Chapter 1, “What is Contemplation?” Post 3

In the second half of Chapter 1 (3-5) Merton continues to describe the "whatness" of contemplation, saying it's “also the response to a call” from the voiceless One who nevertheless “speaks in everything that is, and Who, most of all, speaks in the depths of our own being.”

As strange as that description may sound, Merton’s words ring true. If you have ever listened to an inward desire to come into God’s presence, you have in a real sense heard His "voiceless" voice. When we long for God, we are in conversation with God, for, as Merton says, “we ourselves are words of His.” God has called us into being; we are living in His language, His speaking, and eventually His story. We are meant to communicate with God, meant to be His conversation.

Merton suggests that we are an “echo” of God. By this metaphor, Merton suggests that we learn to speak “God language” from God himself; we listen and speak contemplatively because God listen and speaks contemplatively. “We ourselves become His echo and His answer.” There is thus an shared awareness that is characterized and experienced, as it were, as conversation, as question and answer so that God’s great “I AM” is echoed by our “I am.” We hear God’s speaking his Name and listening to His Name we name ourselves.

Neither a philosophical notion nor an abstract idea, this unitive awareness is a gift; in no way “the fruit of our own efforts”:

It is the gift of God Who, in His mercy, completes the hidden and mysterious work of creation in us by enlightening our minds and hearts, by awakening in us the awareness that we are words spoken in His One Word, and that Creating Spirit
(Creator Spiritus) dwells in us, and we in Him . . . . Contemplation is the awareness and realization, even in some sense experience, of what each Christian obscurely believes: “It is now no longer I that live but Christ lives in me.”

Convinced of this Reality by his own personal experience, Merton repeatedly confirms such “virginal knowledge” by Scriptural assurances and testimony. While he does not provide chapter and verse citations (expecting us know the Bible so thoroughly that we need none), he frequently quotes the New Testament, especially St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans. Because in Christ we are “sons [and daughters] of God,” our being with God is intimate and profoundly personal; “We are ‘in Christ’ that Christ lives in us." In Christ, we are part and parcel of God’s own mystery, His creative speaking, and His own freedom.

By now it should be obvious that for many Christians the contemplative Christian tradition is today almost a foreign language as it tries to describe how God wraps us intimately in His creative Presence and love. Ever since the Reformation and subsequent so-called "Age of Enlightenment," we are good at talking "about" God. Merton would have us move beyond our "yadda-yadda-yadda" about God so that we move beyond treating Him as the object of our thinking. We are satisfied to talk about God because we have lost the way of Christian contemplation. As a consequence, in New Seeds of Contemplation, Merton sets out to re-introduce us what the Church has largely forgotten--a way of living and being that invites us to a wordless intimacy with God that lays hidden within as the gift of his Reality in our hearts.

Chapter 1, “What is Contemplation?” Post 2

Merton begins his first chapter with a series of answers to the question “What is contemplation?” His first sentence dares to declare that “contemplation is the highest expression of man’s intellectual and spiritual life.” Thereafter Merton can’t praise contemplation enough: it is “spiritual wonder,” “spontaneous awe at the sacredness of life,” “gratitude for life,” and awareness of the reality of “an invisible, transcendent, and infinitely abundant Source.” Contemplation sees “without seeing” and knows “without knowing,” “a knowledge too deep to be grasped in images, words or even in clear concepts” (1).

Contemplation is “beyond” (Merton uses the word eleven times in a single paragraph!) aesthetic intuition, art, poetry, philosophy, speculative theology, our own knowledge and light, beyond systems, explanations, discourse, dialogue, and our own self. It supercedes “every other form of intuition and experience—whether in art, in philosophy, in theology, in liturgy or in ordinary levels of love and of belief.” Although “compatible with all these things,” contemplation “is their highest fulfillment.” It reaches out “to the experience of the transcendent and inexpressible God”:

It knows God by seeming to touch Him. Or rather it knows Him as if it had been invisibly touched by Him . . . . [the ellipsis is Merton’s]. Touched by Him Who has no hands, but Who is pure Reality and the source of all that is real!

