Thomas Merton: Session 3

James Finley (0:00)

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

Greetings, everyone, and welcome to our time here together, turning to the Christian mystic, Thomas Merton, to help deepen our experience and response to God's presence in our lives. In this session, I want to share with you a passage in Merton's writings, which is New Seeds of Contemplation, and this is chapter five, found in chapter five of New Seeds of Contemplation, Things and Their Identity. And I'm selecting this passage because it's a seminal passage in which Merton expresses his way of sharing the ancient kind of contemplative Christian tradition of our ultimate identity as persons, are created in the image and likeness of God. That is, it's a meditation on the question of the deep question of, who am I? At the deepest possible level. What is my ultimate identity? And I want to break this passage down into three parts. And in the first part I want to, which is really the second part in the passage from Merton, is that in the first part I want to first.

Explore the way Merton expresses the kind of the poetry of our ultimate identity in God. And then in the second part, I want to reflect on how he understands the foundations of our suffering as though all the ways that we're exiled from the invincible preciousness of our ultimate identity in God. And then the third part is what is the path then that in which we're healed from all that hinders us from finding our way out of the darkness into the light of joining God and who God eternally knows us to be hidden with Christ and God forever from before the origins of the universe. So I'd like to break it down into those three phases. And you can see here as we read these passages in Merton how rich this is. It's the kind of thing that you just quietly sit with in a kind of daily prayer and meditation as a kind of daily rendezvous with God. So that little by little by little the depth and richness of this spiritual worldview and the path on which we learn to be faithful to it becomes clearer and clearer. And this is how we turn to Thomas Merton as our guide or as our teacher along this path, this way of life. So first, the ultimate ground of our identity, Merton writes. And again, he excuses sexist language. Again, if you were writing today, he would be very careful to use inclusive language of God.

Merton writes, the secret of my identity is hidden in the love and mercy of God. But whatever is in God is really identical with God. For God's infinite simplicity admits no division and no distinction. Therefore, the only way I can hope to find myself, therefore, I cannot hope to find myself anywhere except in Him. Ultimately, the only way I can be myself is to become identified with Him in whom is hidden the reason and the fulfillment of my existence. Therefore, there is only one problem on which all my existence, my peace, and my happiness depend, to discover myself in discovering God. If I find God, I will find myself, and if I find my true self, I will find God. I'd like to reflect on this text. And the poetry of this, in terms of the Christian understanding of God's inter-divine life as Trinity, is that from all eternity, God the Father, that is, God is origin, God is Father, God is Mother, God is origin of God, and that from all eternity, God the Father is eternally expressing the infinite totality of himself, the infinite reality of the divinity of himself as his word. So it is as scripture says, in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. And so from all eternity then, Meister Eckhart uses the phrase, God's like a woman in labor giving birth to God. The inter-divine life of God is God the Father, and this poetic richness, speaking God, like birthing God, as the word of God. And through all eternity, God the Father, eternally contemplates himself, herself, contemplates God in the word. And the word of God contemplates himself in the Father. And in their contemplative communion, in their oneness, in their infinite oneness with each other, because God is one, the love that arises out of that union is the Holy Spirit. So the inter-divine life of God is this life of infinite love and knowledge as the overflowing fullness of infinite reality itself, the mystery of God.

Where we come in to this picture, this poetic vision, is that from all eternity, God the Father is expressing himself, herself as Word, and is contemplating himself, herself in the Word, and then is eternally contemplating in the Word you, who you are. So that when God creates you, God creates you into the human plane of time and space. God did not have to think up who you might be, because for all eternity, God eternally knows who you eternally are, hidden with Christ and God forever before the origins of the universe. So this ultimate identity, this true self, this is the birthless you, the you that was never born, because God never, never has not known who you eternally are, hidden with Christ and God forever before the origins of the universe. And this birthless you, hidden with Christ and God, is the deathless you, for God will never, never, never, never, never not know who you eternally are, hidden with Christ and God forever. And this is your identity. It's your ultimate identity, in so with respect to your capacity to awaken to your God-given identity, which is religious experience. And in a way, in other words, your capacity to realize that the depths of God is by the generosity of God being given to you as the depths of yourself, in your nothingness without God. In that intimate realization of that God-given godly nature of yourself in your nothingness without God, then it's your then capacity in being awakened to that, is to say yes to that, to give yourself in love to the love that gives itself to you.