Contemplative Haven

“But creatures remain untouchable, inviolable.  If God wants you to suffer a little, He allows you to learn just how inviolable they are.  As soon as you try to possess their goodness for its own sake, all that is sweet in them becomes bitter to you, all that is beautiful, ugly.  Everything you love sickens you.  And at the same time your need to love something, somebody, increases a hundred times over.  And God, Who is the only one who can be loved for His own sake alone, remains invisible and unimaginable and untouchable, beyond everything else that exists.

You flowers and trees, you hills and streams, you fields, flocks and wild birds, you books, you poems, and you people, I am unutterably alone in the midst of you.  The irrational hunger that sometimes gets into the depths of my will, tries to swing my deepest self away from God and direct it to your love.  I try to touch you with the deep fire that is in the center of my heart, but I cannot touch you without defiling both you and myself, and I am abashed, solitary and helpless, surrounded by a beauty that can never belong to me.

But this sadness generates within me an unspeakable reverence for the holiness of created things, for they are pure and perfect and they belong to God and they are mirrors of His beauty.  He is mirrored in all things like sunlight in clean water:  but if I try to drink the light that is in the water I only shatter the reflection.

And so I live alone and chaste in the midst of the holy beauty of all created things, knowing that nothing I can see or hear or touch will ever belong to me, ashamed of my absurd need to give myself away to any one of them or to all of them.  The silly, hopeless passion to give myself away to any beauty eats out my heart.  It is an unworthy desire, but I cannot avoid it.  It is in the hearts of us all, and we have to bear with it, suffer its demands with patience, until we die and go to heaven where all things will belong to us in their highest causes.”

[Thomas Merton:  The Sign of Jonas, pg. 238, Sept. 14, 1949]

Dear friends, this will be my last post at Contemplative Haven. As I stated on my “Mary” blog, it is time now for me to slip back into a more contemplative life, offline. I want to thank you all for the years of friendship, fun, angst, joys, sorrows, humour and prayer – you have all sustained me – each and every one of you. May God bless you and keep you, and may you continue to flourish in your contemplative lives.
 

Solitude, says the moon shell.  Center-down, say the Quaker saints.  To the possession of the self the way is inward, says Plotinus.  The cell of self-knowledge is the stall in which the pilgrim must be reborn, says St. Catherine of Siena.  Voices from the past.  In fact, these are pursuits and virtues of the past.  But done in another way today because done consciously, aware, with eyes open.  Not done as before, as part of the pattern of the time.  Not done because everyone else is doing them; almost no one is doing them.  Revolutionary, in fact, because almost every trend and pressure, every voice from the outside is against this new way of inward living.

[Anne Morrow Lindbergh:  Gift from the Sea, pgs. 56-57]

“Nativitas est hodie sanctae Mariae Virginis (Today is the nativity of Saint Mary the Virgin: First antiphon for Vespers of the feast). We have just come from first Vespers of Our Lady’s birthday. I am full of those happy antiphons, and glad because of the feast and because of what it means, for through her we come to heaven. Coeli fenestra facta es. (Thou art become the window of heaven: from the hymn O gloriosa Domina). I am glad that in our Order we still enter heaven through the window. I believe that line of the hymn was reformed in the Roman liturgy so that the rest of the Church goes in more decorously through the door. But we Cistercians still get in by the window….

This afternoon I was content looking at the low green rampart of woods that divides us from the rest of the universe and listening to the deep silence: content not for the sake of the scene or the silence but because of God. And now I hear a car in the distance, a solitary car coming down the road. The sound of action reminds me that I must soon wash my neck and go and read Monsignor Sheen to the retreatants at their supper.

That is how everything stands, Mother of God, after the first Vespers of your Nativity in the year 1947. Dona nobis pacem (Give us peace). Keep us in your heart until next year and the year after and until we all die in peace, disposed in the four corners of America in new foundations, and myself perhaps you know where, alone with you and with God. His will is my cell. His love is my solitude. Dona nobis pacem.”

[Thomas Merton: The Sign of Jonas, pgs. 62-63, Sept. 7, 1947]

Something my Mom used to say all the time when I was little; Owen and Pia are familiar with the expression.

As you can see (at least for the time being, and for no apparent reason) my sidebar has slipped away and is replaced by recent posts. The fun just goes on and on, doesn’t it?

I’m going to be trying out a couple of new templates tonight (I’m giving myself a short time limit though, because I have to get up for work in the morning; you know, the place where I’m languishing…). So if it’s a mess every time you stop by, consider this: it’s still less messy than a hole in the head.

I’ve been tagged by Cathy of A Bit of the Blarney!  Here’s the question(s) of the day:

“What picture would I use for my holy card should I make it to sainthood, and of what cause(s) would I want to be patroness?”

I didn’t have to think about this one for too long.  If I ever make it to sainthood I would like to be known as:

“Patroness of Lay Contemplatives Languishing in the Workforce”.

Yes, little ones, you may call on me to intercede if:

a)  You would rather stay home and pray than earn money, but your spouse and/or bank manager is not in agreement on this point, and you do, in lucid moments, acknowledge the importance of feeding the children;

b)  Your daily commute finds you consistently failing to disembark at the right stop because you were deep in prayer (despite the multitude of cell-phone conversations going on all around you, none of which, as far as you could ascertain before you “slipped away”, were conversations with God);

c)  You are no longer welcome in staff meetings because your colleagues neither comprehend nor appreciate your morals/ethics/point of view/silence; you now rather enjoy being ostracized because you can actually feel St. John of the Cross slapping you on the back, urging you to put down your calculator and go make coffee for everyone, and make it properly;

d)  You are considered a snob because you have missed every office function for the last fifteen years since they all conflicted with your beloved liturgical calendar;

e)  You skip out at lunch just for Mass but when you emerge from the church it is dark outside and upon making your way back to the office you find everyone has gone home and the door is locked.  Again.