“As long as I am content to know that He is infinitely greater than I, and that I cannot know Him unless He shows Himself to me, I will have Peace, and He will be near me and in me, and I will rest in Him.”
Merton, Thomas. Thoughts in Solitude. (NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1958); (pbk ed 1999), p. 97.
“We can study endless maps of the pathways into the silent land. But the map is not the territory. To discover the actual land of silence requires not information but the silence of God that is the very ground of the mind and that causes us to seek in the first place.”
Laird, Martin. Into the Silent Land : a Guide to the Christian Practice of Contemplation. (NY: Oxford University Press, 2006), page 76.
“Praise God we do not have hearts of stone or spirits of iron either. I do not wish evil on anyone, and no Christian, especially, is supposed to desire the wrath of God for anyone, not even for the Turks or the Jews or his enemy, indeed, not even for the cardinals and the pope.”
Luther, Martin. “To the Saxon Princes” (1545) Luther’s Works Vol. 43. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1969), page 262.
“Not even”! Late in his life Martin Luther made this declaration that all of us should be able to sign on with: don’t wish evil, don’t wish God’s wrath, on anyone. He had in mind at that particular moment Muslims, Jews, and Catholics – all of whom were his opponents in one way or another. (And why didn’t the Anabaptists or the Reformed make his list?)
Whom would he list today? More importantly, who would make your list of opponents? And most importantly, would you also not wish them evil? Can you love your enemies instead?
“It really should not be necessary for my sermons and words to be circulated widely throughout the country. Certainly there are other books that might properly or profitably serve as sermons for the people. I do not know why God destines me to be involved in this game in which people pick up and spread my words, some as my friends, others as enemies. This has induced me to publish this Lord’s Prayer, previously published by my friends, and to exposit it further in the hope that I may also do my adversaries a favor. It is always my intention to be helpful to all and harmful to none.”
Luther, Martin. “An Exposition of the Lord’s Prayer for Simple Laymen” (1519) Luther’s Works Vol. 42. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1969), page 19.
“Is not work worthwhile for its own sake? It is one of the crimes of our age to have belittled it and to have substituted for its beauty the ugliness of fierce self-seeking. Noble souls live a glorious life and expect it to be fruitful in addition. They work not only for the fruit, but for the work; they work in order that their lives may be pure, upright, and manly, like that of Jesus, and ready to be united with His.”
Sertillanges, Antonin G., O.P. The Intellectual Life: its Spirit, Conditions, Methods. (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1987), p. 254.
“Do not be too anxious about your advancement in the ways of prayer, because you have left the beaten track and are traveling by paths that cannot be charted and measured. Therefore leave God to take care of your degree of sanctity and of contemplation. If you yourself try to measure your own progress, you will waste your time in futile introspection. Seek one thing alone: to purify your love of God more and more, to abandon yourself more and more perfectly to His will and to love Him more exclusively and more completely, but also more simply and more peacefully and with more total and uncompromising trust.”
Merton, Thomas. The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation. Edited and with an Introduction by William H. Shannon. (NY: HarperOne, 2003), page 97. (NOTE: the text belongs to 1959!)
“Do not, then, stir yourself up to useless interior activities. Avoid everything that will bring unnecessary complications into your life. Live in as much peace and quiet and retirement as you can, and do not go out of your way to get involved in labors and duties, no matter how much glory they may seem to give God. Do the tasks appointed to you as perfectly as you can with disinterested love and great peace in order to show your desire of pleasing God. Love and serve Him peacefully and in all your works preserve recollection. Do what you do quietly and without fuss. Seek solitude as much as you can; dwell in the silence of your own soul and rest there in the simple and simplifying light which God is infusing into you. Do not make the mistake of aspiring to the spectacular ‘experiences’ that you read about in the lives of the great mystics. None of those graces (called gratis datae) can sanctify you nearly so well as this obscure and purifying light and love of God which is given you to no other end than to make you perfect in His love.”
