A Contemplative Moment: on Contemplation and Detachment

True contemplation is the work of a love that transcends all satisfaction and all experience to rest in the night of pure and naked faith. This faith brings us close to God that it may be said to touch and grasp Him as He is, though in darkness. And the effect of that contact is often a deep peace that overflows into the lower faculties of the soul and thus constitutes an "experience." Yet that experience or feeling of peace always remains an accident of contemplation, so that the absence of this "sense" does not mean that our contact with God has ceased.

To become attached to the "experience" of peace is to threaten the true and essential and vital union of our soul with God above sense and experience in the darkness of a pure and perfect love.

And so, although this sense of peace may be a sign that we are united to God it is still only a sign --- an accident. The substance of the union may be had without any such sense, and sometimes when we have no feeling of peace or of God's presence He is more truly present to us than he has ever been before. If we attach too much importance to these acccidentals we will run the risk of losing what is essential, which is the perfect acceptance of God's will, whatever our feelings happen to be.

But if I think the most important thing in life is a feeling of interior peace I will be all the more disturbed when I notice I do not have it. And sense I cannot directly produce the feeling in myself whenever I want to, the disturbance will increase with the failure of my efforts. Finally I will lose my patience by refusing to accept this situation which I cannot control and so I will lose the one important reality, union with the will of God, without which true peace is completely impossible.

Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton

A Contemplative Moment: On Distractions

Prayer and Love are learned in the hour when prayer has become impossible and your heart has turned to stone.

If you have never had any distractions you don't know how to pray. For the secret of prayer is a hunger for God and for the vision of God, a hunger that lies far deeper than the level of language or affection. And a [person] whose memory and imagination are persecuting [her] with a crowd of useless or even evil thoughts and images may sometimes be forced to pray far better in the depths of [her] murdered heart, than one whose mind is swimming with clear concepts and brilliant purposes and easy acts of love.

. . . But in all these things it is the will to pray that is the essence of prayer, and the desire to find God and to see Him and to love Him is the one thing that matters. If you have desired to know Him and love Him you have already done what was expected of you, and it is much better to desire God without being able to think clearly of Him, than to have marvelous thoughts about Him without desiring to enter into union with His will.

"Distractions" Seeds of Contemplation

by Thomas Merton, OSCO



A Contemplative Moment: Our Entire Availability

You will always remember how privileged you are that God should love your soul, and as time goes on you will appreciate this all the more. . . . Humble and detached, go into the desert. For God awaiting you there, you bring nothing worth having, except your entire availability. . . .He is calling you to live on friendly terms with him, nothing else.

The Hermitage Within, Introduction

A Contemplative Moment: Listening to the Word

Listening to the Word

"The Word is very near you, it is in your mouth and in your heart" Nearer even than that, because you yourself are his creative word of love. You know God and can listen to him because you are his image, his icon, because he has mirrored himself in your being and his creative word is even now bringing out that likeness, and giving you to yourself. Your obedient listening to to his word is at its most fundamental in this humble, loving acceptance of yourself  as his word.

The word within you is your own center, your deepest reality and your freedom. It is God's utterance of your name, the name that reveals to you your destiny and meaning and all that you can become, as Jesus spoke Mary Magdalene's name to her in the garden. There is a growing sense of identification between ourselves and this word, and in this we are sharing in our fumbling way, in the experience of Jesus.

He is the Word, yet as man he had to listen, and still does listen, to the Word that he is. His listening was made perfect in his Easter reality where obedience meant only union, freedom, and joy. This is what the gift of the Spirit is, this consciousness of identification with the Word within: this is being a child of God, and we cannot but cry, "Abba!" Like Jesus you have to listen and listen. It will take you all your life to hear the Father's word of love for you; indeed, it will take you all your eternity.

by Sister Maria Boulding, OSB

Stanbrook Abbey, England

in The Coming of God

A Contemplative Moment: On Simplicity

 

 

It is very hard to be an idealized hermit. It is much more realistic to be an ordinary one. I am sure Merton sometimes laughed at his own folly [the folly of destroying his own solitude almost the moment permission for it was granted]. He was a sociable hermit who loved his guests almost as much as he loved his solitude.

