In a 1967 letter from Thomas Merton to Matthew Fox, Merton wrote:
“I’m glad you are going to work on spiritual theology . . . I do think we are lying down on the job when we leave others to investigate mysticism while we concentrate on more ‘practical’ things. What people want of us, after all, is the way to God.”
We all have our own way to God. Writing, meditation, acts of social justice, and many other ways. I employ all of these, but I am a writer.
That statement, “I am a writer,” was always a difficult one for me to say. I have long felt I wasn’t good enough to claim that title for myself. But, as Fox came to realize himself, “I am a writer. Because I am so happy writing and putting ideas together and in a form I can communicate with others. And I learn so much doing this.”
Upon reading War and Peace, Charles du Bos commented, “Life would speak thus if life could speak.” It reminds me of Parker Palmer’s admonition to let your life speak. So, why not?
I want to write my way to God. Perhaps not literally, but I want to compose words that speak to the collective heart of humankind. I want to create sentences like Merton, Buechner, Brown Taylor, and Lamott. I want to till the ground for a mystical experience like Tolstoy did for Fox. Again, why not?
What about you? What is your way to God? Are you a singer? Then sing. Are you an artist? Then paint. Are you a social prophet? Then speak. The world is short on people who are living into who they really are and at what cost?
Imagine if DaVinci never painted because he thought he wasn’t good enough. Imagine if Tolstoy never wrote because he thought his words didn’t matter. Imagine if Martin Luther King, Jr. never spoke because he thought nobody would want to hear what he has to say. Imagine if you don’t do that thing that burns like red embers in your soul. Will yours have been a life well lived?
How would life speak if you were to put it into words? Some of us need to hear it, so speak. Some of us need to see the face of God in the work of your hands and heart. Don’t try to keep it in, because after all, it will consume you if you do.
The sound washes over me in waves; undulating, matching the vibration of my own energy until each cell and the bowl are singing in unison.
“What is your intention? What do you need to let go of?” The meditation guide asks. This seems to be a recurring theme as of late.
And so as I lie there with eyes closed, body humming, I jump and allow myself to fall. I fall through layer and layer of clouds trusting that something or someone will catch me eventually. But then I realize, I don’t need to be caught. Falling is a safe form of letting go; maybe I’m even falling upward.
As the clouds turn dark and storms form within them, the thunder roars around me filling my ears with ominous sounds until I allow myself to become bigger than the storm and then smaller than the electrons that fuel the lightning.
I’m becoming myself, my intention while the drum beats steadily and the singing bowls peel away layer after layer of things I don’t need. The hand that I grasp is my hand and all difference ceases to exist as we are one. Interconnectedness is manifest there while energy flutters in ebbs and flows like a phoenix flapping her mighty, yet delicate wings.
We are intertwined as the spider makes her way down the web above me. Then she goes back up and I can almost hear her laughter as she does. Why do these spiders seem to follow me?
“Why indeed?” She asks. “You have feared and loathed that which is you: your own spirit animal. Creative. Beautiful in its own way. In touch with the universe. Do you see now?”
“Yes, I do,” I reply as I watch her make her way even more directly above my head. She seems to be showing me my own true self; telling me it’s finally time to go home. Or better yet, showing me that I’m already there. All realities made present as I lie there intertwined looking up.
When I am gone, the spider is gone, too.
I drive while I long for just a glimpse of the mountains. Making my way west I sing to Les Miserables at the top of my lungs. A concert for an audience of one.
When I come to the end of the Finale, I cry; loud and hard and quick. Not knowing exactly what I’m letting go of in that moment, but feeling it leave me. Then it’s over. And that’s ok, because sometimes that’s what falling looks like on the outside.
I’ve always been a collector of words. Quotes, proverbs, definitions, what have you. But I don’t just regurgitate them into the ether. When I say them, I mean them. I have had great teachers that have imparted these words to me.
Browning taught me to reach beyond my grasp because that’s what heaven is for.
Eliot taught me that under red rocks reside things more fearful than shadows and that faith, love, and hope are found in the waiting.
Plato taught me that complacency can only creep in when the dream is dead and Hughes taught me that a dream deferred just might sag like a heavy load.
Oliver taught me to notice the grasshoppers and each blade of grass and asked me what I would do with my one precious life.
