Photograph by Thomas Merton from louie louie.
Contemplation is the highest expression of man’s intellectual and spiritual life. It is that life itself, fully awake, fully active, fully aware that it is alive. It is spiritual wonder. It is spontaneous awe at the sacredness of life, of being. It is gratitude for life, for awareness, and for being. It is a vivid realization of the fact that life and being in us proceed from an invisible, transcendent and infinitely abundant Source. Contemplation is, above all, an awareness of the reality of that Source.
One cannot begin to face the real difficulties of the life of prayer and meditation unless one is first perfectly content to be a beginner and really experience himself (or herself) as one who knows little or nothing, and has a desperate need to learn the bare rudiments. Those who think they “know” from the beginning will never, in fact, come to know anything… We do not want to be beginners. But let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything else but beginners, all our life.
To deliver oneself up, hand oneself over, entrust oneself completely to the silence of a wide landscape of woods and hill, or sea, or desert: to sit still while the sun comes up over the land and fills its silences with light. To pray and work in the morning and to labor in meditation in the evening when night falls upon that land and when the silence fills itself with darkness and with stars. This is a true and special vocation. There are few who are willing to belong completely to such silence, to let it soak into their bones, to breathe nothing but silence, to feed on silence, and to turn the very substance of their life into a living and vigilant silence.
In silence we face and admit the gap between the depth of our being, which we consistently ignore, and the surface which is untrue to our own reality. We recognize the need to be at home with ourselves in order that we may go out to meet others, not just with a mask of affability, but with real commitment and authentic love. That is the reason for choosing silence.
The things we really need come to us only as gifts, and in order to receive them as gifts, we have to be open. In order to be open we have to renounce ourselves, in a sense we have to die to our image of ourselves, our autonomy, our fixation upon our self-willed destiny. We have to be able to relax the psychic and spiritual cramp which knots us in the painful, vulnerable, helpless “I” that is all we know of ourselves.
Contemplation cannot construct a new world by itself.
Contemplation does not feed the hungry; it does not clothe the naked…
and it does not return the sinner to peace, truth, and union with God.
But without contemplation we cannot see what we do…
Without contemplation we cannot understand
the significance of the world in which we must act.
Without contemplation we remain small, limited, divided, partial;
we adhere to the insufficient,
permanently united to our narrow group and its interests,
losing sight of justice and charity,
seized by the passions of the moments…
Without contemplation,
without the intimate, silent,
secret pursuit of truth through love,
our action loses itself in the world and becomes dangerous.
~ Thomas Merton
sketch by the author
Courtesy of The Beauty We Love.
Source: beautywelove.blogspot.com
The “spark” which is my true self is the flash of the Absolute recognizing itself in me.
“… I putter about the hermitage, make the bed, wash the breakfast dishes, sweep the porch; and something begins to order itself inside me as I order my external world. The ordering and puttering become a kind of prayer, a way of attending to the human which is a way of attending to the divine, charged as we are and the world is with the presence of God. Domestic chores also become simply something to do. One cannot pray and meditate unendingly. There is a rhythm to life lived anywhere that calms the heart if we surrender to the necessities of the world around us and the world within.”
—Thomas Merton
(many thanks to Luke at the Parabola Newsletter for this - I love it because it echoes one of the main themes in the book I have recently read, “Everyday Zen” by Charlotte Joko Beck)
Thank you for sharing this, dhammanovice. Just wanted to let you know that this was originally posted over at the sacred space: The Beauty We Love. In the newsletter, the photograph links there.
Source: dhammanovice
A parabola is one of the most dynamic forms in nature. It is the curve of a bowl, the path of a ball soaring upward and down to earth again. The founder of this magazine decided it was a good name for a journal devoted to the search for meaning, which often goes outward, then back home again along a different path.
