“Be content to remain in loneliness and isolation, dryness and anguish, waiting upon God in darkness. Your inarticulate longing for Him in the night of suffering will be your most eloquent prayer.”
Merton, Thomas. The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation. Edited and with an Introduction by William H. Shannon. NY: HarperOne, 2003, p. 103. (NOTE: the text belongs to 1959!)
“The solution of the problem of life is life itself. Life is not attained by reasoning and analysis, but first of all by living. For until we have begun to live our prudence has no material to work on. And until we have begun to fail we have no way of working out our success.”
Merton, Thomas. Thoughts in Solitude. NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 1958. (pbk ed 1999), p. 74.
In a kind of spiritual “just do it” Merton warns those who are forever preparing, forever waiting for the right moment, forever hanging back until they think all the pieces are finally in place. The only way to be prepared, to actuate the moment, to see that the pieces are in place, is to let God worry about all that kind of stuff. Just step out in faith that God will indeed take care of both the big picture and the details.
“The doorway into the silent land is a wound. Silence lays bare this wound. We do not journey far along the spiritual path before we get some sense of the wound of the human condition, and this is precisely why not a few abandon a contemplative practice like meditation as soon as it begins to expose this wound; they move on instead to some spiritual entertainment that will maintain distraction. Perhaps this is why the weak and wounded, who know very well the vulnerability of the human condition, often have an aptitude for discovering silence and can sense the wholeness and healing that ground this wound.”
Laird, Martin. Into the Silent Land : a Guide to the Christian Practice of Contemplation. NY: Oxford University Press, 200, p. 117.
“Why should I pray? Basically it is for the sake of praying. There is much else we might claim about prayer–it is for the sake of the world, it is for those in need, for the Church, for individual souls–all of which is true. But unless it is rooted in the boundless freedom of love and confidence in God, it is void and crippled. It has some effect perhaps, but lacks the current of grace and graciousness that flows from God.”
Quenon, Paul. In Praise of the Useless Life: a Monk’s Memoir. Notre Dame, IN: Ave Maria Press, 2018, p. 5.
My note when I read this in Quenon’s book: We pray well when we are simply praying. It’s one of the things believers do. We don’t do it to get stuff (although that may be the result, or a result). We don’t do it because we are forced to, required to. We pray in order to be praying.
“If someone cannot talk or indicate by a sign that he believes, understands, and desires the sacrament–particularly if he has wilfully [sic] neglected it–we will not give it to him just anytime he asks for it. We have been commanded not to offer the holy sacrament to unbelievers but rather to believers who can state and confess their faith. Let the others alone in their unbelief; we are guiltless because we have not been slothful in preaching, teaching, exhortation, consolation, visitation, or anything else that pertains to our ministry and office.”
Luther, Martin. “Whether One May Flee From a Deadly Plague” (1527) Luther’s Works Vol. 43. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1969, page 135.
The Sacrament of Holy Communion both expresses and creates community. Practice today varies. Some err on the side of inclusion (that it creates community), some at the other end of the spectrum (that it expresses an already existing community).
Note that Luther doesn’t refer to church membership but to faith as the thing that admits one to the table of the Lord. I think that he would have to exercise godly pastoral judgement in doubtful cases. While being faithful in carrying out the many duties of his pastoral office.
“The delicate action of grace in the soul is profoundly disturbed by all human violence.”
Merton, Thomas. Thoughts in Solitude. NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 1958. (pbk ed 1999) (p. 114).
Grace is God’s work and presence everywhere, even amidst violence. But our sinful violence (and I would say that violence is always evidence of sin) makes it harder to notice the presence of God’s grace.
“But it is terribly important to keep silence. When? Almost all the rest of the day. It is essential that priests learn how to silence all their routine declarations of truths that they have not yet troubled to think about. If we said only what we really meant we would say very little. Yet we have to preach God too. Exactly. Preaching the word of God implies silence. If preaching is not born of silence, it is a waste of time.” (8 January 1950)
Merton, Thomas. The Sign of Jonas. San Diego: Harcourt, Inc., 1981, page 266. (originally published 1953)
Keeping silent is a difficult thing for some people. But it is at least as important and necessary as speaking the right word at the right time.
Writing here, Merton was thinking specifically of preachers who speak the sermon or homily in a service of worship. I’m pretty sure that he would agree, though, that all of us regularly ‘preach’ with our actions, and in our daily conversations and social media posts. [okay, so first we would have to explain “social media” to him]
And I would agree that silence is golden. That we simply do not have to always throw in our 2 cents worth. That we do not have to reply to social media. That we do not always need to explain ourselves, defend ourselves, attack the other, or argue our way through the day.
“There is no true spiritual life outside the love of Christ. We have a spiritual life only because we are loved by Him. The spiritual life consists in receiving the gift of the Holy Spirit and His charity… If we know how great is this love of Jesus for us we will never be afraid to go to Him in all our poverty, all our weakness, all our spiritual wretchedness and infirmity.”
Merton, Thomas. Thoughts in Solitude. NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 1958. (pbk ed 1999), (p. 25).
“God speaks, and God is to be heard, not only on Sinai, not only in my own heart, but in the voice of the stranger. That is why the peoples of the Orient, and all primitive peoples in general, make so much of the mystery of hospitality. God must be allowed to speak unpredictably. The Holy Spirit, the very voice of Divine Liberty, must always be like the wind in ‘blowing where he pleases’ (John 3:8).”
Merton, Thomas. “A Letter to Pablo Antonio Cuadra concerning Giants.” (1961) in Selected Essays. Edited with an introduction by Patrick F. O’Connell. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2013 (p. 121).
Someone dear to me regularly reminds us to ‘Pay attention.’ Because you never know, do you, when God will speak to you through another person (stranger or friend), through the call of a bird or the colors of flowers and sunsets, through something you read (particularly even some non-religious thing), through dreams (that happens, at least, in the Scriptures), and so on. It makes sense that God would.
We say God is everywhere, and one thing that must mean is that God can speak to us everywhere. We expect, of course, to hear God in our place of worship, in our private devotional time, in the Scriptures and spiritual classics. But we also should be open to hear God, as Merton writes, “speak unpredictably.” So pay attention.
“The deeper meaning of these experiences [in context he’s writing about ‘depressive experiences’ and acedia] must be explored and the issues worked through. This means going through these experiences, not trying to get around them. The life of increasing interiority has as its hallmark what I call contemplative knowing. This knowing comes about only by sitting with, and working through, the various experiences of our lives. Both the sitting with and working through are essential to the process, allowing for the development of resilient, open vulnerability, so necessary for our way of life.” (p. 121)
Healey, Bede. “Psychological Investigations and Implications for Living Together Alone.” in Belisle, Peter-Damian, editor. The Privilege of Love: Camaldolese Benedictine Spirituality. Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2002.
Pathology: the Study of a Path 