The Mysticism of Thomas Merton
| The Mysticism of Thomas Merton Michael Snellen, Founder of Catholicism for the Modern World “Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone—we find it with another.” Bryan Sherwood, Wikimedia Commons Firstly, it is important to establish that Fr. Louis (Thomas Merton) truly understood what Christian mysticism was. Contemplative prayer, according to Merton, is prayer “centered entirely on the presence of God.” Saying again, elsewhere, “Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone—we find it with another.” During his early years as a monk, he remarked: “I must above all things avoid playing the “know myself” game, because if I do it will surely mean losing what little I can find of a path to God.” (Run to the Mountain). Compared to the false mysticism of today that never goes beyond the self, Merton sought God. “There is no such thing as a kind of prayer in which you do absolutely nothing. If you are doing nothing you are not praying. On the other hand, if God is the source of your interior activity, the work of your faculties may be entirely beyond conscious estimation, and its results may not be seen or understood. Contemplative prayer is a deep and simplified spiritual activity in which the mind and will rest in a unified and simple concentration upon God, turned to Him, intent upon Him and absorbed in His own light, with a simple gaze which is perfect adoration because it silently tells God that we have left everything else and desire even to leave our own selves for His sake, and that He alone is important to us, He alone is our desire and our life, and nothing else can give us any joy.” (New Seeds of Contemplation) The language of the mystics, which on the surface level may seem to imply a Buddhist nirvana, or the loss of the self into a sea of nothingness, firmly kept in light of the context that mysticism is a relationship between God and man, reveals that to obtain this high spirituality is to lose the self into a sea of adoring love. “I shall be lost in Him: that is, I shall find myself. I shall be “saved.” (New Seeds of Contemplation) Merton explains how this concept of being “lost in love” is often confused: “When the mystic…claims to rest absorbed in a simple intuition of God’s presence and love without “seeing” or “understanding” any object, the reflexive consciousness…interprets this in a peculiar way: …as narcissistic repose of the consciousness in itself. It is true that false mysticism can take on some such appearance as this.” (Zen and the Birds of Appetite). False mysticism is blinded by introspective selfishness. Now, on the other hand, extending out to all creation and applying the Christian sacramental worldview, Merton talks about “Man’s need for an adequate understanding of his everyday self in his ordinary life.” The difference between a saint and a madman is that the former can balance the body and the soul. Merton, furthermore, writes, “There is no longer any place for the kind of idealistic philosophy that removes all reality into the celestial realms and makes temporal existence meaningless… Man needs to find ultimate sense here and now in the ordinary humble tasks and human problems of every day.” Here we find the root of Merton’s activism. A mystic, or a plain monk, lives the contemplative life by balancing the spiritual realities with the physical world. Ora et Labora was the motto of Merton’s monastic life, a saying which indicates work is just as important as prayer. As earlier noted, St. Augustine speaks of how we learn spiritual lessons through the world, since we are human beings, body and soul. We learn to love God by loving what God loves, what is good, and creation indeed is “very good.” (Gen 1:31) In New Seeds of Contemplation, Merton gives praise of the Church and its mission in the world, teaching man the ways of God. “The notion of dogma terrifies men who do not understand the Church. They cannot conceive that a religious doctrine may receive a clear and definite and authoritative statement without at once becoming static and rigid and inert and losing all its vitality. And in their frantic anxiety to escape from any such conception they take refuge in a system of beliefs that is vague and fluid, a system in which truths pass like mists and waver and vary like shadows.They make their own personal selection of ghosts, in this pale, indefinite twilight of the mind, and take good care never to bring them out into the full brightness of the sun for fear of a full view of their insubstantiality.” “They favor the Catholic mystics with a sort of sympathetic regard, for they believe that these rare men somehow reached the summit of contemplation in defiance of Catholic dogma. Their deep union with God is supposed to have been an escape from the teaching authority of His Church, and an implicit protest against it. “But the truth is that the saints arrived at the deepest and most vital and also the most individual and personal knowledge of God precisely because of the Church’s teaching authority, precisely through the tradition that is guarded and fostered by that authority.” “For outside the magisterium directly guided by the Spirit of God we find no such contemplation and no such union with Him—only the void of nirvana or the feeble intellectual light of Platonic idealism, or the sensual dreams of the Sufis. But the first step to contemplation is faith; and faith begins with an assent to Christ teaching through His Church; fides ex auditu; cfui vos audit, me audit. He that heareth you, heareth Me.” And “faith cometh by hearing.” Catholicism for the Modern World A New Catholic Renaissance. 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