Thomas Merton: Session 5

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

You're listening to a podcast by the Center for Action and Contemplation. To learn more, visit cac.org.

James Finley (0:08)

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

Greetings, everyone, and welcome to our time here together, which will be turning to the teachings of the Christian mystic Thomas Merton to help us deepen our experience of and response to God's presence in our lives. In two of these previous sessions, we reflected on the passage, Merton, My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. And we use this passage as a way to see how Thomas Merton mentors us or models for us, experiencing God's presence in reflective prayer. That is, in which we receive, we hear God's words speaking directly into our heart in a word of scripture, the word of a spiritual teaching. And that word, that lexio into our heart, initiates a kind of meditatio, a discursive reflective meditation of thoughts and images and insights illumined by faith to deepen our experience and understanding of God's presence in our life. And so we could see how then fidelity to such prayer as a daily rendezvous with God over time transforms the depths of our mind and heart that is little by little, helps form a kind of an underlying habitual state of discipleship or a state of Christ consciousness or a state of this way of being sensitized and tuned in to the grace nature of each passing moment of our life.

And in this session, I want to return into a passage in Merton where he'll be bearing witness to or helping us to understand the ways in which reflective prayer opens out upon a contemplative prayer, like the practice of contemplative prayer. And so before I present this passage, first just a little bit of background for the context of the passage. You know, in the monastery, Thomas Merton was a priest in the community.

And at that time, at least the priests each said a mass in a little alcove or ultra-somewhere in the monastery. And since he was master of novices, he would celebrate the Eucharist in the small chapel in the novitiate at the monastery. And after a mass, after a Eucharist, he would then sit in prayer. And sitting there in prayer, looking at the altar and the novitiate there in the chapel. He shares with us this prayer, which is this prayer bearing witness to contemplative prayer. So I'll read the passage and then we will kind of walk through it together to see what insights we can gain from it. Merton writes, sharing with us this moment of silent prayer, this contemplative prayer, beauty of sunlight falling on a tall vase of red and white carnations and green leaves on the altar of the Namitia Chapel, the light and dark, the darkness of the fresh crinkled flower, light warm and red all around the darkness. The flower is the same color as blood, but it is in no sense whatever is red as blood, not at all. It is as red as a carnation, only that. This flower, this light, this moment, this silence, Dominus est, God is. Eternity. He passes, he remains, we pass in and out. He passes, we remain. We are nothing, we are everything. He is in us, he is gone from us. He is not here, we are here in him. All these things can be said, but why say them? The flower is itself, the light is itself. The silence is itself, I am myself. All perhaps illusion, but no matter. For illusion is the shadow of reality. And reality is the grace and gift that underlies these lights, these colors, this silence. Underlies, is that true? They are simply real. They themselves are his gift. So I would like them to reflect on this passage. You know, he begins here with the word beauty. That is, he is very concrete, he is very present to the concrete details of the flowers on the altar, the fresh crinkled flower, the light and the dark, he's like deeply present. And in the concrete intricacy of the flowers, he beholds the beauty of the flowers, beholds the shining forth of the beautiful, a kind of a spiritual quality that shines out from the concreteness of the flower's presence.

And in this way then, I'd like to suggest, because we're trying to kind of slowly find our way here in understanding the nature of contemplative prayer. And to say first, the contemplative prayer is marked by a certain quality of passivity.

By passivity, I mean it's an enrichment of experience that happens to us, like an interior event. We saw this in an earlier reflection on creation, on the world and time of the dance of the Lord in emptiness, and in turning to see a flock of birds descending, or in a child at play, in the presence of the beloved, or a quiet hour at day's end. There is this, like the receiving of a gift of an enriched awareness of the presence of God, present to us in and as the presence of that to which we are awakened to the presence of God, to the flock of birds descending, to the child, to the beloved, or here to the flowers on the altar, the chapel there. So a condolent prayer, then, is marked by a certain quality of kind of resting wordlessly in the presence of God as grace intimately received, a quiet kind of enriched enhancement of presence.