New Seeds of Contemplation

by Thomas Merton

It is more ordinary for the spirit to learn contemplation from God not in a sudden flash but imperceptibly, by very gradual steps.

as soon as they enter into regions where their own activity becomes paralyzed and bears no visible fruit, they turn around and go back to the lush fields where they can be sure that they are doing something and getting somewhere. And if they cannot achieve the results they desire with such intense anxiety, at least they convince themselves that they have made great progress if they have said many prayers, performed many mortifications, preached many sermons, read (and perhaps also written) many books and articles, paged through many books of meditations, acquired hundreds of new and different devotions and girdled the earth with pilgrimages.

to be patient and not to get excited. Soon they discover that all useless attempts to meditate only upset and disturb them; but at the same time, when they stay quiet in the muteness of naked truth, resting in a simple and open-eyed awareness, attentive to the darkness which baffles them, a subtle and indefinable peace begins to seep into their souls and occupies them with a deep and inexplicable satisfaction.

it is enough to remain peacefully indifferent

But until they are spiritually mature the passions must be treated firmly and with reserve, even in the “consolations” of prayer. When are they spiritually mature? When they are pure, clean, gentle, quiet, nonviolent, forgetful of themselves, detached and above all when they are humble and obedient to reason and to grace.

for a contemplative, there is supreme value in the ordinary everyday routine of work, poverty, hardship and monotony that characterize the lives of all the poor, uninteresting and forgotten people in the world.

he has to do many jobs he would rather not do, suffer many inconveniences with patience, and be content with many things that could be a great deal better.

To live frugally and laboriously, depending on God and not on material things which we no longer have, and doing our best to get along with other people who do not, perhaps, treat us with uniform kindness and consideration, all this may add up to an atmosphere of peace and tranquillity and contentment and joy.

the work of the intellect, properly carried out, is itself a school of humility.

Humility implies, first of all, a dedicated acceptance of one’s duty in life.

Pay as little attention as you can to the faults of other people and none at all to their natural defects and eccentricities.

But the crucial problem of perfection and interior purity is in the renunciation and uprooting of all our unconscious attachments to created things and to our own will and desires.

You pray and suffer and hang on and give things up and hope and sweat, and the varying contours of the struggle work out the shape of your liberty.

FICKLENESS and indecision are signs of self-love.

Before you finish one book you begin another, and with every book you read you change the whole plan of your interior life.

Your whole existence will be a patchwork of confused desires and daydreams and velleities in which you do nothing except defeat the work of grace:

above all we will learn to leave the results to God, and not indulge our own vanity by insisting on quick and visible conversions in everyone we talk to.

in actual practice one of the last barricades of egoism, and one which many saints have refused to give up entirely, is this insistence on doing the work and getting the results and enjoying them ourselves.