The Inner Experience: Thomas Merton's Unfinished Masterpiece on Contemplation, Bridging Catholic Monasticism and Eastern Meditation Traditions

by Thomas Merton

The great practitioners of contemplation who were the Desert Fathers of Egypt21 and the Near East did their best to dispel the illusion. They went into the desert not to seek pure spiritual beauty or an intellectual light, but to see the Face of God. And they knew that before they could see His Face, they would have to struggle, instead, with His adversary. They would have to cast out the devil subtly lodged in their exterior self. They went into the desert not to study speculative truth, but to wrestle with practical evil; not to perfect their analytical intelligence, but to purify their hearts. They went into solitude not to get something, but in order to give themselves, for “He that would save his life must lose it, and he that will lose his life, for the sake of Christ, shall save it.” By their renunciation of passion and attachment, their crucifixion of the exterior self, they liberated the inner man, the new man “in Christ.”