New Seeds of Contemplation

by Thomas Merton

FOR me to be a saint means to be myself. Therefore the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and of discovering my true self.

WHEN I pray for peace I pray God to pacify not only the Russians and the Chinese but above all my own nation and myself. When I pray for peace I pray to be protected not only from the Reds but also from the folly and blindness of my own country. When I pray for peace, I pray not only that the enemies of my country may cease to want war, but above all that my own country will cease to do the things that make war inevitable. In other words, when I pray for peace I am not just praying that the Russians will give up without a struggle and let us have our own way. I am praying that both we and the Russians may somehow be restored to sanity and learn how to work out our problems, as best we can, together, instead of preparing for global suicide.

So instead of loving what you think is peace, love other men and love God above all. And instead of hating the people you think are warmakers, hate the appetites and the disorder in your own soul, which are the causes of war. If you love peace, then hate injustice, hate tyranny, hate greed—but hate these things in yourself, not in another.

He Who Is Not with Me Is against Me

DESPAIR is the absolute extreme of self-love. It is reached when a man deliberately turns his back on all help from anyone else in order to taste the rotten luxury of knowing himself to be lost. In every man there is hidden some root of despair because in every man there is pride that vegetates and springs weeds and rank flowers of self-pity as soon as our own resources fail us. But because our own resources inevitably fail us, we are all more or less subject to discouragement and to despair. Despair is the ultimate development of a pride so great and so stiff-necked that it selects the absolute misery of damnation rather than accept happiness from the hands of God and thereby acknowledge that He is above us and that we are not capable of fulfilling our destiny by ourselves. But a man who is truly humble cannot despair, because in the humble man there is no longer any such thing as self-pity.

It is the duty of anyone who has had even the faintest glimpse of God’s love to protest against an inhumanly cruel and false psychology of mysticism, this psychology which presents “sanctity” and “contemplation” under the guise of riches to be acquired. As if sanctity and mysticism were “goods” that one must have in order to be acceptable in the Kingdom of God—just as one must have a new car every two years, a ranch house and a TV set in order to be acceptable in the cities of men. The new car and all that goes with it seem to indicate that one is not a bum or a slacker. That one is faithful to all the accepted standards. So too, spiritual consolations and very obvious virtues are supposed to be the sign that one has worked loyally in the service of God.

Little do we realize the meaning of spiritual poverty, of emptiness, of desolation, of total abandonment in the mystical life. Contemplative experience is not arrived at by the accumulation of grandiose thoughts and visions or by the practice of heroic mortifications. It is not “something you can buy” with any coin, however spiritual it might seem to be. It is a pure Gift of God, and it has to be a gift, for that is part of its very essence. It is a gift of which we can never, by any action of ours, make ourselves fully and strictly worthy. Indeed, contemplation itself is not necessarily a sign of worthiness or sanctity at all. It is a sign of the goodness of God, and it enables us to believe more firmly in His goodness, to trust in Him more, above all to be more faithful in our friendship with Him. All these should normally grow up as the fruits of contemplation. But do not be surprised if contemplation springs out of pure emptiness, in poverty, dereliction and spiritual night.

In point of fact, too ardent a desire for contemplation can be an obstacle to contemplation, because it may proceed from delusion and attachment to one’s self. The very desire for contemplation may be a dense, opaque, heavy thing that fills our emptiness, enslaves us to the idol of our exterior self, and binds us, like blind Samson, to the mill of vain hopes and illusory desires.

Is contemplation in this context interchangeable with “wisdom”?

How many people there are in the world of today who have “lost their faith” along with the vain hopes and illusions of their childhood. What they called “faith” was just one among all the other illusions. They placed all their hope in a certain sense of spiritual peace, of comfort, of interior equilibrium, of self-respect. Then when they began to struggle with the real difficulties and burdens of mature life, when they became aware of their own weakness, they lost their peace, they let go of their precious self-respect, and it became impossible for them to “believe.” 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.

Living with other people and learning to lose ourselves in the understanding of their weakness and deficiencies can help us to become true contemplatives. For there is no better means of getting rid of the rigidity and harshness and coarseness of our ingrained egoism, which is the one insuperable obstacle to the infused light and action of the Spirit of God.

There is always a danger that hermits will only dry up and solidify in their own eccentricity. Living out of touch with other people they tend to lose that deep sense of spiritual realities, which only pure love can give.

Do you think the way to sanctity is to lock yourself up with your prayers and your books and the meditations that please and interest your mind, to protect yourself, with many walls, against people you consider stupid? Do you think the way to contemplation is found in the refusal of activities and works which are necessary for the good of others but which happen to bore and distract you? Do you imagine that you will discover God by winding yourself up in a cocoon of spiritual and aesthetic pleasures, instead of renouncing all your tastes and desires and ambitions and satisfactions for the love of Christ, Who will not even live within you if you cannot find Him in other men?

