Fasting of the heart…

Fasting of the heart means hearing, but not with the ear... The hearing that is only in the ears is one thing. The hearing of the understanding is another. But the hearing of the spirit is not limited to any one faculty, to the ear, or to the mind. Hence it demands the emptiness of all the faculties. And when the faculties are empty, then the whole being listens. There is then a direct grasp of what is right there before you that can never be heard with the ear or understood with the mind. Fasting of the heart empties the faculties, frees you from limitation and from preoccupations. Fasting of the heart begets unity and freedom... If you can do this, you will be able to go among men in their world without upsetting them. You will not enter into conflict with their ideal image of themselves...

Look at this window. It is nothing but a hole in the wall, but because of it the whole room is full of light. So when the faculties are empty, the heart is full of light. Being full of light, it becomes an influence, by which others are secretly transformed.

The Way of Chuang Tzu Thomas Merton, with thanks to Diane Walker

Fasting of the heart… I have hesitated to post here, because I haven’t had the words for what has been happening within by own heart. Perhaps a kind of fasting is the best way to describe it. So much that we mistake for certainty is in fact preconception, and we cling to our preconceptions as to lifebelts in the great wash of God’s presence.

We do not realise the vastness of God – at least, I don’t – the sheer appalling otherness of this istigkeit we presume to worship.

Aslan is no tame lion, as CS Lewis reminded us. Our Lord’s incarnation is often said to dissolve the distances between God and man, but what kind of a man was it his disciples, the women and men who walked and ate and drank with him day in and day out, actually knew? He terrified them on occasion (Matthew 14:22-33), struck them witless with awe (Luke 9:23-33), baffled them (John 6.43-68), and, after his resurrection, was at times simply unrecognisable (Luke 24.15-16; John 20.14-15).

“…what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?” as the Psalmist (8.4) says. A presence so great that he encompasses the galaxies, the vast interstellar chasms, and yet knows and cares for the fall of a sparrow… What can we know of such a presence, except what we are shown by him?

Tiny and broken, what can we cry but, Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner?

Le Point Vierge

Back from Mull and Iona, I've been trying to catch up on things, with varying degrees of success...

At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us. It is so to speak His name written in us, as our poverty, as our indigence, as our dependence, as our sonship. It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billion points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely.

Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, p. 158

Merton's vision of the point vierge has been haunting me recently. Cynthia Bourgeault quotes this very passage, tying it to the sense of the present mercy of God, the hope that lies deeper than all fear and doubt, at the very bedrock of being itself (Romans 8.28-39).

We are waiting, with the first disciples, for Pentecost. Christ has gone before us, as he promised (John 17.11-13). His promised Holy Spirit (John 16.7-15) will come upon them, and unimaginable consequences (the Acts of the Apostles, and all history since then) will follow. Since then, each of us has had the means (Romans 8.24-27) to observe, inwardly, that "point or spark which belongs entirely to God."

There are many ways to that vision; or should I say there are many ways to wait for God to reveal it to us, since it "is inaccessible to the fantasies of our mind or the brutalities of our own will." For Bourgeault it seems to be centring prayer; for me, as it has been for years, it is the Jesus Prayer. Its words, "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner," contain precisely that waiting, that emptiness that is the contemplative precondition itself.

The kind of awareness that the Jesus Prayer may lead us to is very simple... We believe – we know by faith – that God in Christ is here, with us and in us. Our task is to try to remember him and be attentive to him. It is this attentiveness that is the door to our experience of the presence of God. We cannot summon this experience at will. It is, like the Prayer itself, a gift. Ours is only a discipline of faith and perseverance. The experience, when it comes, will come of its own accord, and will be nothing like what we could ever imagine. God is immensely bigger than our imagination... And then, at last, we shall know what we longed and hoped for all these years when we called on Jesus' name again and again. 

Irma Zaleski, Living the Jesus Prayer, pp.30-31

The words of the prayer, too, contain within them that constant sense of trust in the mercy of God in Christ that Bourgeault sees so clearly. In Zaleski's words (ibid., pp.52-53) we meet God alone:

In a very real sense, we can only pray within the Church. When we say "Jesus," and ask for his mercy, we ask on behalf of his whole body, the Church, and by implication, on [behalf of] every human being who has ever lived. (See also Romans 8.12)

On the other hand, because the Jesus Prayer is a prayer of repentance, a prayer of a sinner, it must also be a prayer of each one alone... In the final analysis, we must make our own individual peace with God, find our own relationship with Christ, meet him face to face. Nobody can do it for us...

Simples?

