Social commentators are right to be concerned about people sitting in isolation in front of computers, a prey to nasty stuff. Such isolation can lead some young people to encounter extremist views and conspiracy theories and other right-wing propaganda.
But being alone is not necessarily a source of loneliness. "A man alone is always in bad company," Paul Valery is quoted as saying, but I disagree with this as an absolute principle. A person left alone, adrift with ties to family or faith or any other community, can be in bad company--unless he or she seeks the kind of solitude that nourishes the spirit.
Creative people need solitude, which is not at all akin to loneliness. Most of us need a few hours alone, especially in this noisy, busy culture; we need to be alone with ourselves. Solitude implies a time apart that is enjoyable. My time writing requires solitude; my wife, a poet and fiction writer, goes so far as to disconnect the telephone for what she calls "cloistered time." Both of us are happy being on our own for a few hours reading, writing, or just thinking.
Anyone who has read Thomas Merton (Thoughts in Solitude, e.g.) or May Sarton or many other more recent writers knows that one can be happy, or at least contented, with a good bit of solitude. I thought of this in my research into feline behavior. Cats are solitary creatures, but they also crave company and seek our attention. So it is with people, especially creative ones. We need to interact with another living being, yet we also need time apart for ourselves.
Solitude is a precious commodity of the self, something the poet Rilke has in mind when he wrote, "I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other." So the kind of love he envisions, as a poet, requires respecting the other's private domain, allowing the partner the creative freedom to be alone.
And yet being alone in contemplative prayer or meditation, as Merton and other can attest, is also to be connected to the vast web of others who are praying or meditating. In being part of a community of silence, we are never really alone even while being on our own. And we are certainly not lonely or in bad company.
Showing posts with label Thomas Merton. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Thomas Merton. Show all posts
Sunday, November 17, 2019
Saturday, December 17, 2016
Staying Connected
One of the best features of the Christmas season for me is contacting my many out-of-town or seldom-heard from friends and relatives, conveying best wishes. This annual ritual is a reminder that we are all connected.
It is very easy for me, as a writer and reader who loves solitude, who disconnects the telephone at certain times so my wife and I can write, to feel restless and lonely, isolated in my comfortable bubble. As I think of the many single people I know living alone, I often think of the Lennon-McCartney song, "Eleanor Rigby," with its refrain: "Ah, look at all the lonely people."
Why are there so many people who feel alone, unwanted, or useless every day? I think of my elderly neighbor, whose frustration with the limitations of her life at 89 causes her to lash out in anger at the caregiver who's there to help her. If only she could feel a part of the greater whole that surrounds her--in nature, the world of ideas and music, the friends and family who think of her every day, the prayers said for her. She is surrounded by love.
Achieving such a feeling of being loved and connected is not easy. Sometimes it comes naturally, the way prayer does after a dry spell that we must endure before finding a sense of relatedness to God, or, if you prefer, to Life.
I combat feelings of isolation by an awareness of the many people who admire me, think of me, write to me, maybe pray for me--sight unseen. I think of the strangers who read this blog in various countries--or something else I have published: something I have written has interested them, or moved or helped them in some way.
Or I can think of the many thousands of students who have benefited from my classes (and still do) as well as family members, now gone, whose faces and voices I can still hear in my mind. Or I think of the saints since I believe that somehow, in the great mystery of things, I am surrounded by many who wish me well, from this side of the grave or the other. Their memories of me might be more positive than I will ever know. And our connection is real.
So, I tell myself, I am surrounded by good will. I know dozens of people I can call on for help, other than my wife. Moreover, from what I know about biology, I am aware that I live in a interconnected world of supportive relationships. I am a living part of nature, related to the plants and animals, to the stars at night that remind me that millions of others in many other places are seeing the same stars, maybe feeling that they, too, are part of the cosmos.
I am reminded that the Greek word "cosmos" means order, also ornamentation (as in cosmetics), and so the universe or cosmos means the ordered beauty of the reality in which I live and breathe and have my being.
Of course, the media, too, are daily reminders that we are part of a global community. I like to think that love, in the form of caring or compassion, is at work in these contexts: altruism, which is said to exist in our very genes, is real, as in the effort of most of us to make our planet healthier.
If we live in isolation, believing we are inferior to everyone else or superior to them, we are living in the kind of hell depicted by T. S. Eliot ("The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"). The answer: reach out and contact the sick or lonely or depressed neighbor. Write an email to someone who'd appreciate a reminder that they are not forgotten. Or ask for help: it will come.
Those contemplatives in my Catholic tradition (monks, nuns) who are physically apart from public life are linked, as Thomas Merton once wrote, in a "friendly communion of silence." I think of them every day. Richard Rohr, writing in this religious context, writes: "we are already in union with God. . .inside a life larger than us that can't be taken from us." The union of the divine with the human is precisely what is celebrated at Christmas.
As Merton wrote, because we are a part of God, who is in us, "we are already one. But we imagine we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we already are."
My first wish for those of you who read this rambling post or other musings of mine is that you will contact me with a comment: use the Comments section or my email: schiffhorst@yahoo.com. Thank you.
Even if I don't hear from you, I know you are there and that you, like me, are part of this living cosmos united in love and with every reason to celebrate Christmas. My second (and primary) wish is that you enjoy a season of true peace that extends into the coming year.
It is very easy for me, as a writer and reader who loves solitude, who disconnects the telephone at certain times so my wife and I can write, to feel restless and lonely, isolated in my comfortable bubble. As I think of the many single people I know living alone, I often think of the Lennon-McCartney song, "Eleanor Rigby," with its refrain: "Ah, look at all the lonely people."
Why are there so many people who feel alone, unwanted, or useless every day? I think of my elderly neighbor, whose frustration with the limitations of her life at 89 causes her to lash out in anger at the caregiver who's there to help her. If only she could feel a part of the greater whole that surrounds her--in nature, the world of ideas and music, the friends and family who think of her every day, the prayers said for her. She is surrounded by love.
Achieving such a feeling of being loved and connected is not easy. Sometimes it comes naturally, the way prayer does after a dry spell that we must endure before finding a sense of relatedness to God, or, if you prefer, to Life.
I combat feelings of isolation by an awareness of the many people who admire me, think of me, write to me, maybe pray for me--sight unseen. I think of the strangers who read this blog in various countries--or something else I have published: something I have written has interested them, or moved or helped them in some way.
Or I can think of the many thousands of students who have benefited from my classes (and still do) as well as family members, now gone, whose faces and voices I can still hear in my mind. Or I think of the saints since I believe that somehow, in the great mystery of things, I am surrounded by many who wish me well, from this side of the grave or the other. Their memories of me might be more positive than I will ever know. And our connection is real.
So, I tell myself, I am surrounded by good will. I know dozens of people I can call on for help, other than my wife. Moreover, from what I know about biology, I am aware that I live in a interconnected world of supportive relationships. I am a living part of nature, related to the plants and animals, to the stars at night that remind me that millions of others in many other places are seeing the same stars, maybe feeling that they, too, are part of the cosmos.
I am reminded that the Greek word "cosmos" means order, also ornamentation (as in cosmetics), and so the universe or cosmos means the ordered beauty of the reality in which I live and breathe and have my being.
Of course, the media, too, are daily reminders that we are part of a global community. I like to think that love, in the form of caring or compassion, is at work in these contexts: altruism, which is said to exist in our very genes, is real, as in the effort of most of us to make our planet healthier.
If we live in isolation, believing we are inferior to everyone else or superior to them, we are living in the kind of hell depicted by T. S. Eliot ("The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"). The answer: reach out and contact the sick or lonely or depressed neighbor. Write an email to someone who'd appreciate a reminder that they are not forgotten. Or ask for help: it will come.
Those contemplatives in my Catholic tradition (monks, nuns) who are physically apart from public life are linked, as Thomas Merton once wrote, in a "friendly communion of silence." I think of them every day. Richard Rohr, writing in this religious context, writes: "we are already in union with God. . .inside a life larger than us that can't be taken from us." The union of the divine with the human is precisely what is celebrated at Christmas.
As Merton wrote, because we are a part of God, who is in us, "we are already one. But we imagine we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we already are."