Rilke taught me that the questions are more important than the answers and Teilhard de Chardin that if I wait patiently I will live into who God made me to be.
Whyte taught me that if I let go then I’ll see that my True Self resides as near as a reflection in a Himalayan lake or any lake and Eckhart that I can only know truth through erasure and that addition by subtraction is the only way to myself.
O’Donohue taught me that the space between all of us is sacred and that in the solitude and unsayable resides the beauty of interconnected knowing.
Yes, I love words and they sometimes love me back. But I’m ready to go deeper now.
Osho teaches that intuition is something that goes beyond knowing. There are things that we think we can grasp intellectually and then there is the unknowable; the mystery that can’t be expressed in words that humans have ever mastered. This may be closer to what the ancient philosophers called gnosis: almost a divine knowledge reserved for only whose who would practice the awareness to receive it.
I think there’s another layer, though, and that’s where I want to go while taking all the rest with me: being. I have lived much of my life in my head amassing knowledge and yes, I have also felt. Sometimes that feeling has been uncomfortable and sometimes downright painful. Now as I embark on a sabbatical journey of deeper self growth, I want to start to embody the things that I have inherited from my teachers. I want to live them into my being and become the things that I speak of.
I will keep reaching, Robert and I will be content when I cannot grasp that which my hand has brushed against. But I will appreciate it nonetheless.
I will have the courage to look under that red rock, T.S. That dark place that my shadow has accompanied me to even if it scares the hell out of me. And when I do, I will carry with me hope that faith and love also accompany me and that on the other side of the darkness is a light that shines in my own being that is so beautiful that even you can’t find the words to express it.
I will not become complacent, Plato. I will be intentional every step of the way and hold up that dream, Langston so that it doesn’t fester in the sun as you so feared. In fact, we’ll carry the dream together.
I’ll tell you what I’m going to do with this one precious life, Mary. I’m going to love fiercely and bravely like each breath was my last. I’m going to smell the fresh cut grass and notice the butterfly as she flutters away from the daffodil and feel the warmth of the sun on my face as I speak gratitude for all of it.
Rainer, I’m going to go ahead and rest in those questions and not be too quick to come to any conclusions. I’m going to learn to appreciate the pauses in between and stay curious along the way. I will wait, Pierre. I’m in no hurry, because I’m starting to see that right here and right now is a pretty good place to be.
I’ll look in every lake and pond and puddle that I can find, David. And even when I can’t see my own reflection, I’ll keep letting go of the unhealthy and the things that I don’t need because I’m going to do it right. I’m going to erase those false narratives, Meister, and I’m not going to add any more than I need because I know I already have oceans of stardust clasped in my palm.
And yes, John. Thank you. The space between us is filled with the laughter of children and burning bushes and the singing of cherubs. It’s blessed and it’s precious and it’s sacred. I’ll try not to forget that. I’ll also remember that even when I’m alone, I’m not. I’ll keep reminding myself that my soul is intertwined with those that I love and that at the core of all existence, we are all interconnected.
I will embody these truths as I continue to learn, grow, and love. I’ll keep writing and I’ll keep manifesting: both the things that can be expressed and those that cannot.
Lest I forget you, Osho: I will wear intuition as a garment of indescribable color. I’ll not become entangled in knowing what it is, but will merely appreciate that it is. I will breathe and I will be.
I can relate to whoever said, “I wonder as I wander.”These words that originated in Appalachia resound with me because I tend to do a lot of both and usually at the same time.At any given moment, my mind is awash with musings and questions and in a place like this (Roslyn Retreat Center Richmond, VA), one can get rather contemplative.
I wonder if Meister Eckhart, Therese of Liseux, Thomas Merton and the like had sudden blazes of revelation – breakthroughs that stayed with them for the duration of their lives.There are stories of ecstatic visions, but most are balanced with accounts of traveling aimlessly through the dark night of the soul – their hands outstretched in front of them to feel their way along in the shadows lest they injure themselves on a rock or tree.This seems to be where most of us find ourselves at one time or another.