The whole spiritual life can be reduced in practice to one simple formula: doing the will of God.

Thomas Merton, Ascent to Truth

It’s interesting to consider, though, if this is the case, how important must be the discernment of God’s will.

St Francis, of course, listened keenly to God’s voice—and yet even he, at least when young, got it wrong. He interpreted God’s word about the armour marked with the Cross as predicting his knightly success, and later he took Christ’s words from the San Damiano crucifix, “Go, Francis, and repair my house, which as you see is falling into ruin…” as referring to the building, and not to Holy Church herself.

St Ignatius of Loyola considered discernment impossible without a spiritual director.

No one who is trying to make spiritual progress should attempt to do so alone - a spiritual director is required. A director assists a Christian in examining the motives, desires, consolations, and desolations in one's life. Objectively, one can know what is right from looking at the Ten Commandments and the Seven Deadly Sins in a thorough examination of conscience. But the broader picture of one's life is often not so clear. A Christian should, according to St. Ignatius, share everything with a director who can see things objectively, without being swayed by the emotions or passion. Discerning whether the good spirit (the influence of God, the Church, one's soul) or the bad spirit (the influence of Satan, the world, the flesh) is at work requires calm, rational reflection. The good spirit brings us to peaceful, joyful decisions. The bad spirit often brings us to make quick, emotional, conflicted decisions. A spiritual director can assist both by personal experience, listening with care, and giving an objective analysis.

St Paul (1 Corinthians 12.10) placed great emphasis on prayerful intuition, and seems to have lived by it himself (e.g. Acts 16.6-10), while John (1 John 4.1-3) seems to have proposed a creedal formula. The writer to the Hebrews, perhaps more helpfully, suggests measuring everything against Scripture (Hebrews 4.12-13).

For myself, regular readers of The Mercy Blog won’t be surprised that I most often simply give up attempting to “work it out”, and resort to the Jesus Prayer, holding my own ignorance of God’s will up, as it were, to his Son’s own merciful discernment:

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner…

Being where Christ is…

All truly contemplative souls have this in common: not that they gather exclusively in the desert, or that they shut themselves up in reclusion, but that where He is, there they are.

Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude, p.95

And that does not make today a comfortable place to be, or even one that the mind can grasp, really. There is just this hollow silence, an absence of anything that thought can reach, or hold.

Prayer today is odd—a reaching out into what is not known, but still loved; almost as the Magdalene loved between the Cross and the empty tomb, perhaps. The author of The Cloud of Unknowing said it well, many years ago: “He can certainly be loved, but not thought. He can be taken and held by love but not by thought…” (Ch. 6)

Let my trust be in your mercy…

Let my trust be in Your mercy, not in myself. Let my hope be in Your love, not in health, or strength, or ability or human resources. If I trust You, everything else will become, for me, strength, health, and support. Everything will bring me to heaven. If I do not trust You, everything will be my destruction.

Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude, pp.29-30

I was writing last week about suffering:

…the good God has in mind is far deeper than “making it all better”. He means to make us holy, and that is a terrible thing in itself. What makes it worse is that the further one allows oneself to be led along this path, the more one refuses anaesthetise the pain with the things of the world, the longer one realises the journey ahead to be...

It all comes down to trust in Christ’s mercy. Merton puts it so succinctly: “If I trust you… everything will bring me to heaven. If I do not trust You, everything will be my destruction.”

Once again, I’m brought to the realisation that, for me at least, the Jesus Prayer is the complete path to this trust, with its simple, plain appeal, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner…”

Once we can trust, once we can give ourselves up (and this is the deepest meaning of this penitential season of Lent) in whatever act of surrender God has called us into, in the Jesus Prayer, in the Holy Rosary, in the faithful keeping of the Daily Office, then truly “We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.” (Romans 8.28 NRSV)

The use of prayer...

What is the use of prayer if at the very moment of prayer, we have so little confidence in God that we are busy planning our own kind of answer to our prayer?

Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude, Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, p. 24

I have so often felt that this was the necessary driving force behind contemplative prayer, at least from an intercessor's point of view. “In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express.” (Romans 8.26 NIV) And if we cannot know even how to pray, how can we know what God's answer might be?

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner...

The mercy of Christ...

Let my trust be in Your mercy, not in myself. Let my hope be in Your love, not in health, or strength, or ability or human resources.

If I trust You, everything else will become, for me, strength, health, and support. Everything will bring me to heaven. If I do not trust You, everything will be my destruction.