My first wish for those of you who read this rambling post or other musings of mine is that you will contact me with a comment: use the Comments section or my email: schiffhorst@yahoo.com. Thank you.
Even if I don't hear from you, I know you are there and that you, like me, are part of this living cosmos united in love and with every reason to celebrate Christmas. My second (and primary) wish is that you enjoy a season of true peace that extends into the coming year.
Sunday, November 8, 2015
Silence Revisited
For nearly twenty years, I have been investigating the power of silence, a topic that first struck me when teaching the later poetry of T. S. Eliot. I then discovered all the many things Thomas Merton had to say about silence as contemplative prayer. In several articles on Merton and silence, I tried to define the broader implications of silence as something more than the absence of sound.
Many other writers, I found, have explored this topic, suggesting that genuine silence is not about emptiness or negativity but presence. What kind of presence is not always easy to define, but it became clear to me that true silence has its own positive, independent existence: it is the enduring reality that sound interrupts. Or we can say it is the permanent reality that supports sound, a bit like the way the white space on a printed page exists in dialogue with the words, which come out of silence.
Silence lasts while words do not. And while such insights come from my literary background, they also come from my search for prayer, the kind that goes beyond words to an interior reality known to mystics in both Eastern and Western spiritual traditions. Christians might find in contemplation and meditation an awareness of the kingdom of God within. This attention to spiritual reality through stillness and silence has been called the sacrament of the present moment.
Recently, I have profited from listening to Richard Rohr, the Franciscan priest and author, who sees silence as an alternative consciousness, a way of way of knowing beyond rational analysis. The ego, he says (drawing on Jung), needs words to make points and to get what it wants; the ego is uncomfortable with silence since part of us wants to argue.
But the soul, so to speak, sees that silence is more important than words. Silence for Rohr is the wholeness of being with nothing to argue about. It gives us moments in the timeless present but also something more: a sense of the eternal since time increases ("grows into a fullness") in silence, which is more significant than words.
Rohr's great spiritual model is St. Francis, who said, "Pray always and sometimes use words," referring to actions (good deeds) and silence as more expressive of love than language. If our words begin with, and come out, of silence, our words will be carefully chosen. Words not surrounded by silence (but blurted out in a great rush) can be hurtful, critical, sarcastic, hardly spiritual.
Rohr also suggests that a focus on silence as a spiritual practice prepares us for death, the Great Silence. And the other manifestations of silence in art--the stillness of paintings, for example, or the eloquent absence of sound in certain films--are also worth studying.
I remain grateful to Merton for reviving the Christian tradition of contemplative prayer and seeing its parallel in Buddhist practice, something he was exploring in Bangkok at the time of his death in 1968. I am happy to see that what he and many others have done, in both poetry and prose, continues the exploration of silence as a source of ultimate meaning as well as the source of language and music.
As T. S. Eliot wrote (in "Ash Wednesday"), the word cannot be heard here, in ordinary time: "there is not enough silence."
Many other writers, I found, have explored this topic, suggesting that genuine silence is not about emptiness or negativity but presence. What kind of presence is not always easy to define, but it became clear to me that true silence has its own positive, independent existence: it is the enduring reality that sound interrupts. Or we can say it is the permanent reality that supports sound, a bit like the way the white space on a printed page exists in dialogue with the words, which come out of silence.
Silence lasts while words do not. And while such insights come from my literary background, they also come from my search for prayer, the kind that goes beyond words to an interior reality known to mystics in both Eastern and Western spiritual traditions. Christians might find in contemplation and meditation an awareness of the kingdom of God within. This attention to spiritual reality through stillness and silence has been called the sacrament of the present moment.
Recently, I have profited from listening to Richard Rohr, the Franciscan priest and author, who sees silence as an alternative consciousness, a way of way of knowing beyond rational analysis. The ego, he says (drawing on Jung), needs words to make points and to get what it wants; the ego is uncomfortable with silence since part of us wants to argue.
But the soul, so to speak, sees that silence is more important than words. Silence for Rohr is the wholeness of being with nothing to argue about. It gives us moments in the timeless present but also something more: a sense of the eternal since time increases ("grows into a fullness") in silence, which is more significant than words.
Rohr's great spiritual model is St. Francis, who said, "Pray always and sometimes use words," referring to actions (good deeds) and silence as more expressive of love than language. If our words begin with, and come out, of silence, our words will be carefully chosen. Words not surrounded by silence (but blurted out in a great rush) can be hurtful, critical, sarcastic, hardly spiritual.
Rohr also suggests that a focus on silence as a spiritual practice prepares us for death, the Great Silence. And the other manifestations of silence in art--the stillness of paintings, for example, or the eloquent absence of sound in certain films--are also worth studying.
I remain grateful to Merton for reviving the Christian tradition of contemplative prayer and seeing its parallel in Buddhist practice, something he was exploring in Bangkok at the time of his death in 1968. I am happy to see that what he and many others have done, in both poetry and prose, continues the exploration of silence as a source of ultimate meaning as well as the source of language and music.
As T. S. Eliot wrote (in "Ash Wednesday"), the word cannot be heard here, in ordinary time: "there is not enough silence."
Thursday, September 24, 2015
Listening to Pope Francis
The remarkable Pope Francis, on his first trip to the U.S. this week, is giving 18 speeches. I hope he also has time to listen to Americans and their needs.
Listening to his moving speech today before Congress, I can see that he knows what notes to strike, what tone to take in dealing, as only he can, with major issues that go beyond partisan politics.
I was almost as nervous, proud, and excited as Joe Biden, the VP, and Speaker John Boehner, who wept: a Catholic leader universally regarded as a wise prophet who doesn't shout to be heard, who speaks courageously, from the heart, saying tough things in soft tones. His halting English became more confident and lively as he proceeded, and the audience sat in rapt attention to every word. Quite a contrast to the anti-Catholic attitudes of past times in this country.
The greatest surprise of the speech was his inclusion of two of my favorite people from recent American Catholicism: two radical converts, Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton, both viewed with some alarm by bishops in the 1960s for their peace activities and their preference for social justice as the way to live out the Gospel message.
I have written a good bit about Merton and have given talks on Day and her Catholic Worker Movement (once considered a socialist-Communist operation) and so was thrilled to hear these two Americans singled out and honored in one of the major speeches in recent memory.
"My duty is to build bridges," Francis said today, putting Merton and Day in the company of Lincoln and M. L. King as four heroic Americans concerned as the pope is with the common good, rejecting by implication the selfishness of ordinary political life and celebrity culture. This is a pontiff who lives up to what that title implies: bridge builder. Merton and Day also built bridges of action and prayer that live on.
I have often been dismayed that many people are unaware of Day and Merton. Now they will have a chance to learn, thanks to Pope Francis, the pontiff who does not pontificate.
Listening to his moving speech today before Congress, I can see that he knows what notes to strike, what tone to take in dealing, as only he can, with major issues that go beyond partisan politics.
I was almost as nervous, proud, and excited as Joe Biden, the VP, and Speaker John Boehner, who wept: a Catholic leader universally regarded as a wise prophet who doesn't shout to be heard, who speaks courageously, from the heart, saying tough things in soft tones. His halting English became more confident and lively as he proceeded, and the audience sat in rapt attention to every word. Quite a contrast to the anti-Catholic attitudes of past times in this country.
The greatest surprise of the speech was his inclusion of two of my favorite people from recent American Catholicism: two radical converts, Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton, both viewed with some alarm by bishops in the 1960s for their peace activities and their preference for social justice as the way to live out the Gospel message.
I have written a good bit about Merton and have given talks on Day and her Catholic Worker Movement (once considered a socialist-Communist operation) and so was thrilled to hear these two Americans singled out and honored in one of the major speeches in recent memory.
"My duty is to build bridges," Francis said today, putting Merton and Day in the company of Lincoln and M. L. King as four heroic Americans concerned as the pope is with the common good, rejecting by implication the selfishness of ordinary political life and celebrity culture. This is a pontiff who lives up to what that title implies: bridge builder. Merton and Day also built bridges of action and prayer that live on.
I have often been dismayed that many people are unaware of Day and Merton. Now they will have a chance to learn, thanks to Pope Francis, the pontiff who does not pontificate.
