s A Christian Look at Zen. Merton must have been a psychic because he addresses so many questions that I’m asking but he definitely is biased towards Christianity. Although I think that last statement may stem from my not having experienced Christianity as he did. He uses phrases like “mystery of Christ” and “word of the Cross” and I can’t help but wonder how deeply he felt these and how shallow the words are for me. But in any case, Merton wrote …

It cannot be repeated too often: in understanding Buddhism it would be a great mistake to concentrate on the “doctrine,” the formulated philosophy of life, and to neglect the experience, which is absolutely essential, the very heart of Buddhism. This is in a sense the exact opposite of the situation in Christianity. For Christianity begins with revelation. Though it would be misleading to classify this revelation simple as a “doctrine” and an “explanation” (it is far more than that—the revelation of God Himself in the mystery of Christ) it is nevertheless communicated to us in words, in statements, and everything depends on the believer’s accepting the truth of these statements.

Therefore Christianity has always been profoundly concerned with these statements: with the accuracy of their transmission from the original sources, with the precise understanding of their exact meaning, with the elimination and indeed the condemnation of false interpretations. At times this concern has been exaggerated almost to the point of an obsession, accompanied by arbitrary and fanatical insistence on hairsplitting distinctions and the purest niceties of theological detail.

This obsession with doctrinal formulas, juridical order and ritual exactitude has often made people forget that the heart of Catholicism, too, is a living experience of unity in Christ which far transcends all conceptual formulations. What too often has been overlooked, in consequence, is that Catholicism is the taste and experience of eternal life: “We announce to the you the eternal life which was with the Father and has appeared to us. What we have seen and have heard we announce to you, in order that you also may have fellowship with us and that our fellowship may be with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ.” (I John 1:2-3) Too often the Catholic has imagined himself obliged to stop short at a mere correct and external belief expressed in good moral behavior, instead of entering fully into the life of hope and love consummated by union with the invisible God “in Christ and in the Spirit,” thus fully sharing in the Divine Nature. (Ephesians 2:18, 2 Peter 1:4, Col. 1:9-17, I John 4:12)

Some of the blogs I pay attention to have been spending a lot of time on points of theology that I just can’t see the relevance of. Whether infant baptism is good/bad/indifferent. The “mechanics” of how Jesus’ death saves. Whether homosexuality is good/bad/indifferent. I don’t understand why people would spend so much time on these “trivial” theological points when they are so far from the point. To me, the only thing theology like that does is divide. The only result of saying “infant baptism is necessary and is proper and does such and such for the child and here are a bunch of verses that prove my point” is that you separate yourself from other Christians who do not hold the same view. When I was growing up in an IFCA church (that’s Independent Fundamental Churches of America), I truly thought that all Lutherans, all Episcopalians, all Catholics, most Methodists, some Presbyterians were going to hell. In sixth grade, I told a classmate who was Catholic that he was not a Christian. All based on differing points of theology.

Too many Christians have forgotten that Christianity is “a living experience of unity in Christ which far transcends all conceptual formulations.” Being a Christian has been reduced to a series of bulleted points that you must initial to show that you claim to believe them. And you have to learn to defend these points with chapter and verse so that you can persuade all heretics you may meet. This is what “defending your faith” has become — quibbling over insignificant points of theology.

Christianity should be the “entering fully into the life of hope and love consummated by union with the invisible God.” How can that be reduced to theology? It’s an experience that must be experienced first hand. It can’t be talked about and reduced to formulas. It’s like smelling a rose, watching a sunset, having an orgasm. You just have to experience it yourself or else you have absolutely no idea what it’s all about.