 

One day I was quietly sitting in prayer once again lamenting my inability to acquire the simple lifestyle I felt essential to the solitary.  I felt a demanding voice within me saying, Stop. Just stop. Stop trying. Stop creating. Stop evading. Simply be. Be human. Be vulnerable. Be a failure. That is simplicity.

 

 

From, Silent Dwellers, Embracing the Solitary Life

by

Barbara Errako Taylor

A Contemplative Moment: The World of Silence

Silence is not simply what happens when we stop talking. It is more than the negative renunciation of language; it is more than simply a condition we can produce at will. When language ceases, silence begins. But it does not begin because language ceases. The absence simply makes the presence of Silence more apparent. Silence is an autonomous phenomenon . . . it is . . .an independent whole subsisting in and through itself. It is creative as language is creative; and it is formative of human beings as language is formative, but not in the same degree. Silence belongs to the basic structure of man.

Silence is nothing merely negative; it is not the mere absence of speech. It is positive, a complete world in itself. Silence has greatness simply because it is. It is, and that is its greatness, its pure existence. There is no beginning to silence and no end: it seems to have its origins in the time when everything was still pure Being. It is like uncreated, everlasting Being. When Silence is present, it is as though nothing but silence had ever existed.

Where silence is, man is observed by silence. Silence looks at man more than man looks at silence. Man does not put silence to the test; silence puts man to the test. One cannot imagine a world in which there is nothing but language and speech, but one can imagine a world where there is nothing but silence. Silence contains everything within itself. It is not waiting for anything; it is always wholly present and it completely fills out the space in which it appears.

The World of Silence by Max Picard

A Contemplative Moment: Entering the Silence

Entering the Silence

 A commitment to silence is a commitment to truth. The truth is found first in the truth of sensing. Not forgetful sensing, but being present in our sensing. When we do, our sight is clearer, our smelling keener, our touching more intimate. The experience is not one of stronger acuity of the senses but rather of a sensing pervaded with the holiness of the world. Commitment is the best place to start with Silence. It is then possible to move to the depths and the heights, but if we try to go to these regions first, we are assured only of illusion.

The most basic experience of Silence is intimacy. We feel an intimacy with the world, as if we are within everything around us rather than behind or alongside things that we are then looking at. This mantle of touch brings us to the living truth of our being. We know who we are in a completely non-self-conscious way. We feel how we, in our individuality, are part of a vast and mysterious world process. And when we cultivate Silence to the point that we are consciously within it rather than imagining that it is in us, we cannot be other than we are. The imagination of it being within us emanates from the loss of touch of Silence. . .Silence keeps us intimately bound with the truth of our being, constantly conveying to us in a bodily way that our individual and unique presence as soul, spirit, and body intermingles with the world, and at the same time, lives a free and independent existence. Illusion and ego-fantasy begin with forgetting this intimacy.

from Silence: the Mystery of Wholeness, "Entering the Silence"

by Robert Sardello

A Contemplative Moment: Finding the Face of God in Others

"St Teresa of Avila used to say that to pray is to treat God like a friend. The essence of prayer is to hear not only the voice of Christ, but the voice of each person I meet, in whom Christ also addresses me. His voice comes to me in every human voice, and his face is infinitely varied It is present in the face of the wayfarer on the road to Emmaus, in the gardener speaking to Mary Magdalen; and it is present in my next door neighbor. God became incarnate so that man might contemplate God's face in every face. Perfect prayer seeks this presence of Christ and recognizes it in every human face. The unique image of Christ is the icon, but every human face is an icon of Christ, discovered by a prayerful person."

by  Evdokimov cited by Catherine de Hueck Doherty in Poustinia

A Contemplative Moment: The Silence of Solitude

The Silence of Solitude

"Solitude has nothing to do with existential neurosis, but is rather a creative search for the flame of love that burns in God's heart. . . .What occupies the center. . .is the existential solitude of God himself. This is what the human heart wants to absorb and this is where it wants to rest. The eremitic solitude is in no case a fruitless and spiritually empty isolation, a cold indifference toward people and the world, or a selfish passiveness. Just the opposite, it is a space of redemption, full of spiritual life and meant to accept and change any human distress, sorrow, or fear."