My guess is that these mystics existed in a place somewhere in between these extremes, much like the place where we tend to exist.To have a constant view of the sacred would be overwhelming.It’s less about these mystics being especially chosen to receive the light as it is about their ability to wait.In the waiting and watching they developed eyes to see that which was always there.The long periods of contemplation gave them occasional glimpses of the Divine that would fade, but serve as a constant reminder that there really was something holding us together.
Most of us don’t have the luxury or the mindset to remain in a state of introspection for long periods of time.Instead, we seem to be constantly wading through troubled waters trying to get to some place that we don’t even know.
Maybe this is a blessing.Surely we don’t see it this way.But who can really bear to look upon something so beautiful for any period of time without going blind?
During our retreat today, we sang the old spiritual, Wade in the Water.As the melody washed over me and the words crossed my lips, it served as a timely reminder.It was a prompting that we don’t have to be ashamed when we feel like we are a wreck.We don’t have to be afraid just because we don’t know what’s on the other side of the river.
Come to your own river with wonder and hope.
Stand there on the muddy shore.Let the wet loamy sand rise between your toes as you sink into it.Lift your foot and take that step into the cold water as it swirls around your legs.Don’t worry, you’ll keep your balance.You won’t get swept away.
The place where you step stirs up the silt at the bottom and clouds form above your feet.Wait.Watch.What’s left when the cloud dissipates and the silt settles?Your One and Truest Self.
Nothing is born from the water unless it is troubled first.And so it is with you and with me.Amen.
In a world where being sure about everything is the way of life, embracing mystery can be incredibly difficult. Unfortunately (or fortunately), there are many aspects of our life to be gleaned in those dark places, so we shouldn’t forsake them.
It’s easy to feel that life would be so much easier if we could just know everything clearly and be able to define every occurrence accurately without having to take time for interpretation. If we could know ourselves without all of the soul-searching and contemplation, wouldn’t life be so much better? I don’t think so.
Those walks in the dark where the ambiguity is the rule and not the exception, are transformative. Barbara Brown Taylor said that “I have learned things in the dark that I could never have learned in the light, things that have saved my life over and over again, so that there is really only one logical conclusion. I need darkness as much as I need light.” Groping our way around in the darkness teaches us things about the world and ourselves that seeing them in the light never could.
During Lent, we learn to embrace the darkness so that we can appreciate the light. That faint glimmer of sunshine that pierces through the gap between the stone and the cave wall is not a reassurance that we will be saved from the darkness, but rather a reminder that the darkness is good, too. Light and dark need each other to exist.
When Thomas Merton was starting his writing career and making his early attempts at being a novelist, some of the beauty that would emerge from embracing the spiritual writing that he was best at shone through. In this excerpt, Merton is having a conversation with a couple of Gestapo officers in London through the window of a bombed out house as he writes. They ask him why he writes and he replies that it is so he can learn about the world and himself. The officers then inquire as to whether it would just be faster to see things clearly from the beginning and that writing to figure things out would lead to many volumes of wasted paper and meaningless books. Merton’s reply was:
No doubt. But if I if it were all clear at once, I would not really understand it,
either. Some things are too clear to be understood, and what you think
is your understanding of them is only a kind of charm, a kind of incantation in your mind concerning that thing. This is not understanding: it is something you remember. So much for definitions! We always have to go back and start from the beginning and make over all the definitions for ourselves again.
Even the things that can be seen clearly in the light aren’t always what they seem to be: scripture, the actions of another, our own lives, even. It’s in the overcoming of the discomfort and the dis-ease of our own being that we finally start to reach out in the dark without fearing the monster that may lie waiting beyond our fingertips. It’s in those moments when we really get to know the world as it really is.
Another Veterans Day is upon us and, as I do every year, I ask myself what it’s all about. There is a cynical side of me that says we are glorifying something that should never happen under any circumstance. The idea of exterminating human beings for the sake of being right seems appalling to me and to celebrate those who have participated in them in any way causes me to feel the mournful disdain of glorifying violence. But, after much contemplation, I can see that, as in all things, there is another side of the coin.
Of course I realize that we are celebrating valor and the courage of those who were willing to risk (and sometimes lose) their lives for a cause greater than themselves. Sure, some may have entered military service to avoid jail time, some to kill, and some to enforce their ideals. It is sometimes, however, those very ideals that perpetuate the violence in the first place. Our addiction to being right all the time can lead to the reinforcement of a false truth.