No matter how little you may have learned of God in prayer, compare your acts with that little: order them by that measure. Try to make all your activity bear fruit in the same emptiness and silence and detachment you have found in contemplation. Ultimately the secret of all this is perfect abandonment to the will of God in things you cannot control, and perfect obedience to Him in everything that depends on your own volition, so that in all things, in your interior life and in your outward works for God, you desire only one thing, which is the fulfillment of His will.

THE extreme difficulties that lie in the way of those who seek interior freedom and purity of love soon teach them that they cannot advance by themselves, and the Spirit of God gives them a desire for the simplest means of overcoming their own selfishness and blindness of judgment. And this is obedience to the judgment and guidance of another.

Yet today people have great difficulty in understanding religious obedience, precisely because it is felt that the sacrifice of “one’s own personality” and of one’s “spontaneity” is too much to ask. In reality, the issues are often terribly confused. On the one hand, the subject may be flying from responsibility. On the other, the Superior may be governed by caprice and immaturity, being himself imperfectly able to cope with the responsibilities of his position.

No one can become a saint or a contemplative merely by abandoning himself unintelligently to an oversimplified concept of obedience.

THE mere ability to choose between good and evil is the lowest limit of freedom, and the only thing that is free about it is the fact that we can still choose good.

Therefore, the simplest definition of freedom is this: it means the ability to do the will of God. To be able to resist His will is not to be free. In sin there is no true freedom.

THERE are aspects of detachment and refinements of interior purity and delicacy of conscience that even the majority of sincerely holy men never succeed in discovering. Even in the strictest monasteries and in places where people have seriously dedicated their lives to the search for perfection, many never come to suspect how much they are governed by unconscious forms of selfishness, how much their virtuous acts are prompted by a narrow and human self-interest. In fact, it is often precisely the rigidity and the unbending formalism of these pious men that keep them from becoming truly detached.

They have given up the pleasures and ambitions of the world, but they have acquired for themselves other pleasures and ambitions which have a higher and more subtle and more spiritual character. Sometimes they never even dream that it is possible to seek perfection with an intensity of self-conscious zeal that is itself imperfect. They too are attached to the good things of their little enclosed world.

Sometimes, for instance, a monk can develop an attachment to prayer or fasting, or to a pious practice or devotion, or to a certain external penance, or to a book or to a system of spirituality or to a method of meditation or even to contemplation itself, to the highest graces of prayer, to virtues, to things that are in themselves marks of heroism and high sanctity. And men who seemed to be saints have let themselves be blinded by their inordinate love for such things. ...

How many there must be who have smothered the first sparks of contemplation by piling wood on the fire before it was well lit.

THERE is a kind of crude materialism in religious life which makes sincerely holy men believe that abnegation means simply giving up things that please the five exterior senses.

A man who hopes to become a contemplative by detaching himself only from the things that are forbidden by reason, will not even begin to know the meaning of contemplation.

Some people seem to think that the only reason for meditating on God is to get some interesting ideas about Him. It is true that one of the elementary purposes of meditation is to strengthen all our religious convictions and give them a deeper foundation of faith and understanding: but that is only the beginning. That is only the threshold of meditation.

Others suppose that the function of meditation is to show us the necessity for practicing virtues and to produce in us the courage and determination to go ahead and do something about it. That is true. This is another elementary fruit of meditation. But it is only another step on the way.

A less serious error—for now we come closer to the truth—is that meditation is supposed to produce in us greater love for God. Whether or not this concept is satisfactory depends on what you mean by loving God. If you think meditation has done its work when it has made y...

First it is supposed to give you sufficient control over your mind and memory and will to enable you to recollect yourself and withdraw from exterior things and the business and activities and thoughts and concerns of temporal existence, and second—this is the real end of meditation—it teaches you how to become aware of the presence of God; and most of all it aims at bringing you to a state of almost constant loving attention to God, and dependence on Him.

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.

COMPARED with the pure and peaceful comprehension of love in which the contemplative is permitted to see the truth not so much by seeing it as by being absorbed into it, ordinary ways of seeing and knowing are full of blindness and labor and uncertainty.

God touches us with a touch that is emptiness and empties us. He moves us with a simplicity that simplifies us. All variety, all complexity, all paradox, all multiplicity cease. Our mind swims in the air of an understanding, a reality that is dark and serene and includes in itself everything. Nothing more is desired. Nothing more is wanting. Our only sorrow, if sorrow be possible at all, is the awareness that we ourselves still live outside of God.

IN the vivid darkness of God within us there sometimes come deep movements of love that deliver us entirely, for a moment, from our old burden of selfishness, and number us among those little children of whom is the Kingdom of Heaven.