Wednesday, September 16, 2015
Learning from Buddhism
What can Christians and other non-Buddhists learn from Buddhist meditative practice?
Many things, as Thomas Merton showed fifty years ago in his writings about Zen, as Richard Rohr and others suggest today--without becoming Buddhists.
I remain very much a beginner in Buddhist practice and derive most of my insights here from the recent (Sept. 7) post by Richard Rohr, who says our "deepest, truest reality" is our oneness with God.
Although he didn't use the term 'mindfulness,' Merton brought the ancient Christian contemplative tradition into the 20th century by emphasizing inner silence, solitude, and attention to the sacrament of the present moment, or what has been called the power of now. His work and those who have followed him (John Main, Thomas Keating, James Finley, et al.) remind us that the goals of Buddhists are different from those of Christians, but they have much in common.
Being mindful and living mindfully, with full attention to the presence of God in the present moment, is the key mystical element that links the two traditions, Western and Eastern. It is a unitive, non-dualistic approach that replaces dualism--body vs. soul, man vs. the planet, good vs. evil, and God "up there" vs. people "down here"--with an awareness that all things are one. To live and move and have our being in God is to know that we are not separate from God.
Romano Guardini (cited by Finley and others) articulated in a memorable way the non-dualistic, unitive nature of this mystical experience. "Although I am not God, I am not other than God either, " Guardini wrote. From this we can say, although I am not you, I am not other than you; although I am not the earth, I am not other than the earth.
The implications of this way of unitive thinking are enormous: we are all connected to one another, to creation, and to God, however alone we might feel. Without losing our individuality, we exist also in relation to and with others. How then can we hate our neighbors?
In Catholic thinking, the human person is not just an individual, with freedom and rights; he or she does not find complete fulfillment until he or she lives in relationship with others. In other words, we live in relation to others in pursuit of the common good, that which benefits all, not just the isolated individual.
So, simplifying a complex topic, I would say Buddhist practice and Christian contemplation share the goal of seeking unity with God in the present moment. The effect of such a spirituality not only benefits me but reminds me of my connection with others. I am unique yet also united with the suffering of my fellow man.
So the way I relate to myself affects how I relate to others and the world we share and, ultimately, how I relate to God.
Many things, as Thomas Merton showed fifty years ago in his writings about Zen, as Richard Rohr and others suggest today--without becoming Buddhists.
I remain very much a beginner in Buddhist practice and derive most of my insights here from the recent (Sept. 7) post by Richard Rohr, who says our "deepest, truest reality" is our oneness with God.
Although he didn't use the term 'mindfulness,' Merton brought the ancient Christian contemplative tradition into the 20th century by emphasizing inner silence, solitude, and attention to the sacrament of the present moment, or what has been called the power of now. His work and those who have followed him (John Main, Thomas Keating, James Finley, et al.) remind us that the goals of Buddhists are different from those of Christians, but they have much in common.
Being mindful and living mindfully, with full attention to the presence of God in the present moment, is the key mystical element that links the two traditions, Western and Eastern. It is a unitive, non-dualistic approach that replaces dualism--body vs. soul, man vs. the planet, good vs. evil, and God "up there" vs. people "down here"--with an awareness that all things are one. To live and move and have our being in God is to know that we are not separate from God.
Romano Guardini (cited by Finley and others) articulated in a memorable way the non-dualistic, unitive nature of this mystical experience. "Although I am not God, I am not other than God either, " Guardini wrote. From this we can say, although I am not you, I am not other than you; although I am not the earth, I am not other than the earth.
The implications of this way of unitive thinking are enormous: we are all connected to one another, to creation, and to God, however alone we might feel. Without losing our individuality, we exist also in relation to and with others. How then can we hate our neighbors?
In Catholic thinking, the human person is not just an individual, with freedom and rights; he or she does not find complete fulfillment until he or she lives in relationship with others. In other words, we live in relation to others in pursuit of the common good, that which benefits all, not just the isolated individual.
So, simplifying a complex topic, I would say Buddhist practice and Christian contemplation share the goal of seeking unity with God in the present moment. The effect of such a spirituality not only benefits me but reminds me of my connection with others. I am unique yet also united with the suffering of my fellow man.
So the way I relate to myself affects how I relate to others and the world we share and, ultimately, how I relate to God.
Friday, January 30, 2015
When old answers don't suffice
Today, on the 100th anniversary of Thomas Merton's birth, I quote a fragment of one of his poems:
Each one who is born
Comes into the world as a question
For which old answers
Are not sufficient.
It so happens that this idea applies to what I wrote today in an Op-Ed piece for the Orlando Sentinel (orlandosentinel.com): "The Catholic Church needs a kick in the pants."
The essay was occasioned by the recent ordination of an Orlando woman, Rita Lucey, to the priesthood. This is not something I would usually go out of my way to applaud, but it struck me as an important symbolic gesture, a wake-up call about what is deeply wrong with the present all-male, all-celibate clerical world.
So I tried to argue--not easy, given the word limit of under 400 words--that the priesthood needs to be opened up: it is on life support, with U.S. parishes either closing or coping without resident priests. "The sheep look up and are not fed," as Milton said of the Anglican clergy of his time.
I believe the laity in the Catholic church must not act like sheep. They should speak up if they feel, as I do, that open and honest discussion must take place about making celibacy optional for men, not mandatory. Pope Francis is the kind of man who can make such a change and also do something about including women in a decision-making role in the church. If this means ordination to the diaconate, great: a first step toward priesthood in the future.
If Merton were alive, I believe he would be in the front ranks calling for ongoing clerical reform since he knew that the old ways, the old answers, are not always enough.
Each one who is born
Comes into the world as a question
For which old answers
Are not sufficient.
It so happens that this idea applies to what I wrote today in an Op-Ed piece for the Orlando Sentinel (orlandosentinel.com): "The Catholic Church needs a kick in the pants."
The essay was occasioned by the recent ordination of an Orlando woman, Rita Lucey, to the priesthood. This is not something I would usually go out of my way to applaud, but it struck me as an important symbolic gesture, a wake-up call about what is deeply wrong with the present all-male, all-celibate clerical world.
So I tried to argue--not easy, given the word limit of under 400 words--that the priesthood needs to be opened up: it is on life support, with U.S. parishes either closing or coping without resident priests. "The sheep look up and are not fed," as Milton said of the Anglican clergy of his time.
I believe the laity in the Catholic church must not act like sheep. They should speak up if they feel, as I do, that open and honest discussion must take place about making celibacy optional for men, not mandatory. Pope Francis is the kind of man who can make such a change and also do something about including women in a decision-making role in the church. If this means ordination to the diaconate, great: a first step toward priesthood in the future.
If Merton were alive, I believe he would be in the front ranks calling for ongoing clerical reform since he knew that the old ways, the old answers, are not always enough.
Sunday, January 12, 2014
Sundays with Andrew
I have learned that spending a bit of time each Sunday with Andrew Sullivan is worthwhile. I mean reading his popular Daily Dish blog, where he and his clever associates post pieces on religion and spirituality, along with all the rest: politics, gender and sex, legalizing pot, and the usual rich cultural mix of poetry and popular culture that this pioneer blogger and thinker is famous for.
This week I glanced at pieces he posted on cosmology, the Hagia Sophia, a poem by William Stafford, and article on the quest for meaning--all helpful in slowing us down as we tend to rush through stuff on the internet. Even non-theists and materialists can find material for reflection here.
Last week, Sullivan and Co. introduced me to a theologian named Martin Laird, author of Into the Silent Land. Here, in a generous selection from the book, the Daily Dish gave us a passage on union with God that reminded me of Thomas Merton. "Separation from God is not possible," writes Laird; "God does not know how to be absent." We created in our minds the illusion that we are separated from the God, whom we meet in stillness and silence, beyond words. Laird writes beautifully, and I am grateful, as always, to find someone else, with a stronger background in such things, to say what I have been trying to say.
I am also grateful to Andrew for a piece by Robert Barron on why and how the new atheists miss the boat: God, as Aquinas found and Merton (among many others) re-discovered, is the sheer act of being itself. God is not a being separate from us.