Here, in the first paragraphs of this chapter, Merton asserts that contemplation moves us beyond the boundaries of theology, traditional worship, and conventional prayer, the so-called cataphatic tradition by which we speak of and to God. Without disparaging all that we already "know" about God, contemplation--as God's gift!--places on the other side of sacred reading, Gospel proclamation, liturgical worship, and charismatic experience. Contemplation places in a sacred space that leaves behind all forms of piety, holy thoughtfulness, and idiosyncratic apprehension of God. In short, it places us within the apophatic tradition .

To be a contemplative is therefore a way of being superbly alive in God. While appreciating and complementing all that we associate with Sunday, Bible study, prayer groups, liturgy, and "institutionally church-produced" engendered relationships with God-- contemplation somehow manages something beyond. It is, as Merton says, "a more profound depth of faith." What that may mean is the burden and joy of New Seeds of Contemplation.

For more on cataphatic and apophatic understandings, visit Theologies: Theology for Normal People.

"You who are sitting in darkness, keep your hope alive; the rise of the morning star, the sun shall not be slow."

New Seeds of Contemplation: Post 1

I'd like to begin this blog with a reading of Merton's New Seeds of Contemplation (1972), which hereafter I'll refer to as NSC. The first page of NSC contains this Latin inscription:

TU QUI SEDES IN TENEBRIS
SPE TUA GAUDE:
ORTA STELLS MATUTINA
SOL NON
TARDABIT

Here's my translation:

"You who are sitting in darkness, keep your hope alive; the rise of the morning star, the sun shall not be slow."

I have scribbled a note from somewhere telling me that the Latin inscription comes from a 12th century Gregorian chant. Merton 's Latin inscription surely is an encouragement meant to give us hope that all of us, even when we "sitting in darkness," can nonetheless expect that light will dawn upon us. As Christians who wish to practice contemplative prayer, we may anticipate a movement from night to day; we may look forward to the rising of "the morning star." Teasingly biblical, perhaps the Latin quotation is suggesting that we who find ourselves in darkness will come to experience "the Dawn from on High" whom Luke in the voice of Zechariah proclaims as Christ.

But what is the darkness? I suspect it is, first of all, a quite literal darkness. After all "those who sit in darkness" and singing these verses were once clearly twelfth-century monastic Christiains sitting and singing one of the Night Offices, well in the middle of night, in a darkened sanctuary. In monastic communities through the world, many still sing to God just a few hours after midnight. They have gathered and continue to gather themselves together to sing the Psalms in the early pre-dawn hours of the night.

I don't know about you, but it has been my practice, off and on (but more recently more and more "on") to rise early in the morning and sit in a hour or so before dawn so that I may enter the Presence of God in prayer. These hours are the quietest of the day, often a hour or so before the birds begin their choir practice to greet the day. Yesterday morning, for example, while sitting outside in the darkness, I heard the lone honkinig of a single goose flying over the lake. And every so faintly the wail of a locomotive some twelve miles away as a train made it way through Jackson. Once in a while a dog down the way woke up to bark. The leaves rustled a bit in the infrequent wind. But other that those sounds, there was nothing to hear but my own breathing. The moon was waning, but still fairly full as it made its way through the pine tops.

As I sat, slowly undoing myself from these faint images and sounds, freeing myself from the burden of thoughts, and letting go of long-held attachments, slight intimations of light made themselves welcome. But it was of little consequence, nothing dramatic. A kind of emptiness. Was God pouring himself into me? I'm not sure; but if he was entering my heart in such quietness, he didn't say so distinctly. If anything it was something of an echo of a whisper. When I sit again in such quietness, perhaps more. But even if not, God is with me in the darkness.

O, yes, in case you're wondering: yes, sometimes I do back to bed and sleep for another hour.