Contemplative Haven

In Chapter XI of Contemplative Prayer (by Thomas Merton, with an Introduction by Thich Nhat Hanh), Merton writes:

What is the purpose of meditation in the sense of “the prayer of the heart”?

In the “prayer of the heart” we seek first of all the deepest ground of our identity in God. We do not reason about dogmas of faith, or “the mysteries.” We seek rather to gain a direct existential grasp, a personal experience of the deepest truths of life and faith, finding ourselves in God’s truth….

We wish to gain a true evaluation of ourselves and of the world so as to understand the meaning of our life as children of God redeemed from sin and death. We wish to gain a true loving knowledge of God, our Father and Redeemer. We wish to lose ourselves in his love and rest in him. We wish to hear his word and respond to it with our whole being. We wish to know his merciful will and submit to it in its totality.

Sister Donna has recently discovered prayer of the heart, and her joy and enthusiasm is contagious, as you will see in this video. She has put together a 6-part YouTube series (the introduction to which is the second video in this post), based on St. Teresa of Avila’s The Way of Perfection. [Note:  Although she mentions St. Therese of Lisieux's 'little way' in the first video here, her series is actually based on St. Teresa of Avila's writing.]  So we will be taking a little journey here at Contemplative Haven with Sister Donna! If you would like to read the chapters that Sister Donna is highlighting in her videos but do not have a copy of The Way of Perfection, you can read it online at Catholic First.

From: The Sign of Jonas [Thomas Merton], pgs. 297-298 – Easter Sunday, 1950

“The grace of Easter is a great silence, an immense tranquility and a clean taste in your soul. It is the taste of heaven, but not the heaven of some wild exaltation. The Easter vision is not riot and drunkenness of spirit but a discovery of order above all order – a discovery of God and of all things in Him. This is a wine without intoxication, a joy that has no poison hidden in it. It is life without death….

If Mass could only be, every morning, what it is on Easter morning! If the prayers could always be so clear, if the Risen Christ would always shine in my heart and all around me and before me in His Easter simplicity! For His simplicity is our feast, this is the unleavened bread which is manna and the bread of heaven, this Easter cleanness, this freedom, this sincerity. O my God, what can I do to convince You that I long for Your Truth and Your simplicity, to share in Your infinite sincerity which is the mirror of Your True Being, and is Your Second Person! Only the little ones can see Him. He is too simple for any created intelligence to fathom. Sometimes we taste some reflection splashed from the clean Light that is the Life of all things: Baptism, First Mass; Easter morning. Give us always this bread of heaven. Slake us always with this water that we may not thirst forever.”

“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.
 

“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]

Thank you, Pia, for last week’s poignant Merton quote; I would like to pick up on the same theme here today, specifically with regard to contemplative prayer:

“Hence monastic prayer, especially meditation and contemplative prayer, is not so much a way to find God as a way of resting in him whom we have found, who loves us, who is near to us, who comes to us to draw us to himself. Dominus enim prope est. Prayer, reading, meditation and contemplation fill the apparent “void” of monastic solitude and silence with the reality of God’s presence, and thus we learn the true value of silence, and come to experience the emptiness and futility of those forms of distraction and useless communication which contribute nothing to the seriousness and simplicity of a life of prayer.

Whatever one may think of the value of communal celebration with all kinds of song and self-expression – and these certainly have their place – the kind of prayer we here speak of as properly “monastic” (though it may also fit into the life of any lay person who is attracted to it) is a prayer of silence, simplicity, contemplative and meditative unity, a deep personal integration in an attentive, watchful listening of “the heart.” The response such prayer calls forth is not usually one of jubilation or audible witness: it is a wordless and total surrender of the heart in silence.”

[Thomas Merton: Contemplative Prayer, pgs. 29-30]

“The high roofs of Strasbourg, Tauler’s city.  Streets known to Eckhart….

