Posted on by Kurt Bodling

take these one sentence at a time

“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!)

Posted on by Kurt Bodling

meditative prayer

“In meditative prayer, one thinks and speaks not only with his mind and lips, but in a certain sense with his whole being. Prayer is then not just a formula of words, or a series of desires springing up in the heart–it is the orientation of our whole body, mind and spirit to God in silence, attention, and adoration. All good meditative prayer is a conversion of our entire self to God.”

Merton, Thomas. Thoughts in Solitude. NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1958. (pbk ed 1999), p. 40.

This is how we can finally get away from the Sears-catalog-Amazon-wish-list type of prayer that so many Christians are boxed in by.

Posted on by Kurt Bodling

daily daylong silence

“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.

Posted on by Kurt Bodling

spiritual life and the love of Christ

“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.” (p. 25)

Merton, Thomas. Thoughts in Solitude. NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 1958. (pbk ed 1999).

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growth in Christ

“We increase and deepen our participation in the life of the Body by the activity of our minds and wills, illuminated and guided by the Holy Ghost. We must therefore keep growing in our knowledge and love of God and in our love for other men. The power of good operative habits must take ever greater and greater hold upon us. The Truth we believe in must work itself more and more fully into the very substance of our lives until our whole existence is nothing but vision and love.

“What this means in practice is summed up by one word that most men are afraid of: asceticism.” (pp. 9-10)

Merton, Thomas. “The White Pebble.” (1950) in Selected Essays. Edited with an introduction by Patrick F. O’Connell. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2013.

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the Holy Spirit, mystics, and Church

“It can be said at once that the inspirations of the Holy Ghost are seldom completely at variance with the sanely traditional norms of religious societies. However the history of the saints is full of examples when those led directly by God fell under the furious censures of professionally holy men. The trial of St. Joan of Arc is a case in point.

“The life of a contemplative is apt to be one constant tension and conflict between what he feels to be the interior movements of grace and the objective, exterior claims made upon him by the society to whose laws he is subject. The tension is heightened by the realization that false mystics are always ready to claim exemption from social norms on the basis of private inspiration. And the society itself, speaking through its most articulate members, will not be slow to remind him of the fact.”  (pp. 76-77)

Merton, Thomas. The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation. Edited and with an Introduction by William H. Shannon. NY: HarperOne, 2003. [Merton wrote this in 1959]

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true self – false self

“The self that appears to be weighed down by its love and carried away to material things is, in fact, an unreal thing. Yet it retains an empirical existence of its own; it is what we think of ourselves. And this empirical existence is strengthened by every act of selfish desire or fear. It is not the true self, the Christian person, the image of God stamped with the likeness of Christ. It is the false self, the disfigured image, the caricature, the emptiness that has swelled up and become full of itself, so as to create a kind of fictional substantiality for itself. Such is Augustine’s commentary on the phrase of St. Paul: scientia inflat. ‘Knowledge puffs up’.” (pp. 60-61)

Merton, Thomas. “The Recovery of Paradise.” (1959) in Selected Essays. Edited with an introduction by Patrick F. O’Connell. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2013.

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source of personal holiness

“True sanctity is not the work of man purifying himself; it is God Himself present in His own transcendent light, which to us is emptiness.” (p. 59)

Merton, Thomas. “The Recovery of Paradise.” (1959) in Selected Essays. Edited with an introduction by Patrick F. O’Connell. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2013.

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mysticism of life in Christ

“These Christian themes of ‘life in Christ’ and ‘unity in Christ’ are familiar enough, but one feels that today they are not understood in all their spiritual depth Their mystical implications are seldom explored. We dwell rather, with much greater interest, on their social, economic, and ethical implications.” (p. 54)

Merton, Thomas. “The Recovery of Paradise.” (1959) in Selected Essays. Edited with an introduction by Patrick F. O’Connell. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2013.

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paradise and solitude

“Modern studies of the Fathers have revealed beyond question that one of the main motives that impelled men to embrace the ‘angelic life’ (bios angelikos) of solitude and poverty in the desert was precisely the hope that by so doing they might return to paradise.

“Now this concept must be properly and accurately understood. Paradise is not ‘heaven.’ Paradise is a state, or indeed a place, on earth. Paradise belongs more properly to the present than to the future life. In some sense it belongs to both. It is the state in which man was originally created to live on earth. It is also conceived as a kind of antechamber to heaven after death–as for instance at the end of Dante’s Purgatorio. Christ, dying on the cross, said to the good thief at His side: ‘This day thou shalt be with me in Paradise,’ and it was clear that this did not mean, and could not have meant, heaven.” (p. 53)

Merton, Thomas. “The Recovery of Paradise.” (1959) in Selected Essays. Edited with an introduction by Patrick F. O’Connell. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2013.