Thomas Merton: Session 8

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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Jim Finley (0:08)

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

Greetings, everyone. Welcome to our time here together, turning to the teachings of the Christian mystic, Thomas Merton, to help us deepen our experience and response to God's presence in our lives. This session, actually, will be our last session on Thomas Merton. As I understand it, there will be an opportunity for you to submit questions around these reflections on Merton we've been sharing here together. And my response to those questions will then be posted. You can have availability, have access to those. Our next series of eight sessions or so will be turning in a very similar way to the teachings of St. Teresa of Avila on the Interior Castle. And there will be a chance to ask questions, and we'll go from there. Next, Mystic will probably be St. John of the Cross and so on. And in this session, what I want to do is I'd like to kind of go back and review our explorations of Thomas Merton by singling out seminal themes or seminal aspects of his teachings. And I think this is significant because by singling out these themes, as we go from one Mystic to the next, we'll see how these same themes are found in all the Mystic teachers in the Christian tradition and really in all of the Mystic teachers of all the world's great religions. For they're the themes of contemplative consciousness itself. That is, it experientially opens up to us the spiritual world view and the path that world view illumines how we might follow it and live it and share it with others day by day.

And therefore, to the extent then, this world view, these teachings, rings true to you. That is, insofar as it speaks to you or you feel drawn towards it, it bears witness then to the extent to which you're already on this path. You're already being invited to follow this ancient lineage of intimate awakening, to this oneness with God, one with us in life itself, day by day.

And so, it's not a... As our first theme then, kind of implied throughout, I'd actually like to add another quote here from Merton. This is from Merton's Palace of Nowhere, page 40

And the first theme is that this is always grounded in life itself. That is, it's not a method or a theory, but it's a way of speaking of or entering into an enriched understanding of the intimacy of our own life as opening out upon the intimacy of God given to us as life itself. And so, here's the passage in Merton, page 40, Merton's Palace of Nowhere. Merton writes, Very often the inertia and repugnance which characterize the so-called spiritual life of many Christians could perhaps be cured by simple respect for the concrete realities of everyday life, for nature, for the body, for one's work, one's friends, one's surroundings, etc. A supernaturalism which imagines that the supernatural is the kind of platonic realm of abstract essences totally apart from and opposed to the concrete world of nature offers no real support to a genuine life of meditation and prayer. Meditation has no point and no reality unless it is firmly rooted in life. Without such roots, it can produce nothing, but the ash and fruits of disgust, achadia, and even morbid and degenerate interversion. And achadia is this word we see in the Desert Fathers and Desert Mothers. It's a sense of deep discontent in the spiritual life. And the cure for the discontent is to re-ground ourselves in the concrete realities of our life, our body, our mind, our emotions, the people we live with and who love us and we love them, and our daily work, our service, life, life, life, life, the divinity of the concrete immediacy of life itself.

And a second text associated with the same thing about grounding ourselves and finding God's presence in life itself. This is page 92 of Merton's Palace. Merton writes, We should not look for a method or system to cultivate an attitude, an outlook, faith, openness, attention, reverence, expectation, supplication, trust, joy. All these finally permeate our being with love insofar as our living faith tells us that we are in the presence of God, that we are living in Christ, that in the Spirit of God we see God our Father without seeing. We know Him in unknowing. Faith is the bond that unites us to Him in the Spirit who gives us light and love. So the path then is this perpetual metanoia, this perpetual conversion of the fundamental attitudes of our heart and these stands of humility, patience, gratitude, humility and so forth, until we become ever more habituated and stabilized in these ways of living our life and of being in the world. It is the contemplative way.