Thomas Merton: Session 7

James Finley (0:00)

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

You Greetings, everyone. Welcome to our time here together, turning to the Christian mystic, Thomas Merton, to help us deepen our experience of and response to God's presence in our lives.

In this session, we're coming to the end of this initial series here on Thomas Merton, the session following this one, being a kind of, not a summary, but attempt to kind of get in kind of an overview of the spiritual worldview of contemplative Christianity and following the path of learning to live in fidelity to it. And I believe, too, there'll be an opportunity for you to ask questions over the site here, and Kirsten will come and interview me based on the questions that you might have on this initial series here on Thomas Merton.

And so I've decided in this session as our text to choose a passage in, which is chapter six, in Thomas Merton's book, The Inner Experience. It's a significant book, and that is the book that he was still in the midst of doing the final edits of when he died in Asia. He wrote the Asian Journal on the trip to Asia where he met the Dalai Lama and so on. But this was back in his hermitage at Gethsemane. He was writing this as kind of the mystical lineage of the Christian tradition. And in chapter six of the Inner Experience, Infused Contemplation, or if I say mystical contemplation, he has a series of very succinct statements to bear witness to what infused or mystical contemplation is.

And I think what I'd like to do here, these are so poetic, they're so intuitively pure, that I want to just kind of poetically kind of reflect out loud with you for a little bit, with each one, to kind of move into the spirit of the subtlety of this. So I think here what he's doing, he's kind of assuming, he's in the spirit of what we've been saying before in the previous sessions. That is, you're living your day-by-day life, and you have a daily rendezvous with God, a kind of prayer, devotional sincerity. And in that devotional sincerity, in that prayer, you can begin to discern the beginnings of something starting to happen to you in prayer, which is this mystical or infused contemplation. And he lists 11 points. I like to go over at least a number of them here and kind of prayerfully reflect on it together. And as I go through this, I encourage you to, as you listen to this, to ask yourself, have you ever experienced this? Or ever had intimations of this? Or as you listen to it, you're drawn to this so that in prayer and your further readings of scripture and Merton and your other sources, you might open your heart to this kind of deepened infused mystical way of experiencing this communion with God in your daily life. Merton writes, chapter six, Inner Experience. Merton writes, we are now in a position to summarize essential elements of mystical contemplation. Number one, it is an intuition that at its lower level transcends the senses. On its higher level, it transcends the intellect itself. So you're sitting in prayer, just kind of being quietly attentive in the presence of God. And it begins to emerge within you a certain kind of grace state of consciousness, which in the beginning can be kind of like intuition, a kind of an intuitive knowing, or an intuitive way of being present, or being present to God in prayer. And this emerging intuitive state transcends the senses. That is to say, the senses are still there. This is not a state of trance that can happen in prayer. But you're still sitting there and there's still your senses in which you're still sitting there. If you're sitting there looking out the window, or you're sitting there looking at the crucifix, or you're looking at a burning candle, you're aware of your presence in the room, any sounds that are there, all of that is still there. But what you're beginning to experience could not be insofar as it has a feeling of an experience. We might say here also any sense of a consolation here in terms of affect, like a sense of inner warmth, or a sense of the felt sense of the presence of God, that might be there. But you get the feeling there's the beginning of an intuitive way of knowing or experiencing God's presence that qualitatively transcends the senses, what can adequately be understood in terms of sensory experience. And at a higher level, it transcends the intellect itself. That is, while sitting there, reading scripture, Merton, whatever, you may be in the midst of very moving, very profound thoughts about God, profound insights into the nature of God or God's presence in your life. But you feel that in this emerging intuitive state, it's a state of consciousness that transcends all those thoughts, regardless of how profound they might be. It's a kind of a transconceptual state of knowing beyond the conceptual thinking and reflective mind. It's a kind of non-reflective, intimate immediacy beyond all concepts of God, yourself, the world, the thinking self, and all that it thinks is being very, so subtly transcended in this moment.