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“The Christ we seek is within us”

Published
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Ken
on June 5, 2007
in christianity, god, jesus, mysticism, quotes and thomas merton
. 1 Comment

I tried to talk about this idea in previous posts here and here. In my recent “coincidental” book purchase of Thomas Merton’s The Hidden Ground of Love: Letters on Religious Experience and Social Concerns (yes, another quote from Merton!) he talks about the same idea in a letter to D.T. Suzuki:

The essentially Christian element in all this is the fact that it is centered in Christ. But what does that mean? Does it mean conformity to a social and conventional image of Christ? Then we become involved and alienated in another projection: a Christ who is not Christ but the symbol of a certain sector of society, a certain group, a certain class, a certain culture . . . Fatal. The Christ we seek is within us, in our inmost self, is our inmost self, and yet infinitely transcends ourselves. We have to be “found in Him” and yet be perfectly ourselves and free from the domination of any image of Him other than Himself. You see, that is the trouble with the Christian world. It is not dominated by Christ (which would be perfect freedom), it is enslaved by images and ideas of Christ that are creations and projections of men and stand in the way of God’s freedom. But Christ Himself is in us as unknown and unseen. We follow Him, we find Him (it is like the cow-catching pictures) and then He must vanish and we must go along without Him at our side. Why? Because He is even closer that that. He is ourself.

I think there’s too much emphasis on God being “out there.” We as poor sinners cannot reach way up high to touch God except through Jesus Christ. But even after we’ve done that, God is still “out there” and we are still “down here” and Christ is still “some where” acting as mediator. There’s no identification with God or Christ. Sure, we have the Holy Spirit indwelling us but no one really knows what that means today. “Christ … is within is, in our inmost self, is our inmost self.” I think the difficulty with this concept is that it changes the way we must look at others. As Jesus said, “whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.” Now, if “the least of these” is Christ, then we are in a world of trouble.

Merton goes even further than I did in my posts. He goes beyond the identification. He goes to the total consummation. After we identify with Christ, we then consume him (”This is my body …?”) and he becomes part of us. But even more than part of us. He is integrated into us so completely that we can’t tell where we end and he starts. We’ve become one — the symbolism of marriage — so that there are no longer two but only one.

The goal of every Christian is to able to recognize that integration — in ourselves and in others. The goal is to not see me and you but to see GmOeD and GyOoDu and to recognize the three-sided equality of you-me-God. If we all did that, we would not go to war. We would not let people starve. We would not pollute our bodies or the environment. Obeying God’s law would be first-nature because it would be our law. We would be totally, completely, 100% free to do whatever we wanted because our wants would be perfect wants — the wants of God. God’s will would, surely, be done on earth as it is in heaven.

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It pays to pay attention

Published
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Ken
on June 4, 2007
in mindfulness and thomas merton
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We were in LA a few weeks ago visiting my wife’s brother. While there, I happened to notice two people reading books by or about Thomas Merton. All I saw was the name on the cover. For some reason, I jotted down the name and thought about looking him up. After we got back to KC, I was browsing one of the local bookstores and on my way out I happened to notice a Thomas Merton book on display — The Hidden Ground of Love: Letters on Religious Experience and Social Concerns. Well, without a second thought I bought it. And it was the best $7 I’ve spent in a long time. As you may have noticed, I’m quoting Merton quite a lot in the blog. I’ve read his letters to D.T. Suzuki which are wonderful.

So, it just goes to show you how important it is to be aware. My finding this book was a total “coincidence” … or was it?

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That, not what, God is

Published
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Ken
on June 3, 2007
in god, mysticism and thomas merton
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“It seems that the most advanced scientific approaches to reality (for instance in physics) seem to exclude the rigid and dogmatic approach to the world and here eventually there may be a meeting with the highest spiritual notions. This remains perhaps for the future. But in the meantime, the struggle to establish a fixed concept of the divine essence that will state clearly “what he is” seems to me to be misleading. It is true that such statements can be made in their place, but they do not really solve anything because our experience of God tells us that he is but not what he is. We tend to experience him as one whom we do not know.”

Thomas Merton, in a letter to Martin Lings
from The Hidden Ground of Love: Letters on Religious Experience and Social Concerns

 

(Note: this was penned in 1964)

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