Then there was a piece on awe and wonder, the kind found in architecture (I think of the Gothic cathedral), based on an article by a psychiatrist who rejects the taboo on combining psychotherapy and spirituality. He defines spiritual people as those who exercise their innate ability to experience awe and wonder. It seems that buildings that inspire awe and wonder are healing because they inspire positive feelings that are quite separate from religious expression.
All this I would have missed without dropping in on Andrew last Sunday.
This week I glanced at pieces he posted on cosmology, the Hagia Sophia, a poem by William Stafford, and article on the quest for meaning--all helpful in slowing us down as we tend to rush through stuff on the internet. Even non-theists and materialists can find material for reflection here.
Last week, Sullivan and Co. introduced me to a theologian named Martin Laird, author of Into the Silent Land. Here, in a generous selection from the book, the Daily Dish gave us a passage on union with God that reminded me of Thomas Merton. "Separation from God is not possible," writes Laird; "God does not know how to be absent." We created in our minds the illusion that we are separated from the God, whom we meet in stillness and silence, beyond words. Laird writes beautifully, and I am grateful, as always, to find someone else, with a stronger background in such things, to say what I have been trying to say.
I am also grateful to Andrew for a piece by Robert Barron on why and how the new atheists miss the boat: God, as Aquinas found and Merton (among many others) re-discovered, is the sheer act of being itself. God is not a being separate from us.
Then there was a piece on awe and wonder, the kind found in architecture (I think of the Gothic cathedral), based on an article by a psychiatrist who rejects the taboo on combining psychotherapy and spirituality. He defines spiritual people as those who exercise their innate ability to experience awe and wonder. It seems that buildings that inspire awe and wonder are healing because they inspire positive feelings that are quite separate from religious expression.
All this I would have missed without dropping in on Andrew last Sunday.
Wednesday, December 4, 2013
Thomas Merton Remembered II
Dec. 10 is a key date in the life of Thomas Merton: he entered the Trappist monastery, Abbey of the Gethsemani, in Kentucky on that date in 1941, and on Dec. 10, 1968, he died in Bangkok after 27 years as a monk, peace activist, poet, and, above all, prolific spiritual writer.
In commemorating his 45th anniversary, I quote an excerpt from The Hidden Ground of Love, in which Merton outlines the dimensions of selfless compassion:
Meditating on someone else's predicament and generating a strong feeling of compassion can lead us into visualizing that they find relief, comfort, joy, and a uplifted spirit. When we continue to practice this we find ourselves desiring to alleviate the suffering of others. This exercise helps us remain in a state of unrestricted and objectless compassion all the time.
In commemorating his 45th anniversary, I quote an excerpt from The Hidden Ground of Love, in which Merton outlines the dimensions of selfless compassion:
Meditating on someone else's predicament and generating a strong feeling of compassion can lead us into visualizing that they find relief, comfort, joy, and a uplifted spirit. When we continue to practice this we find ourselves desiring to alleviate the suffering of others. This exercise helps us remain in a state of unrestricted and objectless compassion all the time.
Saturday, November 30, 2013
Thomas Merton Remembered
In anticipating the 45th anniversary of the death of Thomas Merton, I plan to cite a few brief quotations from his writings, this one from Disputed Questions:
Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody's business. What we are asked to do is to love, and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbors worthy.
Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody's business. What we are asked to do is to love, and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbors worthy.
Thursday, August 15, 2013
Yearning for Silence
Tim Parks, an Englishman living in Italy, is an interesting writer whose books about Italian culture I have enjoyed. A recent piece of his in Aeon magazine, however, struck me as missing the mark a bit, although, being about his personal spiritual quest, Who am I to judge? (as someone else recently asked)
His topic is the yearning for silence, a topic of great importance to me. He says we fear silence and long for it at the same time because it involves the end of the self. Huh?
Well, Parks, having no religious experience with prayer and with only a 10-day Buddhist retreat under his belt, finds that a discussion of silence involves consciousness and selfhood, with which I agree; but it also involves, he says, "the desire to invest in the self and the desire for the end of the self." But it's more than Self!
His Vipassana experience taught him that "our excessive interest in our own wordy thoughts" can dissolve as language melts away during the meditative breathing but that meditative "techniques" return us to the noisy self, the busy mind, something most people understandably long to escape from. And he learned what most beginners know: that silence and stillness are related.
Parks does not seem aware that he is on the edge of the ancient mystical tradition of contemplative prayer, the practice of the presence of God in silence. Whether or not this is a technique or not, it is lifelong pursuit (for monastics and laypeople alike) of the union of the self with God in which the self falls away; but this is not a loss but a fullness of experience.
The experience of God-with-us-now in the present moment is a loss of the self-conscious self but also a discovery, according to Thomas Merton, of the true self, the one known by God, who dwells within at the center of our being.
I hope Parks looks more deeply into silence and practices it regularly, that he reads Merton and Thomas Keating, John Main, and others like him in the Christian tradition. Their work is richer than the essentially secular and limited approach he has outlined in which the fear of death and the loss of the self becomes the result of silent meditation.
I want to tell him: What seems to be lost in the darkness of silence is the self, but that is only the first step on the mystical path that can't be clearly explained, even by great poets like John of the Cross or T. S. Eliot, except to say it involves finding the true self in the love of God.
That may not make any sense to some readers, and I am not sure I understand it myself. That's why we call it a mystery, the kind without a solution or answer.
His topic is the yearning for silence, a topic of great importance to me. He says we fear silence and long for it at the same time because it involves the end of the self. Huh?
Well, Parks, having no religious experience with prayer and with only a 10-day Buddhist retreat under his belt, finds that a discussion of silence involves consciousness and selfhood, with which I agree; but it also involves, he says, "the desire to invest in the self and the desire for the end of the self." But it's more than Self!
His Vipassana experience taught him that "our excessive interest in our own wordy thoughts" can dissolve as language melts away during the meditative breathing but that meditative "techniques" return us to the noisy self, the busy mind, something most people understandably long to escape from. And he learned what most beginners know: that silence and stillness are related.
Parks does not seem aware that he is on the edge of the ancient mystical tradition of contemplative prayer, the practice of the presence of God in silence. Whether or not this is a technique or not, it is lifelong pursuit (for monastics and laypeople alike) of the union of the self with God in which the self falls away; but this is not a loss but a fullness of experience.
The experience of God-with-us-now in the present moment is a loss of the self-conscious self but also a discovery, according to Thomas Merton, of the true self, the one known by God, who dwells within at the center of our being.
I hope Parks looks more deeply into silence and practices it regularly, that he reads Merton and Thomas Keating, John Main, and others like him in the Christian tradition. Their work is richer than the essentially secular and limited approach he has outlined in which the fear of death and the loss of the self becomes the result of silent meditation.
I want to tell him: What seems to be lost in the darkness of silence is the self, but that is only the first step on the mystical path that can't be clearly explained, even by great poets like John of the Cross or T. S. Eliot, except to say it involves finding the true self in the love of God.
That may not make any sense to some readers, and I am not sure I understand it myself. That's why we call it a mystery, the kind without a solution or answer.
Sunday, May 26, 2013
Who are we, really?
I have awakened from a dream recently to realize that the person I was in my dream is not my present self but an ageless adult, sort of a composite of how I think of myself, as if I were permanently 35.
And I connected this realization to an earlier post (April 30: Genuine Freedom) and to other musings about the mysterious inner me, the "selfless self of self," as the poet G. M. Hopkins called it.
Who are we at the core of our being? That is the question. Am I the product of my conscious thought, produced by the brain, embodied in my mortal flesh, or am I an enfleshed spirit or, as I was raised to think in parochial school, a soul encased in a body?
Without considering for a moment the immortal center of my being called the soul, I think of all the many couples who, married in their twenties, find that they have drifted apart and become divorced in their forties, because they have changed. What part of them has actually changed? Of course, we are changing and growing constantly biologically; our tastes and behavior and attitudes change as do our values.
But the man or woman of 45-50 who is more mature than the bride or groom of 25, with different interests from his or her partner, remains essentially the same person. The question then is, what can psychology and philosophy tell us about who that person is, that self that might grow but remains essentially true to its original form?