On the way to the Wild Goose Festival in Hot Springs, NC this year, I was listening to a podcast with Fr. Richard Rohr. He said that we know we are operating from the False Self, or the ego, when we are individually offended by some action or words. As I drove on, with much time to ponder, I came to the conclusion that the opposite is also true: Any time we are offended on behalf of humankind, we are operating from our True Self.
So what does this have to do with war? We have been called to defend and empower the least of these. If someone is marginalized and oppressed, it is our duty to lend our voice to stopping the oppression and even to joining a revolution against it. As we know, sometimes revolutions require force.
In his New Seeds of Contemplation, Thomas Merton calls the church to being in a constant state of revolution. He says that the church must return to tradition, which seems like an oxymoron when placing tradition and revolution next to each other in synonymous relationship. For most, tradition is the very enemy of reform as we do things “the way we have always done them.” For Merton, though, the tradition is the revolution: “[T]his tradition must always be a revolution because by its very nature it denies the values and standards to which human passion is so powerfully attached” (143).
In other words, tradition is the outward manifestation, in practice, of the church’s True Self. If individuals have a True Self and organizations are living organisms comprised of individuals, then they too must have a corporate True Self. Too many churches and organizations have not only lost sight of who they are, but likely have never cared to know.
This is no less true for entire countries who allow or even create structures that lead to systemic oppression. When it comes time to upend these systems, we hope that the revolution can be a peaceful one from the inside with the death of the individual and corporate False Selves. According to Merton, “all the others demand the extermination of somebody else” (144).
If violence is the only means of insurrection and not an internal death of False Self giving birth to what is True, then indeed
There will be violence, and power will pass from one party to another, but when the smoke clears and the bodies of the dead men are underground, the situation will be essentially the same as it was before: there will be a minority of strong men in power exploiting all the others for their own ends. There will be the same greed and cruelty and lust and ambition and avarice and hypocrisy as before (144).
It is arguable, and likely a fact that more wars have been started over religion than any other issue. Dogmatic absolute “truths” lead humans to carry their ideologies on their backs into battle with sword and gun in hand. If we can hold our own created beliefs at arm’s length where they are visible to us and see them for the “dry formula of a dogmatic definition” that they are, then perhaps we can approach our ideas with humility, grace, and a fair reflection of our True Selves. Instead of creating individual “truths” from a False Self that only leads to the extermination of human lives, let us find our oneness in the source of all being, the one in whom we find the image of who we really are.
Everything was perfect – theoretically anyway. I had finished an MBA and a Masters in Geriatrics and the world was my oyster. I had a consulting business, a care management business and was working in sales while I continued to grow my companies. But I hated it. I just absolutely could not stand going out and trying to sell machinery that I could not possibly care less about. Because of my lack of interest I completely sucked at selling. I didn’t have the drive to market my own businesses and was utterly miserable. So, I went to seminary.
This is not to say that seminary is for everyone. Ministry happens to be my vocation and passion, so it works for me. If it wasn’t, I would merely be continuing to feed into my False Self – the ego that led me to go to law school and business school in Japan. If I was a lawyer or a businessperson, surely people would approve of me and I would have the status that I needed. Of course this all only served to feed the fears of inadequacy that I was trying to quell in the first place. As the cognitive dissonance grew, so did my misery and the awareness that there was another “me” that was being ignored.
That self is the True Self. Richard Rohr defines this self as “the mask that I wore before I was born.”
In his New Seeds of Contemplation, Thomas Merton warns for himself that if he puts on the mask of another and tries to be someone that he isn’t, then, “I shall spend eternity contradicting myself by being at once something and nothing, a life that wants to live and is dead, a death that wants to be dead and cannot quite achieve its own death because it still has to exist.”
When I was four, my dad put me up on the kitchen counter in our small apartment in Rochelle, IL and told me that he was moving out. He said something along the lines of things weren’t working out with my mom and it wasn’t my nor my brother’s fault that he had to go. He failed to convince me because I did think it was my fault.
