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.