But if a man had to wait for such vivid experiences before he became a contemplative he might have to wait a long time—perhaps a whole lifetime. And perhaps his expectation would be vain.

LET US never forget that the ordinary way to contemplation lies through a desert without trees and without beauty and without water. The spirit enters a wilderness and travels blindly in directions that seem to lead away from vision, away from God, away from all fulfillment and joy. It may become almost impossible to believe that this road goes anywhere at all except to a desolation full of dry bones—the ruin of all our hopes and good intentions.

The prospect of this wilderness is something that so appalls most men that they refuse to enter upon its burning sands and travel among its rocks. They cannot believe that contemplation and sanctity are to be found in a desolation where there is no food and no shelter and no refreshment for their imagination and intellect and for the desires of their nature.

Convinced that perfection is to be measured by brilliant intuitions of God and fervent resolutions of a will on fire with love, persuaded that sanctity is a matter of sensible fervor and tangible results, they will have nothing to do with a contemplation that does not delight their ...

They want to know where they are going and see what they are doing, and 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 ...

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, a...

Not that all of these things are not good in themselves: but there are times in the life of a man when they can become an escape, an anodyne, a refuge from the responsibility of suffering in darkness and obscurity and helplessness, and allowing God to strip us of our f...

The man who is not afraid to abandon all his spiritual progress into the hands of God, to put prayer, virtue, merit, grace, and all gifts in the keeping of Him from Whom they all must come, will quickly be led to peace in union with Him. His peace will be all the sweeter because it will be free of every care.

This is an articulation of surrender.

On the other hand, if giving up meditation simply means that your mind goes dead and your will gets petrified, and you lean against the wall and spend your half hour of meditation wondering what you are going to get for supper, you had better keep yourself occupied with something definite. After all, there is always a possibility that laziness will dress itself up as “prayer of quiet” or “prayer of simplicity” and degenerate into torpor and sleep. The mere absence of activity does not ipso facto turn you into a contemplative.

What you most need in this dark journey is an unfaltering trust in the Divine guidance, as well as the courage to risk everything for Him. In many ways the journey seems to be a foolish gamble. And you may well make many mistakes. You are thoroughly capable of deceiving yourself. Humility and docile submission to the guidance of a good Director will neutralize the effect of your own mistakes. Even your Director himself may not always be right. But you must trust in God, who “writes straight on crooked lines” and brings great good out of evil. What matters in the contemplative life is not for you or your Director to be always infallibly right, but for you to be heroically faithful to grace and to love. If God calls you to Him, then He implicitly promises you all the graces you need to reach Him. You must be blindly faithful to this promise.

IN any degree of the spiritual life, and even where there is no spiritual life at all, it can happen that a man will feel himself caught up in an emotional religious ferment in which he overflows with sensible, and even sentimental movements of love for God and other people. If he is completely inexperienced he will get the idea that he is very holy because of the holy feelings that are teeming in his heart. All these things mean very little or nothing at all. They are a kind of sensible intoxication produced by some pleasure or other, and there is only an accidental difference between them and the tears that children sometimes shed when they go to the movies. In themselves these movements of passion are indifferent. They can be used for good or evil, and for beginners in the spiritual life they are generally necessary. But even a beginner would be foolish to depend on them, because sooner or later he will have to do without them. In fact, his spiritual life will not really begin until he has learned in some measure to get along without the stimulus of emotion.

All these things mean very little or nothing at all. They are a kind of sensible intoxication produced by some pleasure or other, and there is only an accidental difference between them and the tears that children sometimes shed when they go to the movies.

In themselves these movements of passion are indifferent. They can be used for good or evil, and for beginners in the spiritual life they are generally necessary. But even a beginner would be foolish to depend on them, because sooner or later he will have to do without them. In fact, his spiritual life will not really beg...

THEREFORE the healthiest reaction to these outbursts is an obscure repugnance for the pleasures and the excitements they bring. You recognize that these things offer no real fruit and no lasting satisfaction. They tell you nothing reliable about God or about yourself. They give you no real strength, only the momentary illusion of holiness. And when you grow more experienced, how much they blind you and how capable they are of deceiving you and leading you astray.

Passion and emotion certainly have their place in the life of prayer—but they must be purified, ordered, brought into submission to the highest love. Then they too can share in the spirit’s joy and even, in their own small way, contribute to it. 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.

IT often happens that an old brother who has spent his life making cheese or baking bread or repairing shoes or driving a team of mules is a greater contemplative and more of a saint than a priest who has absorbed all Scripture and Theology and knows the writings of great saints and mystics and has had more time for meditation and contemplation and prayer.

ONE of the first things to learn if you want to be a contemplative is how to mind your own business.

Nothing is more suspicious, in a man who seems holy, than an impatient desire to reform other men.