Thomas Merton. Thoughts in Solitude. (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux) pp.29-30

If we are to trust God, it is in his mercy we are to put our trust. Jesus, in his faithfulness, sacrifice and glorious resurrection, is for us the mercy of God. To trust in that mercy, to surrender ourselves into those arms open on the Cross itself, is the beginning, and the end, of our following. .He is the living word, the beginning and the end. In him and through his and for him all things came to be, and all people. Truly, if he is for us, who can be against us?

It's in realising this, in understanding that in and of ourselves we can do nothing, that we find that in surrendering everything to him, in absolute trust in his mercy, all things will become for us “strength, health, and support.” This is our penitence, the fast that we are called to in Lent: a fast from the self-sufficiency, ambition, and power that were offered to Jesus at the end of his own long fast in the wilderness (Luke 4.1-13) a giving up that prefigures our own dying into the endless mercy of Christ “the power of God and the wisdom of God.” (1 Corinthians 1.24)

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner...

Ash Wednesday

Last year I put up here a post by Br Dan of Dating God, and looking at it again, I can’t resist doing as he’s done himself, and reposting it today:

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“Even the darkest moments of the liturgy are filled with joy, and Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the Lenten fast, is a day of happiness, a Christian feast.”

In 1958 Thomas Merton wrote an essay titled, “Ash Wednesday,” which offers a reflection on the relationship between penance and joy found in the celebration of the beginning of Lent and the marking of our foreheads with ashes. Instead of me rambling on and on here today, I thought it would be good to share more from Merton himself. You can read the entire essay in Seasons of Celebration (FSG 1965), 113-124.

“Ash Wednesday is for people who know that it means for their soul to be logged with these icy waters: all of us are such people, if only we can realize it.

“There is confidence everywhere in Ash Wednesday, yet that does not mean unmixed and untroubled security. The confidence of the Christian is always a confidence in spite of darkness and risk, in the presence of peril, with every evidence of possible disaster…

“Once again, Lent is not just a time for squaring conscious accounts: but for realizing what we had perhaps not seen before. The light of Lent is given us to help us with this realization.

“Nevertheless, the liturgy of Ash Wednesday is not focussed on the sinfulness of the penitent but on the mercy of God. The question of sinfulness is raised precisely because this is a day of mercy, and the just do not need a saviour.”

Thomas Merton on Ash Wednesday « Dating God

Avoiding responsibility?

One of the elders said: A monk ought not to inquire how this one acts, or how that one lives. Questions like this take away from prayer, and draw us on to backbiting and chatter. There is nothing better than to keep silent…

One of the elders said: Pray attentively and you will soon straighten out your thoughts.

from Thomas Merton, The Wisdom of the Desert, New Directions Publishing Corp., 1960

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How true this is – increasingly, this Lent, I find I’m being drawn to silence, to stillness, to withdrawing from the busyness of so much of church life. I am fortunate, in having only recently moved to this town, to be relatively free of the kind of commitments I too easily make, and so I’m able to do this without causing too much inconvenience to others. But it is hard, sometimes, because one is inevitably misunderstood, even in the kindest of ways, and it is hard to avoid hurting good people by one’s seeming rejection of things that are, in themselves, perfectly good and useful.

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‘Time after time, the old men brought [Abba Theodore of Pherme] back to Scetis saying, “Do not abandon your role as a deacon.” Abba Theodore said to them, “Let me pray to God so that he may tell me for sure whether I ought to function publicly as a deacon in the liturgy.” This is how he prayed to God: “If it is your will that I should stand in this place, make me sure of it.” A pillar of fire appeared to him, stretching from earth of heaven, and a voice said, “If you can become like this pillar of fire, go and be a deacon.” So he decided against it. He went to church, and the brothers bowed to him and said, “If you don’t want to be a deacon, at least administer the chalice.” But he refused and said, “If you do not leave me alone, I shall leave here for good.” So they left him in peace.’

The instant temptation is to say that figures like this were avoiding responsibility, or setting impossibly high standards to justify their refusal of office… The issue is not about whether or not someone should assume their ‘proper’ responsibilities in the church (or society for that matter); the primary responsibility in the desert is… responsibility for your own and each other’s growth and truthfulness before God.

from Rowan Williams, Silence and Honey Cakes, Medio Media / Lion Books, 2003

Thomas Merton on Ash Wednesday « Dating God

“Even the darkest moments of the liturgy are filled with joy, and Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the Lenten fast, is a day of happiness, a Christian feast.”

