Wednesday, February 29, 2012
What to read for today.
Chapter 6: Pray for Your Own Discovery
Questions for your personal
reflection.
Who or what is the God that Merton refers to? Is this a God that you can relate to?
Sharing with others: What
caught your attention or provoked your thinking today?
I can relate to Merton the poet who uses words that point
beyond themselves as in his phrase “God uttering me like a word”. But sometimes
the language becomes literal – too many verbs - and I cannot follow Merton
whose God finds, looks, sees, discovers, empties, bridges, reveals, wills, etc.
It was a relief to read in Merton &
Sufism that Merton told novice monks, “Don’t speak to somebody else’s God,
because somebody else’s Lord may be Satan for you if you don’t look out…one has
to be terribly careful not to impose upon other people one’s own Lord, ones’
own idea of God.”
Posted by Genevieve
Posted by Second Thoughts
ReplyDeleteI found the chapter confusing. One moment the language opened out to possibilities way beyond the words. The next moment it closed down for me. Try as I might I cannot relate to the God that Merton writes about. So at first I found myself going back and forth and getting irritated.
And yet....
The prayer was perfect. It made me laugh. It seemed so spot on. "Set me free from the laziness that goes about disguised as activity when activity is not required of me...Put away heavy loads of judgment and censorship and criticism and the whole burden of opinions that I have no obligation to carry."
Merton is doing a very good job of showing me what is in the way of divine realization.
The one point that really struck me was-the obvious but profound comment that the world gets in the way of communion with God. Funny, that we humans need all the help we can get to discover that God is within us.
ReplyDeleteThe divine is knowable and is in all that exists
his thought that , anything worth knowing or doing takes effort ( What a shocker) is one of those things that is obvious but very difficult to accomplish
post by william