New Seeds of Contemplation

by Thomas Merton

Yet since the interior life and contemplation are the things we most of all need—I speak only of contemplation that springs from the love of God—the kind of considerations written in these pages ought to be something for which everybody, and not only monks, would have a great hunger in our time.

Pascal’s Pensées, the Cautelas and Avisos of St. John of the Cross, the Meditationes of Guigo the Carthusian, or, for that matter, the Imitation of Christ.

St. John of the Cross will find that much that is said about contemplative prayer follows lines laid down by the Spanish Carmelite.

CONTEMPLATION is the highest expression of man’s intellectual and spiritual life.

It is spiritual wonder.

abundant Source.

knows the Source, obscurely, inexplicably, but with a certitude that goes both beyond reason and beyond simple faith.

it sees “without seeing” and knows “without knowing.”

Very zen.

in contemplation we know by “unknowing.” Or, better, we know beyond all knowing or “unknowing.”

in the actual experience of contemplation all other experiences are momentarily lost. They “die” to be born again on a higher level of life.

Heidegger falling out

It is as if in creating us God asked a question, and in awakening us to contemplation He answered the question, so that the contemplative is at the same time, question and answer.

Together we recreate each other. Bernstein 3rd

EVERY moment and every event of every man’s life on earth plants something in his soul. For just as the wind carries thousands of winged seeds, so each moment brings with it germs of spiritual vitality that come to rest imperceptibly in the minds and wills of men.

themselves by asserting their own desires and ambitions and appetites in a struggle with the rest of the world. They try to become real by imposing themselves on other people, by appropriating for themselves some share

sometimes very holy men have been very exasperating people and tiresome to live with. If you do not believe me, perhaps it is because you think that the saints were always perfect, and never had any faults to fight against. But God sometimes permits men to retain certain defects and imperfections, blind-spots and eccentricities, even after they have reached a high degree of sanctity,

You can call this, if you like, the basic tenet of the Natural Law, which is that we should treat others as we would like them to treat us, that we should not do to another what we would not want another to do to us. In other words, the natural law is simply that we should recognize in every other human being the same nature, the same needs, the same rights, the same destiny as in ourselves. The plainest summary of all the natural law is: to treat other men as if they were men. Not to act as if I alone were a man, and every other human were an animal or a piece of furniture.

writer is so cautious that he never writes anything that cannot be criticized, he will never write anything that can be read. If you want to help other people you have got to make up your mind to write things that some men will condemn.

Instead of engaging in meaningful action, we bombard one another with statements and declarations, with interpretations of what has happened, is happening, or is about to happen. We keep telling each other the time, as though time itself would cease to exist if we stopped talking about it. Well, maybe it would!…

Faith is first of all an intellectual assent. It perfects the mind, it does not destroy

The true spiritual life is a life neither of dionysian orgy nor of apollonian clarity: it transcends both. It is a life of wisdom, a life of sophianic love.

the death of the man who, for all practical purposes, you have come to think of as your own self.

The first step to contemplation is faith; and faith begins with an assent to Christ teaching through His Church; fides ex auditu, qui vos audit, me audit. “He that heareth you, heareth Me.” And “faith cometh by hearing.”

For the understanding of dogma is the proximate and ordinary way to contemplation. Everybody who can

the most precious of all the gifts of nature or grace is the desire to be hidden and to vanish from the sight of men and be accounted as nothing by the world and to disappear from one’s own self-conscious consideration and vanish into nothingness in the immense poverty that is the adoration of God.

IT is easy enough to tell the poor to accept their poverty as God’s will when you yourself have warm clothes and plenty of food and medical care and a roof over your head and no worry about the rent. But if you want them to believe you—try to share some of their poverty and see if you can accept it as God’s will yourself!

The only way to possess His greatness is to pass through the needle’s eye of your own absolute insufficiency. The perfection of humility is found in transforming union. Only God can bring you to that purity through the fires of interior trial. It would be foolish not to desire such perfection. For what would be the good of being humble in a way that prevented you from seeking the consummation of all humility?

That is to say it became impossible for them to comfort themselves, to reassure themselves, with the images and concepts that they found reassuring in childhood.

The real purpose of meditation is this: to teach a man how to work himself free of created things and temporal concerns, in which he finds only confusion and sorrow, and enter into a conscious and loving contact with God in which he is disposed to receive from God the help he knows he needs so badly, and to pay to God the praise and honor and thanksgiving and love which it has now become his joy to give.

It is this that causes love of God and wonder and adoration to swim up into us like tidal waves out of the depths of that peace, and break upon the shores of our consciousness in a vast, hushed surf of inarticulate praise, praise and glory!

The whole spirit is rocked and reels in an explosion of drunken joy or a storm of compunction which may be good and healthy, but which is still more or less animal, even though the spark that started the fire may have had a supernatural origin.