"What are we at our core, before anything, before everything?" This question, posed at the opening of an article by Abigail Tucker (in the Smithsonian 1-13) comes from a researcher at the Yale Infant Cognition Center, where scientists have been studying toddlers and babies to see if altruism is an innate human element. It seems too early to say for sure that the answer is definitively 'yes.' But I cite this example as a fundamental question underlying much of the important work I sometimes read about being done by people with infinitely more knowledge than I have or will ever have about the complexities of the human personality.
I remember, too, a psychologist introducing to a workshop I attended some years ago the distinction between "the pattern" and "the person": when we think a friend or partner or colleague is unbearable, annoying, or otherwise unpleasant to be around, what we are reacting to is the behavior pattern that this person displays. I think of several people I know who seldom listen, talk incessantly about themselves and are clearly wound up emotionally. I shun their company.
Yet these people, beneath the surface, are bright, caring individuals who are lovable--if I can separate myself from the surface pattern to see the real person beneath. A challenging "if." How close this approach is to Freudian or Jungian ideas of the psyche or self is something I do not know, but it helped me understand a basic human issue. Perhaps it is related to the belief of Robert Louis Stevenson and others ("Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde") who contended in Victorian times that the human person is not one but two--a divided self, half good, half evil.
Although this seems too simplistic today, there remains in us a sense that our real selves remain mysterious. Even as we shun encountering them, we meet them in dreams and see them reflected in films and literature. If other people are hard to understand (and love), we tend to remain hard to understand even by ourselves.
One of the most satisfying examinations of all this, on the spiritual level, for me has been the work of Thomas Merton and in particular the study focusing on his idea of the true self by James Finley: Merton's Palace of Nowhere. Merton, having read very widely, was attracted to Blake as a graduate student at Columbia and then, as a Trappist monk, steeped himself in the mystical tradition of both Christianity and the East.
I will try to sum up some key aspects of Finley's study of what Merton meant by our true identity in contrast to the false self we create as a public persona or mask. The contemplative tradition of emptiness and silence, for Merton, is the highest form of self-realization; it reveals that the person I am is not limited to the individual I am.
Involved here is the loss of the false self when, in contemplation, our being becomes one with the being of God, who is Being itself. The person, that is, transcends everything in his or her union with God. The self that we thought ourselves to be vanishes ("He who loses his life shall find it," as Jesus said) because of love.
And this brings us back to Brennan Manning, whose death last month prompted a brief post here that expresses the same basic Mertonian idea very directly: The true self is the one loved by God; every other identity is an illusion.
Merton put it this way: "Learning to be oneself means learning to die [to the self] in order to live. It means discovering in the ground of one's being a self, which is ultimate and indestructible..." So, for him, the soul is the mature personal identity, the true self. Yet the question, "Who are you when you do not exist?"--the ultimate question we all ponder when we think of death--can never be answered by the mind. It requires what is difficult for many: a leap of faith.
I hope at least some of this makes sense and that it will lead readers unfamiliar with Merton to read him as well as Finley's classic book, which is challenging because the language of mysticism defies the limits of human language. But few questions are as important as who we are and what happens to us when we are here no more.
And I connected this realization to an earlier post (April 30: Genuine Freedom) and to other musings about the mysterious inner me, the "selfless self of self," as the poet G. M. Hopkins called it.
Who are we at the core of our being? That is the question. Am I the product of my conscious thought, produced by the brain, embodied in my mortal flesh, or am I an enfleshed spirit or, as I was raised to think in parochial school, a soul encased in a body?
Without considering for a moment the immortal center of my being called the soul, I think of all the many couples who, married in their twenties, find that they have drifted apart and become divorced in their forties, because they have changed. What part of them has actually changed? Of course, we are changing and growing constantly biologically; our tastes and behavior and attitudes change as do our values.
But the man or woman of 45-50 who is more mature than the bride or groom of 25, with different interests from his or her partner, remains essentially the same person. The question then is, what can psychology and philosophy tell us about who that person is, that self that might grow but remains essentially true to its original form?
"What are we at our core, before anything, before everything?" This question, posed at the opening of an article by Abigail Tucker (in the Smithsonian 1-13) comes from a researcher at the Yale Infant Cognition Center, where scientists have been studying toddlers and babies to see if altruism is an innate human element. It seems too early to say for sure that the answer is definitively 'yes.' But I cite this example as a fundamental question underlying much of the important work I sometimes read about being done by people with infinitely more knowledge than I have or will ever have about the complexities of the human personality.
I remember, too, a psychologist introducing to a workshop I attended some years ago the distinction between "the pattern" and "the person": when we think a friend or partner or colleague is unbearable, annoying, or otherwise unpleasant to be around, what we are reacting to is the behavior pattern that this person displays. I think of several people I know who seldom listen, talk incessantly about themselves and are clearly wound up emotionally. I shun their company.
Yet these people, beneath the surface, are bright, caring individuals who are lovable--if I can separate myself from the surface pattern to see the real person beneath. A challenging "if." How close this approach is to Freudian or Jungian ideas of the psyche or self is something I do not know, but it helped me understand a basic human issue. Perhaps it is related to the belief of Robert Louis Stevenson and others ("Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde") who contended in Victorian times that the human person is not one but two--a divided self, half good, half evil.
Although this seems too simplistic today, there remains in us a sense that our real selves remain mysterious. Even as we shun encountering them, we meet them in dreams and see them reflected in films and literature. If other people are hard to understand (and love), we tend to remain hard to understand even by ourselves.
One of the most satisfying examinations of all this, on the spiritual level, for me has been the work of Thomas Merton and in particular the study focusing on his idea of the true self by James Finley: Merton's Palace of Nowhere. Merton, having read very widely, was attracted to Blake as a graduate student at Columbia and then, as a Trappist monk, steeped himself in the mystical tradition of both Christianity and the East.
I will try to sum up some key aspects of Finley's study of what Merton meant by our true identity in contrast to the false self we create as a public persona or mask. The contemplative tradition of emptiness and silence, for Merton, is the highest form of self-realization; it reveals that the person I am is not limited to the individual I am.
Involved here is the loss of the false self when, in contemplation, our being becomes one with the being of God, who is Being itself. The person, that is, transcends everything in his or her union with God. The self that we thought ourselves to be vanishes ("He who loses his life shall find it," as Jesus said) because of love.
And this brings us back to Brennan Manning, whose death last month prompted a brief post here that expresses the same basic Mertonian idea very directly: The true self is the one loved by God; every other identity is an illusion.
Merton put it this way: "Learning to be oneself means learning to die [to the self] in order to live. It means discovering in the ground of one's being a self, which is ultimate and indestructible..." So, for him, the soul is the mature personal identity, the true self. Yet the question, "Who are you when you do not exist?"--the ultimate question we all ponder when we think of death--can never be answered by the mind. It requires what is difficult for many: a leap of faith.
I hope at least some of this makes sense and that it will lead readers unfamiliar with Merton to read him as well as Finley's classic book, which is challenging because the language of mysticism defies the limits of human language. But few questions are as important as who we are and what happens to us when we are here no more.
Thursday, December 27, 2012
Finding Yourself as a Writer
"How do you expect to arrive at the end of your own journey," Thomas Merton asked, "if you take the road to another man's city? How do you expect to reach your own perfection by leading someone else's life?"
In his finest book, New Seeds of Contemplation, the source of these arresting questions, Merton the monk is very much, as always, Merton the writer and the individual finding his own existential path to God, even though he lived within the confines of an ancient monastic tradition.
What do his questions say to writers? That no matter how much we owe to others, how much we read and absorb, we must to our own selves be true, following our own individual path. Style, as I discover each time I try to teach it, is a unique reflection of each writer. It emerges out of the material of life deeply lived. It is a matter of the heart as well as the head. Like our lives, it is not about imitating others but making our own choices.
One contemporary poet and memoirist, Mary Karr, has found a singular voice, even though anyone reading her amazing 2009 book, Lit--an account of her progress from "blackbelt sinner" to Catholic convert--can see her indebtedness to those who have gone before her.
In a style that is smart, funny, profane, and intense, Karr describes leaving home (with its violence, abuse, alcoholism, drugs) and her mother to find a new home. Her memoir is about overcoming a life of terror and gradually discovering a community of prayer--and she does it her way. The past becomes vividly present and alive, even though the reader can tell that something positive will come out of the gritty horror of her narrative.
