To work out our own identity in God, which the Bible calls “working out our salvation,” is a labor that requires sacrifice and anguish, risk and many tears.  It demands close attention to reality at every moment, and great fidelity to God as He reveals Himself, obscurely, in the mystery of each new situation. We do not know clearly beforehand what the result of this work will be…

Thomas Merton- New Seeds of Contemplation

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Thomas Merton - Seeds of Contemplation Available from Samantha - $18

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From the publisher:

If you read nothing else by Merton, read this. Personal, direct, and lucid, it contains some of his most challenging insights into the struggle to find an honest relationship with God and one’s fellow humans.

The book takes a compelling yet thoughtful look at a wide variety of spiritual themes, but is — like most of Merton’s writings — devoid of theorizing. A must for anyone who is ready to seriously reassess the reality and direction of his or her life. But beware: you will not emerge untouched.

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Sunday, March 31, 2012

Pause Day

Saturday, March 31, 2012

What to read for today.           

Chapter 33:Journey Through the Wilderness           

Questions for your personal reflection.

Was there anything in today’s chapter that you “held and savored”?           

Sharing with others: What caught your attention or provoked your thinking today?

This was a hard chapter for me to understand.  I thought that Merton was trying to show that there are many routes to contemplation, including sweeping the floor or doing laundry.  We don’t have to do formal mediation. We can read books, look at sacred objects, or be in the presence of nature.  What matters is our state of mind, “a habitual, comforting, obscure and mysterious awareness of God, present and acting in all the events of life”. To me this is what the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hahn calls mindfulness.   It is available to everyone.

Posted by Genevieve

Friday, March 30, 2012

What to read for today.           

Chapter 32:The Night of the Senses           

Questions for your personal reflection.

Can you relate to the “dark and frustrated condition” and the obscurity that Merton refers to in this chapter? If so, how did you interpret your condition at the time?           

Sharing with others: What caught your attention or provoked your thinking today?

From the outset, Merton insisted that finding one’s true identity was a painful process that had no predictable destination.  He said that you had to have faith to do this and I couldn’t relate to that word.  Now I think that “faith” might be the appropriate word for our willingness to enter this process and stick with it even though we don’t know the outcome.  Come to think of it, we enter many other relationships on faith such as marriage, parenthood and jobs.

Posted by Genevieve

Thursday, March 29, 2012

What to read for today.

Chapter 31:The Gift of Understanding           

Questions for your personal reflection.

Has Merton prompted a “new level of awareness” for you this Lent?             

Sharing with others: What caught your attention or provoked your thinking today?

This Lent I have been “doing” a lot of Merton. Books by, about and inspired by him.  This is gradually opening up an awareness of blind spots that were not apparent to me before.  I attribute this to Merton’s persistent cautions against egotism. I find it particularly intriguing to reflect on his suggestion that our wills and ego get in the way of discovering our true identity. For many of us that may be counter-cultural and counter-intuitive but it is still well worth thinking about.

Posted by Genevieve

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

What to read for today.           

Chapter 30:Distraction           

Questions for your personal reflection.

What experience do you have of the composure and state of attention that Merton describes?             

Sharing with others: What caught your attention or provoked your thinking today?

My sense is that I have more daily distractions than Merton did inside the monastery, especially after he got permission to live as a hermit.  His attitude seems to be that it is up to me to do something about that.  For example, he ends the chapter by saying that if our job pressures distract us when we try to be still, then maybe we are over-invested in our jobs and should start to change that.    I think he is saying that you can’t have your cake and eat it too: if you expose yourself to lots of external pressures, you can’t just expect to tune them out when you decide you’d like some solitude.  More tough medicine.

Posted by Genevieve

Tuesday, March 27, 2012

What to read for today. 

Chapter 29: Mental Prayer

Questions for your personal reflection. 

Did this chapter shed any light on what you are experiencing as you practice this Lenten discipline?

Sharing with others: What caught your attention or provoked your thinking today?

I thought that Merton was gently poking fun at meditation books, including New Seeds of Contemplation.  He was cautioning us not to try to replicate what people write about and to have our own spiritual experiences.  The less appealing message was that these experiences must involve suffering, darkness, pain, anguish. This sheds light on or expands what Merton said in Chapter 28, that we shouldn’t get too attached to the pleasurable aspects of our interior life because there is more to it than that.

Posted by Genevieve

Monday, March 26, 2012

What to read for today. 

Chapter 28: Detachment

Questions for your personal reflection. 

Do you have any attachment to spiritual things?  How would your spiritual community benefit if you were to let go of such an attachment?

Sharing with others: What caught your attention or provoked your thinking today?
This chapter made me think back to what people said they were giving up for Lent – chocolate, caffeine, swearing, Face Book.  As always, Merton takes us further.  He says that our more subtle attachments are harder to recognize, such as attachments to “interior peace” or even to prayer. Could that be attachment to particular prayers, or forms of worship or favourite hymns?  I hadn’t thought much about that before but now I am going to pay attention to what kind of attachments I might be carrying around and how they might impact others.

