Thomas Merton: Session 1

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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James Finley (0:08)

Greetings, I'm Jim Finley. Welcome to Turning to the Mystics.

Welcome to this first session of this series of explorations we're titling Turning to the Mystics for Spiritual Guidance.

And in our sessions together, I'll be sharing with you here how I've come to experience and understand the contemplative mystical dimensions of the Christian faith, one with the contemplative mystical lineage of all the world's great religions that I was introduced to and immersed in in the years I spent as a monk in the monastery, in which I've continued to try to be faithful to in my day-by-day life out here in the world.

And what I want to start here is our first mystic with some teachings, some sessions devoted to Thomas Merton, who I understood when I was with him to see it as a living mystic in this living lineage. And so he's my teacher. I mean, I went there at 18 years old, and I just sat at his feet. I mean, I just saw myself sitting in this ancient lineage of mystical Christianity, open to these things. And so here I am today sharing this. So this is Thomas Merton. And so in this first session, and this is how I usually start. When I give a retreat on a mystic, when I give a retreat on Thomas Merton, this is the text I usually begin with.

And this passage is the final paragraphs of his book New Seeds of Contemplation. Excuse the sexist languages before they knew better. If you were living today, he wouldn't do that. So I'll read the text, and then we'll look at the text together. And this would be resetting now an example of how these sessions will go, will have this tone to it.

What is serious to men is often very trivial in the sight of God. What in God might appear to us as play is perhaps what God takes most seriously. At any rate, the Lord plays and diverts himself in the garden of his creation. And if we could let go of our own obsession with what we think is the meaning of it all, we might be able to hear his call and follow him in his mysterious cosmic dance. We do not have to go very far to catch echoes of that game and of that dancing. When we are alone on a starlit night. When by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat. When we see children in a moment they're really children. When we know love in our own hearts or when, like the Japanese poet Basho, we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash. At such times, the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the newness, the emptiness, and the purity of vision that make themselves evident provide a glimpse of the Cosmic Dance. For the world and time are the dance of the Lord in emptiness. The silence of the spheres is the music of a wedding feast.

The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of life, the more we analyze them out into strange finalities and complex purposes of our own, the more we involve ourselves in sadness, absurdity, and despair. But it does not matter very much because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things. We're staying the joy of the cosmic dance, which is always there. Indeed, we are in the midst of it, and it is in the midst of us for it beats in our very blood, whether we want it to or not. Yet the fact remains that we are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the winds, and join in the general dance. That's our passage. That's beautiful.

And so I'd like to look at this together, at this. You know, and what I'm doing here is practicing a kind of a lexio out loud. I'm sharing with you how this strikes me, so that through my sharing, it might help you sit with how it strikes you, and we can enter into the spirit of the text together, like what it reveals to us about ourselves and about our life. He begins first really meditating on the poetry of creation. See that the world and time are the dance of the Lord in emptiness. The silence of the spheres, and the spheres here mean the heavenly bodies, the sun and moon and stars overhead. So the silence of the spheres is the music of a wedding feast. And so he sees creation then as the infinite presence of God in the let it be, like let there be stones and trees and stars and you and me. He once said in the monastery in a talk, he said creation isn't something that just happened in the beginning and then God walked off and left us to our own devices. He said creation is going on all the time. That creation is absolute and perpetual. So ultimately speaking, the infinite presence of God is pouring itself out, giving itself away and presencing itself as the intimate immediacy of our very presence, the presence of others and the presence of all things in our nothingness without God. This gift of God is the absoluteness of the gift. God giving us her very presence, his very presence, and pouring himself out as the gift and miracle of our very presence. It's absolute in this sense that if God were to stop loving you into your chair wherever you are listening to this at the count of three, at the count of three you'd...