Karr has discovered her own path from the harrowing darkness of alcoholism and rage to a realization that "nothing we truly love is ever lost." To feel (not just think) such a truth after much pain is, I think, a key spiritual insight. That she has found prayer as a source of power does not meant that the demons of the past are forgotten.
They are very much alive in this memoir, which manages to take street talk to a lyrical level. Much of this book is not for the squeamish, but its unique style reflects Karr's journey, the hard choices she has made not only as a writer but as a woman of intelligence and strength who has moved beyond living someone else's life. It is good to know that, in her new life as a professor of English and acclaimed author, she is far from the end of her journey, which is very much her own.
In his finest book, New Seeds of Contemplation, the source of these arresting questions, Merton the monk is very much, as always, Merton the writer and the individual finding his own existential path to God, even though he lived within the confines of an ancient monastic tradition.
What do his questions say to writers? That no matter how much we owe to others, how much we read and absorb, we must to our own selves be true, following our own individual path. Style, as I discover each time I try to teach it, is a unique reflection of each writer. It emerges out of the material of life deeply lived. It is a matter of the heart as well as the head. Like our lives, it is not about imitating others but making our own choices.
One contemporary poet and memoirist, Mary Karr, has found a singular voice, even though anyone reading her amazing 2009 book, Lit--an account of her progress from "blackbelt sinner" to Catholic convert--can see her indebtedness to those who have gone before her.
In a style that is smart, funny, profane, and intense, Karr describes leaving home (with its violence, abuse, alcoholism, drugs) and her mother to find a new home. Her memoir is about overcoming a life of terror and gradually discovering a community of prayer--and she does it her way. The past becomes vividly present and alive, even though the reader can tell that something positive will come out of the gritty horror of her narrative.
Karr has discovered her own path from the harrowing darkness of alcoholism and rage to a realization that "nothing we truly love is ever lost." To feel (not just think) such a truth after much pain is, I think, a key spiritual insight. That she has found prayer as a source of power does not meant that the demons of the past are forgotten.
They are very much alive in this memoir, which manages to take street talk to a lyrical level. Much of this book is not for the squeamish, but its unique style reflects Karr's journey, the hard choices she has made not only as a writer but as a woman of intelligence and strength who has moved beyond living someone else's life. It is good to know that, in her new life as a professor of English and acclaimed author, she is far from the end of her journey, which is very much her own.
Monday, November 5, 2012
Do we stay the same person?
William Boyd, whose novel Waiting for Sunrise I enjoyed for its style, is an accomplished English writer. This week, I watched a film adaptation of another of his works, Any Human Heart (not my favorite title), and I was sorry to see that Boyd wrote the screenplay (not usually a good idea).
The result is a 6-hour TV movie involving three separate actors playing the central character, Logan, shown in his 80s looking back on the remembered fragments of his colorful (sexually active) life. In the process, the narrative voice, more than once, comments about how we never stay the same person. The central lesson of his life is that the things that happen to a person makes him or her a different person. Is this true?
Logan, like the protagonist of the Boyd novel I read, is a passive pawn of fate and his active libido (over which his will has little control). The narrative tells us that we can't do much about what happens. The screenplay makes this explicit several times (in case we miss the point) that life is nothing but luck.
I beg to differ with this simplistic idea. Of course, luck or chance determines many aspects of our lives, but so do our choices. We shape our own destinies; and as we change by a combination of biology, time, circumstances, and experience, we retain our core selves. We are not totally transformed, like a character in the Metaphorphoses, losing our essential identity or personhood.
This, at least, is what I have learned from years of reading the major writers from Augustine and Boethius, who wrestled with issues of freedom and fate 2,000 years ago, to more modern thinkers. To me, the freedom of the will is basic to morality, and the true self, as Thomas Merton called it, remains constant: he said it was the self impermanent to time, the self as seen by God.
Others (mystics in various traditions) have called it the center or ground of our being. Some call it the soul.
Isabel Dalhousie, the philosophizing Edinburgh sleuth in the novels of Alexander McCall Smith, is open-minded enough (says the author of The Lost Art of Gratitude) to recognize that the self, or the soul, might just survive death, as she says. "The rigid exclusion of that possibility could be seen as much a statement of faith as its rigid assertion," she tells herself, keeping her options open in a postmodern world.
The creator of Isabel Dalhousie may be less highly regarded than William Boyd in today's literary scene, but her reflections here are more valuable than the philosophy underlying much contemporary fiction, which, like Boyd's, has a pessimism rooted in a totally materialist notion of life. This means that even the possibility of something permanent in ourselves existing, and surviving us, is not seen as possible or worth discussing.
Merton may have a hard time spelling out what the "true self" is (James Finley does a fine job articulating this in a book on the subject), but at least he believes, as I do, in the self, that mysterious inner core of our being that G. M. Hopkins called the "selfless self of self, most strange, most still."
The result is a 6-hour TV movie involving three separate actors playing the central character, Logan, shown in his 80s looking back on the remembered fragments of his colorful (sexually active) life. In the process, the narrative voice, more than once, comments about how we never stay the same person. The central lesson of his life is that the things that happen to a person makes him or her a different person. Is this true?
Logan, like the protagonist of the Boyd novel I read, is a passive pawn of fate and his active libido (over which his will has little control). The narrative tells us that we can't do much about what happens. The screenplay makes this explicit several times (in case we miss the point) that life is nothing but luck.
I beg to differ with this simplistic idea. Of course, luck or chance determines many aspects of our lives, but so do our choices. We shape our own destinies; and as we change by a combination of biology, time, circumstances, and experience, we retain our core selves. We are not totally transformed, like a character in the Metaphorphoses, losing our essential identity or personhood.
This, at least, is what I have learned from years of reading the major writers from Augustine and Boethius, who wrestled with issues of freedom and fate 2,000 years ago, to more modern thinkers. To me, the freedom of the will is basic to morality, and the true self, as Thomas Merton called it, remains constant: he said it was the self impermanent to time, the self as seen by God.
Others (mystics in various traditions) have called it the center or ground of our being. Some call it the soul.
Isabel Dalhousie, the philosophizing Edinburgh sleuth in the novels of Alexander McCall Smith, is open-minded enough (says the author of The Lost Art of Gratitude) to recognize that the self, or the soul, might just survive death, as she says. "The rigid exclusion of that possibility could be seen as much a statement of faith as its rigid assertion," she tells herself, keeping her options open in a postmodern world.
The creator of Isabel Dalhousie may be less highly regarded than William Boyd in today's literary scene, but her reflections here are more valuable than the philosophy underlying much contemporary fiction, which, like Boyd's, has a pessimism rooted in a totally materialist notion of life. This means that even the possibility of something permanent in ourselves existing, and surviving us, is not seen as possible or worth discussing.
Merton may have a hard time spelling out what the "true self" is (James Finley does a fine job articulating this in a book on the subject), but at least he believes, as I do, in the self, that mysterious inner core of our being that G. M. Hopkins called the "selfless self of self, most strange, most still."
Wednesday, August 1, 2012
Escaping all the Noise
Our crowded planet is also an increasingly noisy one. When electronic beepers are not sounding, people are sounding off at great length on various media and in person. I find that going to lunch is sometimes an endurance test: the restaurant noise makes hearing many conversations a strain (and my hearing is fairly good).
A recent article in Parade magazine talks about what it is to live surrounded by a constant bath of noise: living in loud areas can raise the blood pressure. The word noise, we are told, is related to the Latin word for sickness: nausea.
A longer article in the Guardian by George Michelson Foy recalls his own experiment in searching for the quietest place on earth. Trying to escape the dull roar of Manhattan's ceaseless sounds, he visited a monastery, an Indian sweat lodge, and a nickel mine. None was quiet enough. Finally, he discovered the quietest place on earth: the anechoic chamber at Orfield Laboratories in Minnesota.
Whereas some visitors to this small room, thoroughly insulated to absorb every imaginable whisper, find it unbearable, he enjoyed the experience. Most people would experience claustrophia or other problems being sealed in such a room, cut off from the comforting sounds of human life, but his record 45-minute stay in the room was (he says) calming and peaceful, as he listened to the blood rushing in his veins and other bodily functions.