Posted by Genevieve

Sunday, March 25, 2012

Pause Day

Saturday, March 24, 2012

What to read for today. 

Chapter 27:What Is Liberty?

Questions for your personal reflection. 

Do you have any experience of the kind of liberty that Merton writes about?

Sharing with others: What caught your attention or provoked your thinking today?

The freedom that Merton talks seems familiar.  It is like writing a sonnet or a short story. Each literary form imposes certain limitations, but within those forms you can write about anything you like and say whatever you want to say.  On a relational level Merton’s freedom also sounds like marriage.  One takes on certain obligations, connections, demands and so forth as part of the commitment to another person, while at the same time remaining free to be oneself.

I do not know if Merton would equate these things with “the ability to do the will of God” which is how he defines freedom in this chapter.


Posted by Genevieve

Friday, March 23, 2012

What to read for today. 

Chapter 26:Freedom Under Obedience

Questions for your personal reflection. 

What role does obedience play in your spiritual life?  Is this a “prudent use” of your freedom?

Sharing with others: What caught your attention or provoked your thinking today? 

I am not, and do not aspire to be obedient.  Nor do I yearn to be led and advised and directed by someone else.  That is why I do not seek ordination to the priesthood and why I am indifferent to the conventional profession in which I am trained.   My attitude may have something to do with choice of environment.  Merton’s was vertical and hierarchical.  He was, after all, a monk in a monastic order.  Mine is horizontal with give and take between equals.  My personal and business relationships evolve according to circumstances and the people involved.  Nevertheless, Merton raises a provocative question: Is this horizontal context just a way to assert my own will and indulge in my own caprices? 

Posted by Genevieve

Thursday, March 22, 2012 

What to read for today. 

Chapter 25:Humility Against Despair

Questions for your personal reflection. 

If you stopped living for yourself or on the human level and became humble in the manner suggested by Merton, what difference would that make in your thoughts, words or deeds? What relationships would be most affected?  In what way?

Sharing with others: What caught your attention or provoked your thinking today? 

Merton makes a good case for true humility, a state where a person can do great things without concern for “incidentals” like self-interest, reputation, or self-respect, a state where a person can graciously accept praise and then give it all away, keeping nothing back.  But is this attainable?  If it were, surely a person would be in a perpetual state of equanimity. They would be Christ-like or Buddha-like all the time.   I do not think I am engaging in despair when I say that this is quite impossible. 

Posted by Genevieve

Tuesday, March 20, 2012 

What to read for today. 

Chapter 23:The Woman Clothed With The Sun

Questions for your personal reflection. 

To what extent did you find the ideas in this chapter meaningful and accessible?  Was there anything that you found yourself resisting? 

Sharing with others: What caught your attention or provoked your thinking today? 

In the story of the Annunciation Mary is, for me, a person who says an unqualified yes to whatever comes her way. I got the same sense from Merton. He describes her as being devoid of egotism but full of the humility and poverty that are necessary for contemplation. And at this stage in the book I have begun to understand why Merton urges us to “disappear from our own self-conscious consideration” and “be accounted as nothing by the world.” Mary is a model for this way of being. It is possible to see her in this light whether or not one believes in the mythological motifs of the virgin birth and the assumption into heaven.

Posted by Genevieve

Monday, March 19, 2012 

What to read for today. 

Chapter 22:Life in Christ

Questions for your personal reflection. 

Can you identify anything that you are trying to escape from as a means of evading your own true nature and countenance?

Sharing with others: What caught your attention or provoked your thinking today? 

This chapter did not evoke any sense of escape for me.  Instead, I was caught by the idea that nothing is more important than one’s interior life and that the only things that matter are ones that support that life.  “If I have divine life in me, what do the accidents of pain and pleasure, hope and fear, joy and sorrow matter to me?” And then Merton points out that this divine life gets radiated back out to others so that we benefit each other.  I do not think that one has to be a “believer” in Christ or anything else in order to find this compelling.

Posted by Genevieve.

Sunday, March 18, 2012

Pause Day

Saturday, March 19, 2012

What to read for today.  

Chapter 21:The Mystery of Christ

Questions for your personal reflection. 

Merton writes, “But Christian contemplation is supremely personlistic”.  

Do you understand what that means? Is it helpful or instructive to you?

Sharing with others: What caught your attention or provoked your thinking today? 

This reading study is teaching me so much but in this chapter I stumbled over the assumptions that Merton makes about who is a Christian and what Christianity has to mean. How does he know that “all experience of God comes to us through Christ”?  And why must “the normal way to contemplation [be] a belief in Christ…born of thoughtful consideration of His life and His teachings”?  Merton spills a lot of ink in an attempt to integrate dogma and contemplation. I kept wondering why he went to all that trouble. Perhaps he was originally speaking to a more restrictive audience.   In any event, I decided to take his advice, “avoid what gets in your way”!