Merton, Thomas. The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation. Edited and with an Introduction by William H. Shannon. (NY: HarperOne, 2003), pages 96-97. (NOTE: the text belongs to 1959!)
If you really, really want to read all 95 Theses from 31 October 1517 to see what all the fuss was about, you can find them easily enough. Today – which some in the Church mark as Reformation Day – I’m just going to post the first 3; plus a few lines from Martin Luther’s later commentary on number 3. Here goes:
"Out of love and zeal for truth and the desire to bring it to light, the following theses will be publicly discussed at Wittenberg under the chairmanship of the reverend father Martin Luther, Master of Arts and Sacred Theology and regularly appointed Lecturer on these subjects at that place. He requests that those who cannot be present to debate orally with us will do so by letter. [There actually was no formal debate following.] In the Name of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
"1. When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, ‘Repent’, he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.
"2. This word cannot be understood as referring to the sacrament of penance, that is, confession and satisfaction, as administered by the clergy.
“3. Yet it does not mean solely inner repentance; such inner repentance is worthless unless it produces various outward mortifications of the flesh.”
Then from Luther’s August 1518 explanation of the Theses, some of his comments on the 3rd Thesis:
“It follows that the three parts of satisfaction (fasting, prayer, and alms) do not pertain to sacramental penance… But since these satisfactions are related to evangelical penance, fasting consists of all chastenings of the flesh apart from the choice of food or difference in clothes. Prayer includes every pursuit of the soul, in meditation, reading, listening, praying. The giving of alms includes every service toward one’s neighbor. Thus by fasting a Christian may serve himself, by prayer he may serve God, and by the giving of alms he may serve his neighbor… Therefore all mortifications which the conscience-stricken man brings upon himself are the fruit of inner penance, whether they be vigils, work, privation, study, prayers, abstinence from sex and pleasures, insofar as they minister to the spirit. The Lord himself showed forth these fruits of the spirit as did all his saints.”
[I especially like that in his next to last sentence he includes “study” as a “mortification.” Something to think about there!]
Luther, Martin. “Ninety-Five Theses, or Disputation in the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences” (1517) Luther’s Works Vol. 31. Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1957, page 25;
Luther, Martin. “Explanations of the Ninety-Five Theses, or Explanations of the Disputation Concerning the Value of Indulgences” (1518) Luther’s Works Vol. 31. Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1957, pages 86-87.
“There is a time for warmth in the collective myth. But there is also a time to be born. He who is spiritually ‘born’ as a mature identity is liberated from the enclosing womb of myth and prejudice. He learns to think for himself, guided no longer by the dictates of need and by systems and processes designed to create artificial needs and the ‘satisfy’ them.”
Merton, Thomas. “Rain and the Rhinoceros.” (1965) in Selected Essays. Edited with an introduction by Patrick F. O’Connell. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2013, p. 221.
"And it is unfortunate that even in communities whose observance is supposedly designed to favor contemplation there are elements which seriously frustrate it.
“The regular communal life is usually lived at the tempo of those who are active and extroverted. Impatient of interior subtleties and intolerant of all that does not bring tangible result, these good people want to know, at the end of the day, that they have done something in the service of God. Hence their life is geared to reassure them. The day is divided up into many exercises in which prayer is measured by the clock and by the exactitude with which the ceremonial is executed. Attention is concentrated on exterior performance.”
Merton, Thomas. The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation. Edited and with an Introduction by William H. Shannon. NY: HarperOne, 2003, p. 113. (Merton wrote this in 1959)
Merton was, of course, writing about monastic communities which – if you notice the date – had not even at that point been opened up by Vatican II. It seems to me that the same things could be said about Church-related colleges and about every local congregation: things are lived there “at the tempo of those who are active and extroverted” and not at the tempo of those who are contemplatives and introverted.
Pathology: the Study of a Path 