(Eckhart, in a sermon on the divine birth, says that, when a person is about to be struck by a thunderbolt, he turns unconsciously toward it.  When a tree is about to be struck, all the leaves turn toward the blow.  And one in whom the divine birth is to take place turns, without realizing, completely toward it.)”

[Thomas Merton:  Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, pg. 187]

“Yesterday at the solemn profession of Fathers Felician and Meinrad a priest from Louisville preached to us about Adam…. It was a delightful sermon.  All about what a great contemplative Adam was, before the fall:  a subject that has always appealed to me.  The preacher cried out so melodiously and his sentences got so much higher and higher that I thought he would start rising and fly away obliquely into the vaulting of the transept…. 

At all these pontifical functions they have been playing some weird music on the organ.  It reminds me of the stuff you used to hear at the movies before the silent movies went out and the talkies came in.  Now I discover that it is the hymn that the faithful sing at Fatima.  Mother of God, why do you let these things happen?”

[Thomas Merton: The Sign of Jonas, pgs. 53-54, June 14, 1947]

Excerpt from The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton, by Michael Mott [pg. 337]:

“A little more than a year later, on December 26, 1960, through a series of circumstances he could not have foreseen, Thomas Merton had his high place at Gethsemani and his hermitage:

Lit candles in the dusk. Haec regina mea in saeculum saeculi [This queen of mine to the end of the ages] – the sense of a journey ended, of wandering at an end. The first time in my life I ever really felt that I had come home and that my roaming and looking were ended.

A burst of sun through the window. Wind in the pines. Fire in the grate. Silence over the whole valley.

He was less than a mile from the monastery, still within the sound of its bells, writing by candlelight and the last sunlight of the short winter’s day in a small building constructed of cement blocks set on the crest of a low knob called Mount Olivet, a view of the valley in front, woods and a spinney at the back.

When he wrote to Catherine de Hueck Doherty, he called it his dacha.” [a Russian country cottage]

Thomas Merton’s Hermitage

With thanks to YouTube Channel: Gethsemani3

Not long ago, over at Beyond the Horizon 3, Pia spoke of the somewhat mysterious effect of the sound of bells, and there was a little more chatting about it in the combox….

It reminded me of something I had read recently by Merton, from “Thoughts in Solitude“, Chapter XVI:

“Bells are meant to remind us that God alone is good, that we belong to Him, that we are not living for this world. 

They break in upon our cares in order to remind us that all things pass away and that our preoccupations are not important.

They speak to us of our freedom, which responsibilities and transient cares make us forget.

They are the voice of our alliance with the God of heaven.

They tell us that we are His true temple. They call us to peace with Him within ourselves.

The Gospel of Mary and Martha is read at the end of the Blessing of a Church Bell in order to remind us of all these things. 

The bells say: business does not matter. Rest in God and rejoice, for this world is only the figure and the promise of a world to come, and only those who are detached from transient things can possess the substance of an eternal promise.

The bells say: we have spoken for centuries from the towers of great Churches. We have spoken to the saints your fathers, in their land. We called them, as we call you, to sanctity. What is the word with which we called them?

We did not merely say, “Be good, come to Church.” We did not merely say, “Keep the commandments” but above all, “Christ is risen, Christ is risen!” And we said: “Come with us, God is good, salvation is not hard, His love has made it easy!” And this, our message, has always been for everyone, for those who came and for those who did not come, for our song is perfect as the Father in heaven is perfect and we pour our charity out upon all.”

“The Desert Fathers believed that the wilderness had been created as supremely valuable in the eyes of God precisely because it had no value to men.  The wasteland was the land that could never be wasted by men because it offered them nothing.  There was nothing to attract them.  There was nothing to exploit.  The desert was the region in which the Chosen People had wandered for forty years, cared for by God alone.  They could have reached the Promised Land in a few months if they had travelled directly to it.  God’s plan was that they should learn to love Him in the wilderness and that they should always look back upon the time in the desert as the idyllic time of their life with Him alone.”

[Thomas Merton:  Thoughts in Solitude, pgs. 4- 5]