Posted by Genevieve.

Friday, March 16, 2012   

What to read for today. 

Chapter 20:Tradition and Revolution

Questions for your personal reflection. 

Have you found yourself unsettled by Merton’s words in this or any other chapter?  Or simply in disagreement with them?  

Sharing with others: What caught your attention or provoked your thinking today? 

The first time I read this chapter I thought it was a defence of dogma and the teaching authority of the church, which I found to be intriguing and amusing in equal parts. But when I read it again (several times) I started to see so much else.  Like the idea that Christianity is fully revealed but not yet fully understood or fully lived.  Like the idea that each succeeding generation has to rediscover Christianity and return to the source.  Or that the revolution to which Christianity points is an extermination of our false selves instead of the extermination of other people.  So one of the big lessons for me in this chapter is not being so quick to judge what Merton is saying.

Posted by Genevieve.

Thursday, March 15, 2012

What to read for today.           

Chapter 19:From Faith to Wisdom           

Questions for your personal reflection.

Back to the word “faith”.  Is this an adequate word for what Merton is trying to convey?           

Sharing with others: What caught your attention or provoked your thinking today?

I found myself wishing that Merton had used a substitute for “faith” or eliminated it altogether because once again I sensed confusion or contradiction.  If faith is “the incorporation of the unknown and the unconscious into our daily life” I’m all for it. On the other hand, if faith is “acceptance of truths proposed by authority” I’m a lot less interested.  Besides, in Chapter 15 Merton suggested that “blind conformity to a decision made by someone else” was the mark of an immature Christian. 

Posted by Genevieve. 

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

What to read for today.           

Chapter 18:Faith           

Questions for your personal reflection.

Return to your thoughts about “faith” in Chapter 15.  Did this chapter impact or alter those thoughts in any way?           

Sharing with others: What caught your attention or provoked your thinking today?

I had to read this chapter several times before I understood what Merton might be saying, and even then I needed help from an outside source that explained Merton as a “traditionalist”.  I think he’s saying that conventional religious propositions like the Trinity or spiritual texts that are supposed to contain divine revelations are really just gateways or means to an end.  Their end is actually an opening, i.e. a contemplative experience, as opposed to the acceptance of a literal truth. If I got this right, then this line of thinking is entirely compatible with Merton’s thoughts about mature Christianity.

Posted by Genevieve.

Tuesday, March 13, 2012

What to read for today.           

Chapter 17:Hell As Hatred           

Questions for your personal reflection.

Did you recognize yourself anywhere in this chapter?

Sharing with others: What caught your attention or provoked your thinking today?

It was easy to see everyone else in this chapter because it sounded so dramatic with its references to Hitler, Stalin and Napoleon, and its talk of excitement and violence.  But eventually it occurred to me to ask myself, in what ways do I “thrust others away” and struggle  “be free of …another” when I meet opposition my demands or my suggestions?  

Posted by Genevieve.

Monday, March 12, 2012

What to read for today.                       

Chapter 16: The Root of War is Fear           

Questions for your personal reflection.

How comfortable are you with Merton’s notion that individually and collectively we are all a “mysterious, unaccountable mixture of good and evil”?  Do you accept the proposition that we are all responsible for the ethical and political problems of the world?  

Sharing with others: What caught your attention or provoked your thinking today?

Many years ago I heard Henri Nouwen give a sermon where he said, “We are all responsible for war.” I didn’t get it at the time.  In this chapter Merton is saying the same thing as Nouwen: when we look honestly, we have to see that we all exhibit attitudes and behaviours that contribute to war, even if we go about our business at home or on a local basis.  I don’t think this is far fetched.  It’s about shared responsibility.  As long as I can point to someone else or invoke the assistance of a powerful deity, I don’t have to actually do anything and that’s a comfortable position to be in.

Posted by Genevieve. 

Sunday, March 11, 2012

Pause Day

Saturday, March 10, 2012

What to read for today.           

Chapter 15:Sentences           

Questions for your personal reflection.

What does the word “faith” mean to you?  Is your definition an act of “exercising your liberty” or “the acceptance of a decision that has been made by someone else”?

Sharing with others: What caught your attention or provoked your thinking today?

Little by little, I see Merton challenging us to take on a mature Christianity, to grow up as it were.  From this chapter I understand that a mature Christianity includes (1) letting go of resentments (2) generously accepting Christians whose view of Jesus is distasteful or ridiculous to us, and (3) thinking for ourselves, i.e. doing our own spiritual work instead of blindly accepting the decisions that others like parents have made on our behalf.   It sounds to me like Merton is repeatedly telling us to take responsibility for our own interior life.

Posted by Genevieve.