A year later, he asked me if I wanted to go to preschool or stay with him at his girlfriend’s house where he was living. I knew he would just sleep all day and get upset if I woke him for anything because he worked third shift at the Delmonte can plant. So, I decided to go to preschool. That was the last time I would see him for 12 years. He took his girlfriend’s luggage and left for Florida, Alaska, Arizona, and eventually back to his birthplace in Utah where I would meet up with him years later. I often wonder how things would have went if I would have elected to stay with him.
For much of the years to come, I would have a sense of inadequacy. An impostor syndrome coupled with the perceived need to be good enough for those around me followed me wherever I went. I had a recurring dream that I ran into my dad at a truck stop. Pumping my gas, I saw him on the other side of the pump, usually with one of my half brothers. I would tell him to wait there while I go in and pay for my gas, and invariably I would come back out to find him gone, again. I’m not sure if the likeness of the dad in my dreams was accurate or not because by then I had probably forgotten his face.
I can’t fully blame the insecurities that would follow on my dad as I was responsible for dealing with my own issues. I had to initiate the healing and for a long time, my failure to do so only resulted in me hurting others. It’s true what they say: hurt people, hurt people.
I finally realized that I had created a False Self to protect me from my fears who usually just hurt myself and others. Like Merton, I finally had an awakening, noticing that to be seen I would “wind experiences around myself and cover myself with pleasures and glory like bandages in order to make myself perceptible to myself.”
When these bandages finally come off, however, (and they always do), we see that there is no substance. There is only a hollowness temporarily filled with things that never have and never will exist. Merton says that these things are “all destined to be destroyed. And when they are gone there will be nothing left of me but my own nakedness and emptiness and hollowness, to tell me that I am my own mistake.”
While our stories are our own, we rarely own them. Instead, we see ourselves as the culmination of mistakes – our own and those of others. We spend a life time trying to cover the hollowness with things that are no more real than the void we wish to hide. Deep inside that void, however, is the real us, the True Self.
The Self that is us in God and God in us is the point at which we are all interconnected. At this point, there is redemption, there is forgiveness, and there is at-one-ment. Far beyond the sins of our fathers lies a reality that is more real than the stories we tell ourselves. It’s a point in time, space, being, and all that is. When we awaken to our True Self and decide to do the inner work required to find the real me and the real you, we not only find ourselves, but we find God. As usual, Merton said it best: “At that moment the point of our contact with [God] opens out and we pass through the center of our own nothingness and enter into infinite reality, where we awaken as our true self.”
I had a chat with a friend the other day about happiness. She asked me about the pursuit and if it really comes to any meaning. Perhaps it’s just futile and only leads us on a goose chase that leaves us feeling tired and bitter. It was a great conversation and it gave me a lot of insights as I pondered it.
I once heard an author say that all of his writing comes from a question. In other words, he doesn’t write because he thinks he’s an expert about something. Instead, he is processing out loud as he writes. That’s exactly what I am doing here. I’m wondering as a wander, so to speak.
In such a conversation, it seems that we have to start with the semantics. What is happiness? Is it really something to be “attained”? In my own definition, happiness is merely the emotional reaction to what we perceive another is doing to or for us. While I’m probably just being over-analytical, I would venture that what we are really looking for is joy or contentment. Or better yet – serenity.
If we stick with the word “happy,” I have my doubts that it is something that can be pursued and caught up with. It appears to be a futile chase toward something that is ethereal and can never fully be grasped. Rather, it would be more like Thoreau’s estimation that it is something akin to a butterfly that will come and land on our shoulder if we would just stop and smell the roses.
Regardless of the right term – happiness, joy, contentment – I find myself more and more seeing it as a state of being rather than a condition to be attained. In all of its elusiveness, we are shooting at a moving target. It is nearly impossible to hit something that is constantly changing. As I was considering this idea, it occurred to me: we are also moving. If both the target and the source are in motion, then how can we expect to ever make contact!?
What I mean is this: when we aren’t centered and mindful, how do we really even know what we want? How can we ever come to a place that we can be assured is genuine joy? It is like hoping that two atoms from opposite sides of the world will eventually make contact. It’s nearly impossible and only guaranteed to leave us worn out and hopeless.
So what would it look like if we did the inner work to truly know ourselves? How would it be to slow time and actually live in the moment with complete awareness and intentionality? Not multitasking, not running, not chasing. Instead – breathing, sitting, being.
