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
Posted by Second Thoughts
ReplyDeleteAttachements? Yes many. So many that Merton makes me wonder how I am supposed to live in the world.
I am to give up my attachment to exterior facades and to how I want to be seen. To virtuous acts that are motivated by self-interest. I am to give up my attachment to books. philosophies, methods. And now I am to give up even a sense of interior peace and any memories of being at peace because that's just as much of an attachment as liking a glass of beer?
To answer one of the questions posed, I suppose that if I were able free myself from all these various attachments I might be easier to get along with and the people around me might like that. But how much of me would be left? I'm sure that's a question that is loaded with attachment too.
It is going to take me more than forty days of Lent to get where Merton goes.
Posted by Genevieve
ReplyDeleteLiving with Merton is a little bit like living with a brutally honest relative who insists on mentioning that you've got spinach in your teeth or a rip in your pants. You're taken a bit aback and ask, who me?
At first this chapter got me thinking about being attached to spiritual things. Then I re-read the lines about the desire for ceaseless motion, for constant achievement and a "crude hunger for results". Ouch. And after that about people who get so excited that they launch into ambitious projects for teaching and converting the whole world.
Merton's prescription is for us to be quiet and keep peaceful and "attentive to the secret work He is beginning in their souls".
So I have the same question - just how are we supposed to behave in the world? Is he really saying that we're supposed to be passive recipients? I'm sure it's been said before: that is so counter-cultural.
HE does seem to be saying you just let it happen. How do good works get done then? where is God's will in that?
Deletepost by around the corner
I think detachment is a very hard place to get to. and Merton makes it seem almost impossible. For me he seems to set up a series of scenarios to describe the state of detachment and then says... no you're not there yet! I understand that humans aren't perfect and will fall in their attempts to reach this goal but I felt at the end as if there was no hope and what was the point of trying.
ReplyDeleteI get the concept of giving up things - that's one of the themes of Lent , and that in the renunciations you can develop a sense of the truly important. But to, as he put it become detached and then have an awareness of the detachment - destroys it- He seems too overly invested in the destruction of the ego for me.
I did see people I recognized as the previous blogger did in the constant motion people
I found I like this chapter less than others and found his points more "detached" from any spiritual experiences I 've had. But maybe that was the point.
posted by william