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.
Being a Roman Catholic (who is attending an Anglican church), I can see how and why you are confused, but do not share that confusion. We don't really think we are the only souls in heaven! To my own belief, it's all a matter of what Merton (and I) perceive as Christ when addressing those outside formal Christianity. Is Christ among those bathing in the Ganges? To me, certainly. (Is He called "Christ" by those bathers? No.) I'm sure that those outside Christianity that Merton was so interested in and to whom he spoke were not in his mind an audience of the damned. However, I agree that this book and others are published with a conventional public of his own formal religious culture in mind. Had they been written and published now and instantly available worldwide in a multitude of languages and available on Amazon for Kindle e-readers, they would have almost certainly have been expressed differently. In his time, though, Merton would have been aware of the importance in publishing and selling of the Catholic "imprimatur" and "nihil obstat" page.
ReplyDeleteFrom Genevieve
DeleteI agree. I don't think that Merton was condescending to non-Christians or regarding them as damned. Not by any means. It seems pretty clear to me now that he was addressing a particular audience at a particular point in time. I have to remind myself not to take Merton's generalizations so seriously!
Please also see my posting below.
Postscript: . . . and not much in my Church's magisterium is dogma; we have latitude, and by choice within a cultural framework. That might explain some of the apparent contradiction in Merton.
ReplyDeletePosted by Genevieve
ReplyDeleteAfter yesterday's postings, I decided to take a fresh look at this chapter. What I see now is that, through the vocabulary of theology and in his own circuitous style, Merton is actually erasing the lines between humanity and divinity. He is telling us that by contemplating Christ (whom dogma says is simultaneously human and divine) we come to the same realization about ourselves. Not that we are mini-gods with our own individual omnipotence but that we are all of the same stuff, all participating in the same mystery which is beyond words of concepts. "Tat tvam asi" - Thou Art That. As always, the message doesn't leap out at you off the page, but that's what I believe Merton is communicating. He says right at the end that we are "transformed into other Christs...and for me to become Christ is to enter into the life of the Whole Christ, the Mystical Body...".
Post Script by Genevieve
ReplyDeleteI meant to add that in an unrelated conversation my son gave me a great image for Merton's notion of contemplative union.
Two plus two equals four except when you're talking about raindrops. Then two plus two equals one. I think Merton was demonstrating raindrop mathematics in this chapter.
today Merton seems to be setting up "straw dogs" just to knock them over. He makes declarative statements " the normal way to contemplation... Then says BUT....and goes on to describe enough variations to make the "rule" meaningless. I' m not sure what that does for his exploration of faith, love god etc.
ReplyDeleteI was struck that at one point he returned to the theme of god being within in us, and the various manifestations that the divine takes in the corporeal world. This struck a positive chord with me.
His notion that god is also a concept that can be held ( however fleetingly) in the mind ,but is not necessary ( this is a logic argument) also left me unconvinced.
I thought he tied Gordian knots in his explanation of "two in one" or "three in one". and in the end I'm not convinced he did any better than the Nestorians (I'll look them up)
post by william
Posted by Second Thoughts
ReplyDeleteWhen Merton says that Christian contemplation is supremely personalistic we know that he does not think it is an individual activity where you contemplate your own navel. I think he is speaking of his conviction that Christ is the access point for Christians. Merton talks about Christ as the Divine Person. Elsewhere he said that God is a Who and not a what. That must be what he means when he says it is personalistic. Or more correctly, that it is supposed to be personalistic. He is quite firm in his belief that you cannot just bypass Christ on your way to the top.
Funny how Merton has so many should's and should-not's.
I love your son's raindrops mathematics. . . . and, yes, I too do believe that is what Merton is communicating, and is what we are, and is what Christ is. Through Him, with Him, in Him, in the UNITY of the Holy Spirit . . .
ReplyDeleteThe particular form of meditation that is capital C Contemplation can bring one into realised touch with that, as described in Merton's book, "Contemplative Prayer". It takes both faith and practice but can eventually become one's customary form of prayer, - wordless and, importantly, effortless. By the Grace of God, such is my "real" prayer now.