I’m talking to myself as much as anyone, but I would be willing to bet that, if we would stop and smell the roses, we would experience a great shift. Not only would happiness not seem like an elusive ideal, but we would likely realize that, in that moment, we already have all that we need. For the first time, we will experience joy and contentment. Finally, we will have what we ask for in the old prayer: courage, wisdom, and the ultimate peace of mind: serenity.
In his later years, Carl Jung became a genuine mystic and contemplative. His theories of psychology eventually superseded the purely cognitive and reached in to the existential. In his metaphysical journal that would come to be called The Red Book, Jung explored beyond the depths of the human psyche and into the eternal self, seeking the potential of individual humans and the interconnected humanity.
What is important and meaningful to my life is that I shall live as fully as possible to fulfill the divine will within me. This task gives me so much to do that I have no time for any other. Let me point out that if we were all to live in that way we would need no armies, no police, no diplomacy, no politics, no banks. We would have a meaningful life and not what we have now—madness. What nature asks of the apple-tree is that it shall bring forth apples, and of the pear-tree that it shall bring forth pears. Nature wants me to be simply man. But a man conscious of what I am, and of what I am doing. God seeks consciousness in man.
This is the truth of the birth and the resurrection of Christ within. As more and more thinking men come to it, this is the spiritual rebirth of the world. Christ, the Logos—that is to say, the mind, the understanding, shining into the darkness. Christ was a new truth about man. Mankind has no existence. I exist, you exist. But mankind is only a word. Be what God means you to be; don’t worry about mankind which doesn’t exist, you are avoiding looking at what does exist—the self.
In his transcendental thoughts, Jung points out that each of us has a divine potential that is at the core of our being. The autonomy of the individual is merely an illusion – we are in actuality manifestations of the cosmic Christ and any individualistic tendency comes from a fissiparous human propensity. Were we to awaken to the cosmic Christ and our own “divine will within,” peace and harmony would become the norm both in society and within our own souls.
While some are obsequious in their literal interpretation of scripture, I have an occasional tendency toward brash skepticism at most, or an intentional awareness of its metaphorical and allegoric nature at the least. This is not to say that I do not “believe” in scripture, but I believe the way it has been interpreted and handed down over the years by mostly caucasian males has, in many ways, marred it’s true beauty and the divine imprint upon it.
Having said that, Paul’s statement in Philippians 4:13 that “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me” has, in the past, elicited equal doses of hope and doubt. If Christ strengthens us, then why do we sometimes feel so worn down and beat up? Why does Christ choose arbitrarily whom and when to gird and support when needed? When I look at Paul’s adulation of Christ as something that originates externally with no interaction on our part, I find cynicism bubbling up from within. However, when I consider Christ to be the logos, the divine manifestation, the source of all being that exists within all of us that calls us to a conversion into our true self, then I do not merely find myself able to nod in intellectual assent, but I am comforted in some place and at some level that I cannot describe. To know that such strength exists within to draw upon not because it’s occasionally available but because it’s the very nature of our existence creates in me that “peace that surpasses all understanding.”
The Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, spoke of the human conditioned inclination to ignore our true self and choose to make excuses rather than become who we were meant to be. Many times, we even sabotage ourself and make ourselves into victims who are somehow prevented by ill-intentioned people that prevent us from attaining our true potential. In reality, we fear what we do not understand and would rather not know who we are supposed to be, let alone live into that reality.
Perhaps I am stronger than I think. Perhaps I am even afraid of my strength, and turn it against myself, thus making myself weak. Making myself secure. Making myself guilty. Perhaps I am most afraid of the strength of God in me. Perhaps I would rather be guilty and weak in myself than strong in Him whom I cannot understand.
The only way that we can discover our true selves and experience the resurrection of Christ within is to sit with ourselves in the silent stillness and ask ourselves the powerful questions that we are afraid to answer. Who am I? What is my deepest passion? What gives me joy? If my life were ideal, what would it look like? What is preventing me from becoming who God wants me to be? What am I afraid of? Ask these questions and you will find that the answers were there all along. Live those answers and you will finally become who you were meant to be. When the path seems daunting and fear wracks your mind, just tell yourself that “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me” because indeed, it is the potential that has existed within you since before you were born. Claim it for your time for resurrection is now.
Apophatica 