I remember reading a few years ago about a man visiting the bottom of the Grand Canyon and finding the silence there frightening. I doubt if he would head for Minnesota's Orfield with its 99.9% sound-absorbent chamber.
Realizing to his disappointment that total and complete silence is possible only in death, Foy was sorry to end his 45-minute submersion in solitude and silence. Being comfortable with the feeling of absolute calm, he felt rested and peaceful, sorry to leave after only 45 minutes of what many would see as sensory deprivation akin to torture.
Like Foy, who associates silence with happiness, I have been a seeker of silence-- but not the physical absence of sound. I enjoy reading, contemplation, meditation and writing with only the half-conscious sounds of modern life (air conditioning) or birdsong in the background.
I doubt if I would be happy in an anechoic chamber, but I know that the quest for silence is important and profound in mysterious ways. I don't see it as a source of happiness, although a period of silent meditation produces a calmness of mind and a serenity much needed in a too-loud world.
Mostly, I follow the lead of Thomas Merton, who wrote extensively about the silence of contemplative prayer during his 27 years as a Trappist monk in Kentucky. As a result, he could really hear the rain beat down (a wonderful passage in Raids on the Unspeakble) in what he calls a welcome kind of speech. He was fully attuned to the world of nature outside his hermitage and felt connected to people around the world, many of them his readers. In writing, he felt close to God and saw in silence a "friendly communion" with millions of others able to take time out from the constant distractions of everyday life to experience a brief moment in the timeless present.
"The real journey of life is within," Merton wrote. He did not need to seek the quietest place on earth. As to happiness, he would probably understand what the woman, asked by Inspector Maigret in one of Simenon's stories, says when he asks her, "Have you found happiness?"
She responds, in an Old World way that would seem totally foreign to today's Americans, "as much as anyone is entitled to."
A recent article in Parade magazine talks about what it is to live surrounded by a constant bath of noise: living in loud areas can raise the blood pressure. The word noise, we are told, is related to the Latin word for sickness: nausea.
A longer article in the Guardian by George Michelson Foy recalls his own experiment in searching for the quietest place on earth. Trying to escape the dull roar of Manhattan's ceaseless sounds, he visited a monastery, an Indian sweat lodge, and a nickel mine. None was quiet enough. Finally, he discovered the quietest place on earth: the anechoic chamber at Orfield Laboratories in Minnesota.
Whereas some visitors to this small room, thoroughly insulated to absorb every imaginable whisper, find it unbearable, he enjoyed the experience. Most people would experience claustrophia or other problems being sealed in such a room, cut off from the comforting sounds of human life, but his record 45-minute stay in the room was (he says) calming and peaceful, as he listened to the blood rushing in his veins and other bodily functions.
I remember reading a few years ago about a man visiting the bottom of the Grand Canyon and finding the silence there frightening. I doubt if he would head for Minnesota's Orfield with its 99.9% sound-absorbent chamber.
Realizing to his disappointment that total and complete silence is possible only in death, Foy was sorry to end his 45-minute submersion in solitude and silence. Being comfortable with the feeling of absolute calm, he felt rested and peaceful, sorry to leave after only 45 minutes of what many would see as sensory deprivation akin to torture.
Like Foy, who associates silence with happiness, I have been a seeker of silence-- but not the physical absence of sound. I enjoy reading, contemplation, meditation and writing with only the half-conscious sounds of modern life (air conditioning) or birdsong in the background.
I doubt if I would be happy in an anechoic chamber, but I know that the quest for silence is important and profound in mysterious ways. I don't see it as a source of happiness, although a period of silent meditation produces a calmness of mind and a serenity much needed in a too-loud world.
Mostly, I follow the lead of Thomas Merton, who wrote extensively about the silence of contemplative prayer during his 27 years as a Trappist monk in Kentucky. As a result, he could really hear the rain beat down (a wonderful passage in Raids on the Unspeakble) in what he calls a welcome kind of speech. He was fully attuned to the world of nature outside his hermitage and felt connected to people around the world, many of them his readers. In writing, he felt close to God and saw in silence a "friendly communion" with millions of others able to take time out from the constant distractions of everyday life to experience a brief moment in the timeless present.
"The real journey of life is within," Merton wrote. He did not need to seek the quietest place on earth. As to happiness, he would probably understand what the woman, asked by Inspector Maigret in one of Simenon's stories, says when he asks her, "Have you found happiness?"
She responds, in an Old World way that would seem totally foreign to today's Americans, "as much as anyone is entitled to."
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
Why are people bored?
In reading a review of Lost in Transition by the sociologist of religion (at Notre Dame) Christian Smith, I encounter again the question faced by David Foster Wallace about the rootless, restless, disspirited nature of so many people's lives. The focus on Smith's book is on adolescent Americans, who are in crisis: they now remain students longer than in the past, just as they depend on their parents longer, and resist marriage as long as possible; they dread the world of work since it has changed: it offers little in the way of long-term stability.
As a result, these young people (by and large) have a certain amount of freedom--including freedom from commitments; and moral boundaries are less clear than in their parents' generation. They might agree that murder, rape, and robbery are wrong, but doubt that cheating on exams (or one one's partner) is always wrong. As I discovered among my own students, their main concern in cheating is whether they will be caught. As to the behavior of others, well, it is up to each person to decide for himself.
"Very few seem to think that right and wrong are rooted in anything outside personal experience," says the Spectator review of Smith's book.
They are into consumerism, drinking, and sex because of peer pressure, in part, but also because of sheer boredom. Why, with all the choices they have, all the opportunities for learning and enjoying life, would anyone be bored? Could it be that they have too many options, too many consumer goods, like the child who is flooded with toys on Christmas morning and turns with relief to playing hide-and-seek?
Might it be that boredom is, in my favorite definition, a fear of running out of things to do? If happiness consists only of entertaining activities, it is not hard for an imaginative, intelligent person to anticipate a life without the gratification of more stimulation. We are all essentially restless, in part because we do not find a place for contemplation, solitude, and silence.
Few people have articulated the importance of these three things as memorably as the Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton. I began today to look through my "Merton files," clippings of readings sent to me from the Merton Institute for Contemplative Living and other e-mail newsletters, and I find that the two ideas of solitude and silence recur in this extensive body of work more than any other; they are the keys to inner happiness and peace.
Both before and after becoming a monk, Merton, a restless soul, knew the dark side of boredom as a kind of depression. Yet he sought out what to many would seem like the least likely answer: a remote monastery. Once there, he sought out the solitude of his own hermitage in the woods. After being persistent, he was finally (c. 1965) allowed to move to a shed that became "a delight," as he writes in one of his journals: "I can imagine no other joy on earth than to have such a place and to be at peace in it, to live in silence, to think and write, to listen to the wind and all the voices of the wood, to prepare for my own death, to love my brothers and all people, to pray for the world and for peace and good sense among men."
As he wrote elsewhere, all of us need to seek peace within ourselves "because we do not naturally find rest even in our own being. We have to learn to commune with ourselves before with can communicate with other men and with God. A man who is not at peace with himself necessarily projects his interior fighting into the society of those he lives with, and spreads a contagion of conflict all around him." (This is from
No Man is an Island, 1955.)
As Merton makes clear repeatedly, solitude is a true refuge from the depression and restlessness implied in boredom; it is not a negative relationship--the absence of people, any more than silence is the absence of sound. "True solitude is a partcipation in the true solitariness of God, Who is in all things....It is in deep solitude that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brothers."
There's much more: Solitude is not, says Merton, something to hope for in the future; "it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present, you will not find it." For Merton as writer, as for all writers, solitude is essential, and the writing does not isolate the one who writes but connects him or her to all the unseen readers he imagines, just as in silence he can feel connected to all those who are at a given moment being contemplative(fully present to the present moment) rather than busy.
Writing, prayer, contemplation, solitude--all of these involve a sense of creative aloneness in which one does not feel loneliness but a sense of connection with the self, with others, and with God. As the contemporary monk Peter-Damian Belisle says, "One is never alone in true solitude. There is the powerful experience of presence that arises out of solitude's depths."
