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
Posted by Second Thoughts
ReplyDeleteI go back and forth on Merton. Sometimes he leads me to a new awareness or helps me out with what I already think. But just as often, I disagree with him because he’s dogmatic or I get annoyed because he seesaws back and forth.
Today he puts it well when he talks about a place in contemplation where everything and nothing belongs to us and we don’t do anything to deserve it. He uses lots of different words for it like pure light, the joy of emptiness, etc. etc. I particularly liked the one about going in and out of eternity. But what I don’t understand is that, if this place is outside of our ordinary “feeble” ideas about God (which Merton claims) then why does he have God playing gatekeeper so we only get in if God decides to let us in. That makes God sound like the big boss who gets up on the wrong side of the bed some days.
So this is where I start to get confused. Why isn’t Merton’s gatekeeper God just as puny (or inaccurate) as any other God that anybody else thinks up?
Merton seems to be going in circles to me- or worse- talking gobbledegook in this chapter. He talks about the fact that nothing we can do will give us the gift BUT.... without effort it will not occur.
ReplyDeleteIf God is my goal . but God can prevent me from reaching this goal... what's the point?
I was more taken with his thoughts that in contemplation you would go places you could not imagine, nor plot to go to
post by william