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March 23 - March 29, 2020
challenging me to face my restless self.
how much I needed to step back and wonder, “Is there a quiet stream underneath the fluctuating affirmations and rejections of my little world? Is there a still point where my life is anchored and from which I can reach out with hope and courage and confidence?”
Looking me right in the face with his great eyes he added, “Don’t worry about how to speak about the Lord. When you allow him to enter into your heart, he will give you words.”
The tension between his great desire for solitude and his deep compassion for so many people made Merton the writer he was,
me. I have so many ideas I want to write about, so many books I want to read, so many skills I want to learn—motorcycle maintenance is now one of them—and so many things I want to say to others now or later, that I do not SEE that God is all around me and that I am always trying to see what is ahead, overlooking him who is so close.
Why do I always want to read about the spiritual life and not really live it?
When we indeed participate in the life of God we will always discover more of God’s mystery in each other.
In many ways he is telling me about my own attachments and about the dangers of my own power games.
Nepsis means mental sobriety, spiritual attention directed to God, watchfulness in keeping the bad thoughts away, and creating free space for prayer.
“fuge, tace, et quiesce” (live in solitude, silence and inner peace),
What is it in us that makes us so full of desires to see a man risk his life? One answer is: Lack of nepsis.
“Thus says the Lord: By waiting and calm, you shall be saved. In quiet and trust lies your strength” (Is. 30:15).
Ask yourself how much you can work without it making you too tired to pray. It will take you a while to find your balance.”
The Ladder of Divine Ascent by John Climacus, which he called “the most popular book in Eastern monasteries.” He also gave me a copy of his own translation of the Praktikos by Evagrius Ponticus, plus a promanuscripto copy of the Apophtegms, a collection of sayings attributed to the desert fathers.
John Eudes seems able to reach beyond the point where conservatives and progressives go different ways.
The Lord is at the center of all things and yet in such a quiet, unobtrusive, elusive way. He lives with us, even physically, but not in the same physical way that other elements are present to us.
Contemplative life is a human response to the fundamental fact that the central things in life, although spiritually perceptible, remain invisible in large measure and can very easily be overlooked by the inattentive, busy, distracted person that each of us can so readily become. The contemplative looks not so much around things but through them into their center. Through their center he discovers the world of spiritual beauty that is more real, has more density, more mass, more energy, and greater intensity than physical matter.
I really must enter that “otherside,” the quiet, rhythmic, solid side of life, the deep solid stream moving underneath the restless waves of my sea.
I realized that my anger created restlessness, brooding, inner disputes, and made prayer nearly impossible. But the most disturbing anger was the anger at myself for not responding properly, for not knowing how to express my disagreement, for external obedience while remaining rebellious from within, and for letting small and seemingly insignificant events have so much power over my emotional life. In summary: passive aggressive behavior.
First: Allow your angry feelings to come to your awareness and have a careful look at them. Don’t deny or suppress them, but let them teach you. Second: Do not hesitate to talk about angry feelings even when they are related to very small or seemingly insignificant issues. When you don’t deal with anger on small issues, how will you ever be ready to deal with it in a real crisis? Third: Your anger can have good reasons. Talk to me (John Eudes) about it. Maybe I made the wrong decision, maybe I have to change my mind. If I feel that your anger is unrealistic or disproportionate, then we can
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Then some place for God might become available in your occupied mind and heart.
Do I have to go back to teach the well-dressed, well-sheltered, and well-fed? Are there other choices? What do I do with the money from writing books?
They really are very kind, compassionate people. That leaves little room for projection. In fact, none. It is not he or they, but it is simply me. I am the source of my own anger and no one else.
the contemplative life is like hearing a different drummer.
“Without solitude there can be no real people. The more you discover what a person is, and experience what a human relationship requires in order to remain profound, fruitful, and a source of growth and development, the more you discover that you are alone—and that the measure of your solitude is the measure of your capacity for communion. The measure of your awareness of God’s transcendent call to each person is the measure of your capacity for intimacy with others. If you do not realize that the persons to whom you are relating are each called to an eternal transcendent relationship that
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John Eudes
In times of doubt or unbelief, the community can “carry you along,” so to speak;
Evagrius Ponticus who says: “He who has conquered anger, has conquered demons. He, on the other hand, who is the victim of this passion, is an absolute stranger to the monastic life.”
