Thomas Merton

[Thomas]

The mere ability to choose between good and evil is the lowest limit of freedom, and the only thing that is free about it is the fact that we can still choose good.

To the extent that you are free to choose evil, you are not free. An evil choice destroys freedom.

We can never choose evil as evil: only as an apparent good. But when we decide to do something that seems to us to be good when it is not really so, we are doing something that we do not really want to do, and therefore we are not really free.

Perfect spiritual freedom is a total inability to make any evil choice. When everything you desire is truly good and every choice not only aspires to that good but attains it, then you are free because you do everything that you want, every act of your will ends in perfect fulfillment.

Freedom therefore does not consist in an equal balance between good and evil choices but in the perfect love and acceptance of what is really good and the perfect hatred and rejection of what is evil, so that everything you do is good and makes you happy, and you refuse and deny and ignore every possibility that might lead to unhappiness and self-deception and grief. Only the man who has rejected all evil so completely that he is unable to desire it at all, is truly free. God, in whom there is absolutely no shadow or possibility of evil or of sin, is infinitely free. In fact, he is Freedom.

from New Seeds of Contemplation

[Tariki]

Thomas, the quote you gave brings to mind some words of Merton that I am unable to trace. Yet I remember that they revolved around the need to submit to the will of God................and Merton spoke of this as not being submission to some enigmatic yet demanding command that would be the polar opposite of the easy yoke, because in fact the "will of God" is that we be free.

Also, it bought to mind some other words by the Zen Master Caoshan which have always seemed - at least to me - difficult to interpret and truly understand, yet seem - in the light of your own quote - to perhaps point towards the same truths.......

When studying in this way, evils are manifest as a continuum of being ever not done. Inspired by this manifestation, seeing through to the fact that evils are not done, one settles it finally. At precisely such a time, as the beginning, middle, and end manifest as evils not done, evils are not born from conditions, they are only not done; evils do not perish through conditions, they are only not done.

Anyway, another from Merton.......

I am thrown into contradiction:
to realize it is mercy,
to accept it is love,
to help others do the same is compassion.

[Tariki]

Originally Posted by Tariki

I am thrown into contradiction:
to realize it is mercy,
to accept it is love,
to help others do the same is compassion.

Just to illuminate these words..............

I have had to accept the fact that my life is almost totally paradoxical. I have also had to learn gradually to get along without apologising for the fact, even to myself. And perhaps these words are an indication that I have not yet completely learned. No matter. It is in the paradox itself, the paradox which was and still is a source of insecurity, that I have come to find the greatest security. I have become convinced that the very contradictions in my life are in some ways signs of God's mercy to me: if only because someone so complicated and so prone to confusion and self-defeat could hardly survive for long without special mercy. And since this in no way depends on the approval of others, the awareness of it is a kind of liberation.


I remember myself, way back, gaining a minor form of liberation when someone spoke of having contradictions in their lives/words/beliefs pointed out to them. He said that this no longer caused him any concern, that sometimes we just have to live with "truths" that apparently contradict each other. Each seems "true" to us at any one time and need acknowledgement. Perhaps the point is, if we do not cling too tight to the exact expression, in time the "contradictions" resolve themselves at a "higher" ( or perhaps more fundamental) level.

[Snoopy]

Originally Posted by Tariki

I remember myself, way back, gaining a minor form of liberation when someone spoke of having contradictions in their lives/words/beliefs pointed out to them. He said that this no longer caused him any concern, that sometimes we just have to live with "truths" that apparently contradict each other. Each seems "true" to us at any one time and need acknowledgement. Perhaps the point is, if we do not cling too tight to the exact expression, in time the "contradictions" resolve themselves at a "higher" ( or perhaps more fundamental) level.

Hi,

Maybe a computer is always consistent but a computer is fixed (at the gross level). As humans, we all grow and change so "contradictions" are inevitable. Only a person who tries to remain fixed might ever be so consistent as a computer; but at what cost to their personal growth? A judgmental person may even point and say "hypocrite" but I for one don't keep a record of every utterance I have ever made to make sure I'm staying "true" to a former "self."

s.

[lunamoth]

The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another, and all involved in one another.

