Thomas Merton: Session 4

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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James Finley (0:08)

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

Greetings, everyone. And welcome to our time here together, turning to the Christian mystic, Thomas Merton, to, for guidance, helping us to deepen our experience of and response to God's presence in our life. In this session, I'll be sharing a passage that focuses on the theme of prayer in Thomas Merton. We saw this before, we referred to this passage before in an earlier session, the passage, My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. But there we stopped with the first three words, My Lord God, to, as a way of grounding ourself in the devotional sincerity in which this deepening union with God takes place in prayer. So I want to return to that passage again, I'll read it, and then share with you how Merton's prayerful exchange with God in this passage is sharing with us how he's learning to understand himself and to understand his life in the presence of God and to understand how God sustains him and guides him.

And so Merton in the monastery listened deeply to God, and having listened deeply to God, his Lectio and prayer and silence and the Psalms, he's now talking to God, engaging in kind of a meditative dialogue with God. And as I listen to Merton's words, as he talks to God, his words become my Lectio. That is, I hear the rhythms or cadences of God's voice communicating itself to me in Merton's words. And as I share with you what I personally see in this passage, as you listen to me, my words become your Lectio. That is how you might possibly hear the cadence or the rhythms of God speaking to you in these words in your life. And so you can deepen that and personalize that in your own meditation and in your own prayer and in your own life. And in particular here, how this quiet time with God in prayer, this kind of daily rendezvous with God in prayer, how it sheds a light on our life, on how we understand our life in the presence of God and find God in our life. And so in that spirit, then, I'll read the passage and then I'll kind of perfectly walk through it with you so that then you on your own can sit with it on how what strikes you. And I'm also a thing modeling here how to read a text. That is how it's so personal and so endlessly evocative. And with the repetition, you could go over it again and again and the repetition is not redundant. So Merton writes, 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, will I 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. I'd like to reflect on this text. So, my Lord God then grounds us in this devotional sincerity. He's speaking from his heart to God, who has spoken to him the scripture and life. And he's allowing us to listen into this prayer, to see what light it might shed on our life, on our way of experiencing and understanding God in our life. And he begins by saying, I have no idea where I am going. So, what does that mean? Like, how are we to understand what he means here? It seems to me, first, that it's certainly lovely. He certainly does know where he's going, at a certain factual level. That he lived in the monastery. And he can assume that the patterns of the monastic life, prayer and work, like the rhythms of that life following the liturgical year and so on, was going to continue on. He also knew that his ministry of writing and also his novice master's spiritual direction, probably that was going to continue on. Just like with us, just, you know, I think we were in a certain pattern. You might happen to be right now in a time of radical transition, where things are very unforeseeable. But I think for most of us, most of the time, there's a fairly stable pattern where, to some degree at least, we have some sense about where next week, next month, next year, whatever, some sense of where we assume we might be in a few years, you know, where we're going. So what's that mean is I have no idea where I am going.