Fr Cornelius Wencel, Er Cam: The Eremitic Life

A Contemplative Moment: Love is not Coercive

“And because God's love [God's very Self] is uncoercive and treasures our freedom - if above all he wants us to love him, then we must be left free not to love him - we are free to resist it, deny it, crucify it finally, which we do again and again. This is our terrible freedom, which love refuses to overpower so that, in this, the greatest of all powers, God's power, is itself powerless.”

 

Frederick Buechner 



A Contemplative Moment: On Silence and Solitude

In eremitic spirituality silence does not exclude speaking and does not discount meetings and dialogues. What is aimed at is bringing harmony between the heart and the mind, between the spirit and the body, and eventually between God and man. Silence sets us free from the burden of words that are banal and meaningless, from a humdrum that disturbs the true essence of the word. A human word, when it comes from the deep silence of the heart, causes a creative anxiety in everyone who listens to it. It becomes the word of a prophet, proclaiming eternity.

The rigor of solitude --- the second pillar of eremitic ascesis --- does not mean escaping and isolating oneself, and it is not misanthropy of any kind. The hermit wants to meet and confront himself in solitude in order to identify his heart's deceitfulness and to get rid of it. The choice to live in solitude is surely the choice to leave the humdrum of the worldly marketplace, but the character of such a decision is not negative. The hermit does not aim at running away from the world and its affairs and at finding a safe shelter somewhere there in the wilderness. It is not right to consider him a fearful and frustrated fellow, a runaway who is afraid of confronting his self. Solitude has nothing to do with existential neurosis, but it is rather a creative search for the flame of love that burns in God's heart.

Fr Cornelius Wencel, Er Cam  The Eremitic Life

A Contemplative Moment: On the Experience of Existential Dread

Existential Dread

Dread is an expression of our insecurity in this earthly life, a realization that we are never and can never be completely "sure" in the sense of possessing a definitive and established spiritual status. It means that we cannot any longer hope in ourselves, in our wisdom, our virtues, our fidelity. We see too clearly that all that is "ours" is nothing, and can completely fail us. In other words, we no longer rely on what we "have," what has been given by our past, what has been required. We are open to God and his mercy in the inscrutable future and our trust is entirely in his grace, which will support our liberty in the emptiness where we will confront unforeseen decisions. Only when we have descended in dread to the center of our own nothingness, by his grace and guidance, can we be led by him, in his own time, to find him in losing ourselves. . . .This deep dread must be seen for what it is: not as punishment, but as purification and grace. Indeed it is a great gift of God, for it is the precise point of our encounter with his fullness.

Thomas Merton, OCSO, Contemplative Prayer 

A Contemplative Moment: The Still Point

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;

Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,

But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,

Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,

Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,

There would be no dance, and there is only the dance. 

T.S. Eliot

A Contemplative Moment: The Silence of Solitude

Solitude

The truest solitude is not something outside you, not an absence of men or of sound around you; it is an abyss opening up in the center of your own soul.

And this abyss of solitude is created by a hunger that will never be satisfied by any created thing.

The only way to find solitude is by hunger and thirst and sorrow and poverty and desire, and the man who has found solitude is empty, as if he had been emptied by death.

He has advanced beyond all horizons. There are no directions left in which to travel. And this is a country whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. You do not find it by travelling but by standing still.

Yet it is in this loneliness that the deepest activities begin. It is here that you discover act without motion, labor that is profound repose, vision in obscurity, and, beyond all desire, a fulfillment whose limits extend to infinity.

Thomas Merton, OCSO, Seeds of Contemplation