In 1958 Thomas Merton wrote an essay titled, “Ash Wednesday,” which offers a reflection on the relationship between penance and joy found in the celebration of the beginning of Lent and the marking of our foreheads with ashes. Instead of me rambling on and on here today, I thought it would be good to share more from Merton himself. You can read the entire essay in Seasons of Celebration (FSG 1965), 113-124.

“Ash Wednesday is for people who know that it means for their soul to be logged with these icy waters: all of us are such people, if only we can realize it.

“There is confidence everywhere in Ash Wednesday, yet that does not mean unmixed and untroubled security. The confidence of the Christian is always a confidence in spite of darkness and risk, in the presence of peril, with every evidence of possible disaster…

“Once again, Lent is not just a time for squaring conscious accounts: but for realizing what we had perhaps not seen before. The light of Lent is given us to help us with this realization.

“Nevertheless, the liturgy of Ash Wednesday is not focussed on the sinfulness of the penitent but on the mercy of God. The question of sinfulness is raised precisely because this is a day of mercy, and the just do not need a saviour.”

Thomas Merton on Ash Wednesday « Dating God

The Way of the Desert

The spirituality of the desert fathers and mothers is a very early form of Christianity which largely refers to the gatherings of very dedicated Christians that took place after 313 AD, when the church allowed itself to be more than a bit co-opted by the Edict of Constantine.  Great numbers of the deeply faithful moved off into Egypt, Syria, Cappadocia (Turkey), and Palestine during this period.  St. Anthony of Egypt, who died around 369, is called the father of monks.  He was a layman and a Coptic Christian.

In 313 AD, the Roman emperor Constantine, perhaps thinking he was doing us a favour, made Christianity into the imperial religion of the Roman Empire; and a whole lot of things changed, frankly because our viewpoint changed—from the bottom looking up, to the top looking down.  The next Councils of the Church were even convened (controlled?) by emperors and not by bishops or Popes.

So as we draw close to Lent, let’s go back to some of this primitive Christianity before systematic theology and highly centralized/Romanized Christianity had made both its good and bad marks.  The desert fathers and mothers were able to see and know some things that we can not so easily see anymore.  Maybe we need some of their spirit now. 

Richard Rohr, February 2011,
adapted from The Sayings of the Desert Fathers (1975),
with permission of Cistercian Publications, and
The Wisdom of the Desert, Thomas Merton (1970),
with permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

Starting here, I think I’ll try and follow Rohr’s lead by posting snippets from the Desert Fathers and Mothers throughout Lent – as well as I can manage to keep it up!

Merton on Solitude

Solitude is not something you must hope for in the future. Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present you will never find it.

From Thomas Merton: A Life in Letters: The Essential Collection, Shannon & Bochen (eds.), HarperOne  2008

Lord, have mercy…

Lord, have mercy.

Have mercy on my darkness,

my weakness,

my confusion.

Have mercy on my infidelity,

my cowardice,

my turning about in circles,

my wandering,

my evasions.

I do not ask for anything but such mercy, always, in everything,

mercy.

My life here – a little solidity and very much ashes.

Almost everything is ashes. What I have prized most is ashes.

What I have attended to least is, perhaps…

a little solid.

Lord, have mercy.

Guide me,

make me want again to be holy,

to be a man of God, even though in desperateness and confusion.

I do not necessarily ask for clarity, a plain way, but only to go according to your love,

to follow your mercy, to trust your mercy.

I want to seek nothing at all, if this is possible.

But only to be led without looking and without seeking.

For thus to seek is to find.

[Thomas Merton, Journals, August 2, 1960, IV.28 – with thanks to FlowerDust.net]

Faith alone...

Faith alone can give us the light to see that God's will is to be found in our everyday life. Without this light, we cannot see to make the right decisions.

Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999, p. 38

We are all bound to seek not only our own good, but the good of others. Divine providence brings us in contact, whether directly or indirectly, with those in whose lives we are to play a part as instruments of salvation.

Thomas Merton, Life and Holiness, Image Books, 1963, p. 40

I'm sorry to have been so out of touch recently. Difficult personal circumstances, involving among other things regular visits to a friend in hospital, have conspired to keep me distracted and unable to focus on writing on the scattered occasions when I have been able to sit down at the keyboard. But I haven't forgotten this blog, nor have I forgotten that this Lent is drawing down through Passiontide towards Good Friday.

Meanwhile, I thought I'd just post these snippets from Thomas Merton, which seem to sum up the things God has been showing me this last week or so...

Heroically faithful?

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.

Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, New Directions, 1961, p. 244

This seems very close to the lesson God is trying to teach me this Lent. Nothing else, it seems, will do. What we have here seems to be very close to Jesus’ own journey to the Cross. Only his faithfulness, only his preparedness to go, despite the dreadful awareness of the consequences he showed in the Garden of Gethsemane (Matthew 6.36ff; Luke 22.39ff) as far as his Father called him to, trusting only in the bare knowledge of his Father’s love, allowed the Cross to bring to us, to all creation, the healing grace that will make all things new. Merton is right: it is a heroic faithfulness to which we are called if we are to take up our own cross and follow him. God grant us the courage to trust that the grace is there, will always be there, to bring us through…

The Use of Prayer…

What is the use of prayer if at the very moment of prayer, we have so little confidence in God that we are busy planning our own kind of answer to our prayer?

Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999, p. 24

Listening in the spiritual life is much more than a psychological strategy to help others discover themselves. In the spiritual life the listener is not the ego, which would like to speak but is trained to restrain itself, but the Spirit of God within us. When we are baptised in the Spirit—that is, when we have received the Spirit of Jesus as the breath of God breathing within us—that Spirit creates in us a sacred space where the other can be received and listened to. The Spirit of Jesus prays in us and listens in us to all who come to us with their sufferings and pains.

When we dare to fully trust in the power of God’s Spirit listening in us, we will see true healing occur.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. (Romans 8.24b-27)

Trust...

My hope is in what the eye has never seen. Therefore, let me not trust in visible rewards. My hope is in what the heart of man cannot feel. Therefore let me not trust in the feelings of my heart. My hope is in what the hand of man has never touched. Do not let me trust what I can grasp between my fingers.

Let my trust be in Your mercy, not in myself. Let my hope be in Your love, not in health, or strength, or ability or human resources.

Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude, Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1999, pp. 29-30

This is so close to what God has been showing me over the last year... We know so very little of his purposes for us, let alone for those we meet and serve and love. Our trust is all we can bring, a gift that can only be held  in open hands.

The silence and the Cross…

Milosz, life is on our side. The silence and the Cross are forces that cannot be defeated. In silence and suffering, in the heartbreaking effort to be honest in the midst of dishonesty (most of all our own dishonesty), in all these is victory. It is Christ in us who drives us through darkness to a light of which we have no conception and which can only be found by passing through apparent despair. Everything has to be tested. All relationships must be tried. All loyalties have to pass through fire. Much has to be lost. Much in us has to be killed, even much that is best in us. But Victory is certain.

Thomas Merton, Letter to Czeslaw Milosz, Feb, 1959 from The Courage for Truth: Letters to Writers, Christine M. Bochen, editor, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1993 pp. 57-58.

In these days of ours, we’d do well to read these words again…

Solitude as act…

Solitude as act: the reason no one understands solitude, or bothers to try to understand it, is that it appears to be nothing but a condition. Something one elects to undergo, like standing under a cold shower. Actually, solitude is a realization, an actualization, even a kind of creation, as well as a liberation of active forces within us, forces that are more than our own, and yet more ours that what appears to be “ours”. As a mere condition, solitude can be passive, inert and basically unreal: a kind of permanent coma. One has to work at it to keep out of this condition. One has to work actively at solitude, not by putting fences around oneself but by destroying all the fences and throwing away all the disguises and getting down to the naked root of one’s inmost desire, which is the desire of liberty-reality. To be free from the illusion that reality creates when one is out of right relation to it, and to be real in the freedom which reality gives when one is rightly related to it.

Thomas Merton, Learning to Love, Journals Volume 6, Christine M. Bochen, editor HarperSanFrancisco, 1997, pp. 320-321.

It’s a pity this is too long a text to have printed on a tee-shirt—otherwise it would save a lot of explaining!

Nothing but a failure…

In the eyes of our conformist society, the hermit is nothing but a failure. He has to be a failure – we have absolutely no use for him, no place for him. He is outside all our projects, plans, assemblies, movements. We can countenance him as long as he remains only a fiction, or a dream. As soon as he becomes real, we are revolted by his insignificance, his poverty, his shabbiness, his total lack of status. Even those who consider themselves contemplatives, often cherish a secret contempt for the solitary. For in the contemplative life of the hermit there is none of that noble security, that intelligent depth, that artistic finesse which the more academic contemplative seeks in his sedate respectability.

from the essay, “Philosophy of Solitude”, Disputed Questions, Harvest Books, 1985, p. 199, with thanks to Louie, Louie

Why is it that I read something like this with a sense of excitement and anticipation, more than anything else? So much that has been hidden from me for years now seems to be becoming clear in these strange days of summer…