Honest aloneness makes us not alone but awake to God's presence.
The same type of presence rises from the depths of silence, whenever we give ourselves permission to find the freedom that comes in silence. That is one of the paradoxes Merton loves to explore: We are truly free when we "encounter God in our hearts...the truth that makes us free is...the presence in us of a divine person." True religion is a liberating force that helps us find ourselves in God.
Is there a scriptural basis for any of this? St. Paul: "The Spirit pleads for us in our inmost being, beyond words, beyond thoughts, beyond images." The peace and even joy that can come from contemplation, says the mystical tradition of Christianity, is the antidote to boredom and restlessness which afflict our anxious age.
"There is not enough silence," T. S. Eliot wrote. To free ourselves from the noise of too many words, too many thoughts, too much stuff, we need solitude and silence, challenging though these can become.
As a result, these young people (by and large) have a certain amount of freedom--including freedom from commitments; and moral boundaries are less clear than in their parents' generation. They might agree that murder, rape, and robbery are wrong, but doubt that cheating on exams (or one one's partner) is always wrong. As I discovered among my own students, their main concern in cheating is whether they will be caught. As to the behavior of others, well, it is up to each person to decide for himself.
"Very few seem to think that right and wrong are rooted in anything outside personal experience," says the Spectator review of Smith's book.
They are into consumerism, drinking, and sex because of peer pressure, in part, but also because of sheer boredom. Why, with all the choices they have, all the opportunities for learning and enjoying life, would anyone be bored? Could it be that they have too many options, too many consumer goods, like the child who is flooded with toys on Christmas morning and turns with relief to playing hide-and-seek?
Might it be that boredom is, in my favorite definition, a fear of running out of things to do? If happiness consists only of entertaining activities, it is not hard for an imaginative, intelligent person to anticipate a life without the gratification of more stimulation. We are all essentially restless, in part because we do not find a place for contemplation, solitude, and silence.
Few people have articulated the importance of these three things as memorably as the Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton. I began today to look through my "Merton files," clippings of readings sent to me from the Merton Institute for Contemplative Living and other e-mail newsletters, and I find that the two ideas of solitude and silence recur in this extensive body of work more than any other; they are the keys to inner happiness and peace.
Both before and after becoming a monk, Merton, a restless soul, knew the dark side of boredom as a kind of depression. Yet he sought out what to many would seem like the least likely answer: a remote monastery. Once there, he sought out the solitude of his own hermitage in the woods. After being persistent, he was finally (c. 1965) allowed to move to a shed that became "a delight," as he writes in one of his journals: "I can imagine no other joy on earth than to have such a place and to be at peace in it, to live in silence, to think and write, to listen to the wind and all the voices of the wood, to prepare for my own death, to love my brothers and all people, to pray for the world and for peace and good sense among men."
As he wrote elsewhere, all of us need to seek peace within ourselves "because we do not naturally find rest even in our own being. We have to learn to commune with ourselves before with can communicate with other men and with God. A man who is not at peace with himself necessarily projects his interior fighting into the society of those he lives with, and spreads a contagion of conflict all around him." (This is from
No Man is an Island, 1955.)
As Merton makes clear repeatedly, solitude is a true refuge from the depression and restlessness implied in boredom; it is not a negative relationship--the absence of people, any more than silence is the absence of sound. "True solitude is a partcipation in the true solitariness of God, Who is in all things....It is in deep solitude that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brothers."
There's much more: Solitude is not, says Merton, something to hope for in the future; "it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present, you will not find it." For Merton as writer, as for all writers, solitude is essential, and the writing does not isolate the one who writes but connects him or her to all the unseen readers he imagines, just as in silence he can feel connected to all those who are at a given moment being contemplative(fully present to the present moment) rather than busy.
Writing, prayer, contemplation, solitude--all of these involve a sense of creative aloneness in which one does not feel loneliness but a sense of connection with the self, with others, and with God. As the contemporary monk Peter-Damian Belisle says, "One is never alone in true solitude. There is the powerful experience of presence that arises out of solitude's depths."
Honest aloneness makes us not alone but awake to God's presence.
The same type of presence rises from the depths of silence, whenever we give ourselves permission to find the freedom that comes in silence. That is one of the paradoxes Merton loves to explore: We are truly free when we "encounter God in our hearts...the truth that makes us free is...the presence in us of a divine person." True religion is a liberating force that helps us find ourselves in God.
Is there a scriptural basis for any of this? St. Paul: "The Spirit pleads for us in our inmost being, beyond words, beyond thoughts, beyond images." The peace and even joy that can come from contemplation, says the mystical tradition of Christianity, is the antidote to boredom and restlessness which afflict our anxious age.
"There is not enough silence," T. S. Eliot wrote. To free ourselves from the noise of too many words, too many thoughts, too much stuff, we need solitude and silence, challenging though these can become.
Thursday, April 14, 2011
An Existential Christian
I began this blog by referring to Thomas Merton, who plays a prominent role in the six articles I have published in the past two years, just as he continues to influence my spiritual life.
In reading a recent passage (from The Wisdom of the Desert), I was struck again by his approach, which I call existential. That is, he approaches matters of belief and the inner life through his own experience, in many cases by having encountered what he has read and reflected on it, producing memorable passages like this:
He is referring to his reading of the early desert fathers: "What good will it do us to know merely that such things were once said? The important thing is that they were lived. That they flow from an experience of the deeper levels of life. That they represent a discovery of man, at the term of an inner and spiritual journey that is far more crucial and infinitely more important than any journey to the moon." [He was writing just after JFK's call to land on the moon.]
"What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it all the rest are not only useless but disastrous."
The idea that we are often strangers to our true selves is a major theme in Merton's extensive writing. As James Finley shows in detail in Merton's Palace of Nowhere, the true self is our essential core or center, the unchanging self known by God, in contrast to the false social masks we tend to wear. Ultimately, the search for the true self is also a search for the presence of God within us.
As Merton wrote elsewhere, "We could not seek God unless He were seeking us....But the mere fact that we seek Him proves that we have already found Him."
This koan-like paradox reflects, I think, the Gospel: "Seek and you shall find..." The one who seeks has already in a sense found what he needs. The asking is itself a discovery. "Knock and it shall be opened to you."
In Merton I find not only an intellectual who read widely but one who also felt deeply and had the gift--almost the obsession--to write as a way of clarifying his ever-growing awareness of the mystery of God and prayer.
All the writing he did may seem narcissistic to some, but I hope my comments have shown that his appeal as a spiritual master is as an existential writer, whose own experience is the ground of his belief and thus a source of continuing inspiration.
In reading a recent passage (from The Wisdom of the Desert), I was struck again by his approach, which I call existential. That is, he approaches matters of belief and the inner life through his own experience, in many cases by having encountered what he has read and reflected on it, producing memorable passages like this:
He is referring to his reading of the early desert fathers: "What good will it do us to know merely that such things were once said? The important thing is that they were lived. That they flow from an experience of the deeper levels of life. That they represent a discovery of man, at the term of an inner and spiritual journey that is far more crucial and infinitely more important than any journey to the moon." [He was writing just after JFK's call to land on the moon.]
"What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it all the rest are not only useless but disastrous."
The idea that we are often strangers to our true selves is a major theme in Merton's extensive writing. As James Finley shows in detail in Merton's Palace of Nowhere, the true self is our essential core or center, the unchanging self known by God, in contrast to the false social masks we tend to wear. Ultimately, the search for the true self is also a search for the presence of God within us.
As Merton wrote elsewhere, "We could not seek God unless He were seeking us....But the mere fact that we seek Him proves that we have already found Him."
This koan-like paradox reflects, I think, the Gospel: "Seek and you shall find..." The one who seeks has already in a sense found what he needs. The asking is itself a discovery. "Knock and it shall be opened to you."
In Merton I find not only an intellectual who read widely but one who also felt deeply and had the gift--almost the obsession--to write as a way of clarifying his ever-growing awareness of the mystery of God and prayer.
All the writing he did may seem narcissistic to some, but I hope my comments have shown that his appeal as a spiritual master is as an existential writer, whose own experience is the ground of his belief and thus a source of continuing inspiration.
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