When you keep going anxiously to the mailbox in the hope that someone “out there” has thought about you; when you keep wondering if and what your friends are thinking of you; when you keep having hidden desires to be a somewhat exceptional person in this community; when you keep having fantasies about guests mentioning your name; when you keep looking for special attention from the abbot or any one of the monks; when you keep hoping for more interesting work and more stimulating events—then you know that you haven’t even started to create a little place for God in your heart.
I wanted to say, write or do something “different” or “special” that would be noticed and talked about.
Just as people can watch spellbound a circus artist tumbling through the air in a phosphorized costume, so they can listen to a preacher who uses the Word of God to draw attention to himself. But a sensational preacher stimulates the senses and leaves the spirit untouched. Instead of being the way to God, his “being different” gets in the way.
If anything you say is worth saying, you will find its origin in the Word of God and his saints.”
The irony was that I always wanted to be alone to work, but when I was finally left alone, I couldn’t work and started to become morose, angry, sour, hateful, bitter, and complaining.
is not so much, “How to live for the glory of God?” but, “How to live who we are, how to make true our deepest self?”
In your meditation you can ask yourself, ‘Where is the glory of God? If the glory of God is not there where I am, where else can it be?’ ”
John Eudes
“You want God to appear to you in the way your passions desire, but these passions make you blind to his presence now. Focus on the nonpassionate part of yourself and realize God’s presence there. Let that part grow in you and make your decisions from there. You will be surprised to see how powers that seem invincible shrivel away.”
Dorotheus writes: “Don’t look for the affection of your neighbor. He who looks for it is troubled when he does not get it.
“Faith is a thought of God free from passion.”
Reflecting on my past three years of work, I realize more and more that it lacked unity. The many things I did during those years seem disjointed, not really relating to each other, not coining from one source. I prayed during certain hours or days but my prayer seemed separated from the lectures I gave, the trips I made, the counseling I did.
Even small daily tasks such as talking with your own students becomes an anxiety-provoking burden.
When God is my only concern, when God is the center of my interest, when all my prayers, my reading, my studying, my speaking, and writing serve only to know God better and to make him known better, then there is no basis for anxiety or stage fright. Then I can live in such a state of preparedness and trust that speaking from the heart is also speaking to the heart.
“Set your hearts on his kingdom first … and all these other things will be given you as well” (Mt. 6:33). Jesus is very clear about it. You cannot love God and mammon, you cannot be for him and against him, you cannot follow him just a little bit. Everything or nothing.
My preaching and teaching, my lecturing and counseling could be like different forms of a meditative life.
Hebrew word for God’s Spirit, Ruach, is both masculine and feminine,
Diadochus of Photice’s views on the discernment of spirits. He says that we have to keep the surface calm so that we can see deep into the soul. “When the sea is calm, the eyes of the fishermen can penetrate to the point where he can distinguish different movements in the depth of the water, so that hardly any of the creatures who move through the pathways of the sea escape him, but when the sea is agitated by the wind, she hides in her dark restlessness what she shows in the smile of a clear day.”
When we do not panic and create waves, we will be able to “think them through” to the end.
When you find your mind competing again, you might plan an “empty time” of meditation, in this way interrupting the vicious circle of your ruminations and entering into the depth of your own soul. There you can be with him who was before you came, who loved you before you could love, and who has given you your own self before any comparison was possible.
we become painfully aware how much we have already been victimized by our own competitive strivings and how much we have already sold our soul to the opinions of others.
but God’s glory in you can bring out God’s glory in the other when you have become more conscious of this shared gift. God speaks to God, Spirit to Spirit, Love to Love. It is all a gift, it is all grace.
Spiritual life comes entirely from his most holy Spirit. We have our own spirit but it is void of power. It begins to gain strength only when the grace of God flows into it.”2 I wonder
but God speaks only when he wants to speak.
