Posted on by Kurt Bodling

good lines for slow reading

“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!)

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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!)

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living our lives

“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.

Posted on by Kurt Bodling

the entry point

“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.

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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.”

Merton, Thomas. Thoughts in Solitude. NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 1958. (pbk ed 1999), (p. 25).

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spiritual role models

“Great spiritual men are often speechless and spend their days in silence. They live in the revelation of the mystery. They live in what takes them out of themselves so as to make them enter into the mystery of God.” Thought 92. (p. 60)

Sarah, Robert Cardinal. The Power of Silence Against the Dictatorship of Noise. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2017), page 60.

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not just break time

“Two classic practices spiritual seekers have used through the ages to open themselves to knowing and hearing God more deeply. Solitude and silence are not self-indulgent exercises for when an overcrowded soul needs a little time to itself. Rather, they are concrete ways of opening to the presence of God beyond human effort and beyond the human constructs that cannot fully contain the Divine.” (p. 31)

Barton, Ruth Haley. Invitation to Solitude and Silence: Experiencing God’s Transforming Presence. (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2004) page 31.

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center of action and contemplation

“In reality, Jesus seems to sketch out the outlines of a personal spiritual pedagogy: we should always make sure to be Mary before becoming Martha. Otherwise, we run the risk of becoming literally bogged down in activism and agitation, the unpleasant consequences of which emerge in the Gospel account: panic, fear of working without help, an inattentive interior attitude, annoyance like Martha’s toward her sister, the feeling that God is leaving us alone without intervening effectively.” Robert Cardinal Sarah, The Power of Silence Against the Dictatorship of Noise. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2017), page 28

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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.