Thomas Merton: Session 2

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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James Finley (0:08)

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

Greetings, everyone. Welcome to our time here together, in which we'll be turning to the Christian mystic, Thomas Merton, for guidance in deepening our experience of in response to God's presence in our lives. The passage I've chosen for this session is the second chapter of part two of Thomas Merton's book, Thoughts in Solitude. By the way, if you'd not yet had the opportunity to read Thomas Merton, and if you're inclined to do so, Thoughts in Solitude is a great way to start. It's very short little meditations intended to be used for daily prayer as Lectio Divina, a spiritual reading.

And the passage from Thoughts in Solitude I've chosen for today, in this chapter, Thomas Merton says, My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end, nor do I really know myself. And the fact that I think I'm following your will does not mean that I'm actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this, you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore, I will trust you always, though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone. To reflect with you on this passage.

What I'll be doing here is sharing with you what I see in this passage. As I listen to it as my own spiritual reading. And so as you listen to what Merton is saying, and you listen to what I see in it, it might help you to prayerfully sit with and open yourself to what you see in the passage. How it personally touches you, and how it personally helps you in your spiritual path, in your daily life.

And I think about this particular passage is that the intimacy of the passage is that Merton is inviting us to listen in as he prays to God.

And to realize that as he is doing so, he is offering us guidance that will hopefully help us in our prayer and in our daily life.

And it is in this sense then that we are sitting with his words and I'm sharing these words with you, that you might sit with your own inner unfolding path and see where the path takes you. And what strikes me about this passage and in this session, I want to limit myself to the first opening words of the text, My Lord God. And this whole segue in the next session into the remaining words of the passage segue into the next text that we'll be looking at together. The spiritual path that Thomas Merton marks out for us.

What strikes me about the passage is the sense of quiet confidence in Merton's words that as he speaks to God, he knows and he trusts that God hears him. Merton said somewhere, he said in the spiritual life, to know is to know that you're known. And we would say too, that to speak is to know that you're heard. And so another word for it, I think, to my mind, is kind of Merton's guiding us in a certain kind of attitudinal stance that we can look for and foster in ourself. I think we might call it devotional sincerity. Thomas Merton once said, with God a little sincerity goes a long, long way. That Merton's words have a, that they're heartfelt. They're heartfelt. And I think too this sincerity, this heartfelt sincerity echoes a sense of God's infinite sincerity towards us that we see embodied in the teachings in the life of Jesus. In the teachings of Jesus and all that he said, there was no posing or posturing. There doesn't seem to be about it anything that's contrived or manipulative. Everything comes directly from his heart in this kind of sincere devotional sincerity and devotional oneness with God that resonates in his words and carries over into us awakening our sense of being in the presence of God.

And so another way that I would look at this, as we keep opening this up here together on the nature of these teachings, the subtlety of these, intimacy of these teachings, is that there's also a feeling from me then in this prayer that there is within Merton, we might say, an intrapersonal awareness of subsisting in an interpersonal communion with God. The intrapersonal meaning it's within him, it's innermost within himself, but what's innermost within himself is his interpersonal communion with God, that he's subsisting in God, like light subsists in flame. He's in a state of this communion with God, this oneness with God.