[Tariki]

Just browsing through a few more journal entries of Thomas Merton, and uncovered the following. May have been of worth when - was it China Cat Sunflower? - was asking what it was to "believe", but worth a glance in any case. Merton is responding to a passage from Irenaeus..(A passage that my own understanding and experience associates with the Pure Land notion of "being made to become so (of itself) without/beyond the calculation of the devotee, where "no working is true working")

If you are the work of God wait patiently for the hand of your artist who makes all things at an opportune time........Give to Him a pure and supple heart and watch over the form which the artist shapes in you........lest, in hardness, you lose the traces of his fingers......

Merton comments......

The reification of faith. Real meaning of the phrase we are saved by faith = we are saved by Christ, whom we encounter in faith. But constant disputation about faith has made Christians become obsessed with faith almost as an object, at least as an experience, a "thing" and in concentrating upon it they lose sight of Christ. Whereas faith without the encounter with Christ and without His presence is less than nothing. It is the deadest of dead works, an act elicited in a moral and existential void. To seek to believe that one believes, and arbitrarily to decree that one believes, and then to conclude that this gymnastic has been blessed by Christ - this is pathological Christianity. And a Christianity of works. One has this mental gymnastic in which to trust. One is safe, one possesses the psychic key to salvation......

[Snoopy]

Hi,

There’s a new collection of Merton’s writings out, called “Echoing Silence – Thomas Merton and the Vocation of Writing” edited by Robert Inchausti and published by New Seeds. It spans three decades and draws from 28 previously published books. I’ve just read a lengthy review of it and it seems like an interesting and well put together collection.

Merton apparently felt the tension between being a public, known writer (a role that would stroke the ego) and the requirements of the life of a contemplative, where the “intention” is to lose the Self to realise the No Self.

s.


"No writing on the solitary, meditative dimensions of life can say anything that has not already been said better by the wind in the pine trees. These pages seek nothing more than to echo the silence and peace that is “heard” when the rain wanders freely among the hills and forests. But what can the wind say when there is no hearer? There is then a deeper silence: the silence in which the Hearer is No Hearer. That deeper silence must be heard before one can speak truly of solitude."

[Tariki]

Snoopy,

Thanks for the info re the new book. What you have said reminds me of the title of a biography of Thomas Merton by William H Shannon, "Silent Lamp".

The title comes from a poem written in Merton's honour by his friend John C H Wu......

Silent Lamp! Silent Lamp!
I only see its radiance,
But hear not its voice!
Spring beyond the world!

[Snoopy]

"The true solutions are not those which we force upon life in accordance with our theories, but those which life itself provides for those who dispose themselves to receive the truth."

- Raids on the Unspeakable.

[Tariki]

In the last analysis what I am looking for in solitude is not happiness or fulfillment but salvation. Not "my own" salvation, but the salvation of everybody........I am here for one thing: to be open, not to be "closed in" on any one choice to the exclusion of all others: to be open to God's will and freedom, to His love which comes to save me from all in myself that resists Him and says no to Him. This I must do not to justify myself, not to be right, not to be good, but because the whole world of lost people needs this opening by which salvation can get into the world through me.

(Journals, June 24, 1966)

Fidelity to grace in my life is fidelity to simplicity, rejecting ambition and analysis and elaborate thought, or even elaborate concern.

(Journals, Jan 20-21, 1963)

[Tariki]

The speech of God is silence.......everything else is fiction, half-hiding the truth it tries to reveal.......we are travellers from the half-world of language into solitude and infinity.....

(Journals, Jan 11, 1950)

[Tariki]

I've been taking a quiet time away. Dipping into some of the writings of Merton again. His Letters and Journals, which I love. You never quite know just what is coming next.......and the reading is slow and reflective, so much suggested by Merton's own thoughts and words.

Merton was an early riser. Here is a brief extract from his jouranl dated June 5th 1960....

At 2:30 - no sounds except sometimes a bullfrog. Some mornings, he says Om - some days he is silent.....................The first sounds of the waking birds - "the virgin point" of the dawn, a moment of awe and inexpressible innocence, when the Father in silence opens their eyes and they speak to Him, wondering if it is time to "be"? And He tells them "Yes". Then they one by one wake and begin to sing. First the catbirds and cardinals and some others I do not recognise. Later, song sparrows, wrens.........last of all doves, crows...........With my hair almost on end and the eyes of the soul wide open I am present, without knowing it at all, in this unspeakable Paradise, and I behold this secret, this wide open secret which is there for everyone, free, and no one pays any attention............Oh paradise of simplicity, self-awareness - and self-forgetfulness - liberty, peace........