frontiers of language

But before we come to that which is unspeakable and unthinkable, 

the spirit hovers on the frontiers of language, 

wondering whether or not to stay on its own side of the border, 

in order to have something to bring back to other men. 

This is the test of those who wish to cross the frontier. 

If they are not ready to leave their own ideas 

and their own words behind them, 

they cannot travel further. 

~ Thomas Merton

from No Man is an Island

prayer of the heart

In meditation we do not seek to know about God as though he were an object like other objects which submit to our scrutiny and can be expressed in clear scientific ideas. We seek to know God himself, beyond the level of all the objects which he has made and which confront us as “things” isolated from one another, “defined,” “delimited,” with clear boundaries. The infinite God has no boundaries and our minds cannot set limits to him or to his love. His presence is then “grasped” in the general awareness of loving faith; it is “realized” without being scientifically and precisely known, as we know a specimen under a microscope. His presence cannot be verified as we would verify a laboratory experiment. Yet it can be spiritually realized as long as we do not insist on verifying it. As soon as we try to verify the spiritual presence as an object of exact knowledge, God eludes us.

In a word, God is invisibly present to the ground of our being: our belief and love attain to him, but he remains hidden from the arrogant gaze of our investigating mind which seeks to capture him and secure permanent possession of him in an act of knowledge that gives power over him. It is in fact absurd and impossible to try to grasp God as an object which can be seized and comprehended by our minds.

The knowledge of which we are capable is simply knowledge about him. It points to him in analogies which we must transcend in order to reach him. But we must transcend ourselves as well as our analogies, and in seeking to know him we must forget the familiar subject-object relationship which characterizes our ordinary acts of knowing. Instead, we know him insofar as we become aware of ourselves as known through and through by him. We “possess” him in proportion as we realize ourselves to be possessed by him in the inmost depths of our being. Meditation or “prayer of the heart” is the active effort we make to keep our hearts open so that we may be enlightened by him and filled with this realization of our true relationship to him. Therefore the classic form of “meditation” is repetitive invocation of the name of Jesus in the heart emptied of images and cares.

Hence the aim of meditation in the context of Christian faith, is not to arrive at an objective and apparently “scientific” knowledge about God, but to come to know him through the realization that our very being is penetrated with his knowledge and love for us.

~ Thomas Merton

from On Meditation

sketch by the author

too close to be explained

The contemplative life has nothing to tell you except to reassure you
and say that if you dare to penetrate your own silence
and dare to advance without fear into the solitude of your own heart
and risk the share of that solitude
with the lonely other who seeks God through you and with you,
then you will truly recover the light and the capacity to understand
what is beyond words and beyond explanations
because it is too close to be explained:
it is the intimate union in the depths of your heart,
of God’s spirit and your own innermost self,
so that you and He are in truth One Spirit.




~ Thomas Merton
from The Hidden Ground of Love: Letters 

 art by Jenny Meechan

sky inside you

It is a strange awakening to find the sky inside you
and beneath you
and above you
and all around you
so that your spirit is one with the sky,
and all is positive night.

~ Thomas Merton

from  Sign of Jonas

unnameable

.

There is no where in you a paradise that is no place and there

You do not enter except without a story.

To enter there is to become unnameable.

Whoever is nowhere is nobody, and therefore cannot exist except as unborn:

No disguise will avail him anything

Such a one is neither lost nor found.

But he who has an address is lost.

They fall, they fall into apartments and are securely established!

They find themselves in streets. They are licensed

To proceed from place to place

They now know their own names

They can name several friends and know

Their own telephones must some time ring.

If all telephones ring at once, if all names are shouted at once and all cars crash at one crossing:

If all cities explode and fly away in dust

Yet identities refuse to be lost. There is a name and a number for everyone.

There is a definite place for bodies, there are pigeon holes for ashes:

Such security can business buy!

Who would dare to go nameless in so secure a universe?

Yet, to tell the truth, only the nameless are at home in it.

They bear with them in the center of nowhere the unborn flower of nothing:

This is the paradise tree. It must remain unseen until words end and arguments are silent.

~ Thomas Merton

from The Selected Poems of Thomas Merton

.

to breathe nothing but silence

.

Minds which are separated pretend to blend in one another's language.

The marriage of souls in concepts is mostly an illusion.

Thoughts which travel outward bring back reports from You from outward things, but a dialogue with You, uttered through the world, always ends by being a dialogue with my own reflection in the stream of time.  With You there is no dialogue, unless You choose a mountain, circle it with cloud and print Your words in fire upon the mind of Moses.

What was delivered to Moses on tablets of stone, as the fruit of lighting and thunder, 

is now more thoroughly born in our souls 

as quietly as the breath of our own being.

from Dialogues with Silence

To deliver oneself up, to hand oneself over, entrust oneself completely to the silence of a wide landscape of woods and hills, or sea, or desert; to sit still while the sun comes up over the land and fills its silences with light.  To pray and work in the morning and to labor in meditation in the evening when night falls upon that land and when the silence fills itself with darkness and with stars.  This is a true and special vocation.  There are few who are willing to belong completely to such silence, to let it soak into their bones, to breathe nothing but silence, to feed on silence, and to turn the very substance of their life into a living and vigilant silence.

Thomas Merton

from Thoughts in Solitude

sketch by the author

.

the smoke of ideas

The full beauty of the mountain is not seen until 

you consent to the impossible paradox:

 it is... 

and is not.... 

When nothing more needs to be said,

 the smoke of ideas clears, 

the mountain is seen.

 ~ Thomas Merton
with thanks to louie,louie

the empty boat

He who rules men lives in confusion;

He who is ruled by men lives in sorrow.

Yao therefore desired

Neither to influence others

Nor be influenced by them.

The way to get clear of confusion

And free of sorrow

Is to live with Tao

In the land of the great Void.

If a man is crossing a river

And an empty boat collides with his own skiff,

Even though he be a bad-tempered man

He will not become very angry.

But if he sees a man in the boat,

He will shout at him to steer clear.

If the shout is not heard, he will shout again,

And yet again, and begin cursing.

And all because there is somebody in the boat.

Yet if the boat were empty,

He would not be shouting, and not angry.

If you can empty your own boat 

Crossing the river of the world,

No one will oppose you,

No one will seek to harm you.

The straight tree is the first to be cut down,

The spring of clear water is the first to be drained dry.

If you wish to improve your wisdom

And shame the ignorant,

To cultivate your character

And outshine others;

A light will shine around you

As if you had swallowed the sun and the moon:

You will not avoid calamity.

A wise man has said:

"He who is content with himself

Has done a worthless work.

Achievement is the beginning of failure.

Fame is the beginning of disgrace."

Who can free himself from achievement

And from fame, descend and be lost

Amid the masses of men?

He will flow like Tao, unseen,

He will go about like Life itself

With no name and no home.

Simple is he, without distinction.

To all appearances he is a fool.

His steps leave no trace.  He has no power.

He achieves nothing, has no reputation.

Since he judges no one

No one judges him.

Such is the perfect man:

His boat is empty.

~ Chuang Tzu

translation by Thomas Merton
from The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton

art by Nancy Poucher

To deliver oneself up,
to hand oneself over,
entrust oneself completely to the silence
of a wide landscape of woods and hills,
or sea and desert; to sit still while
the sun comes up over the land
and fills its silences with light.

...few are willing to belong completely
to such silence, to let it soak into their bones,
to breathe nothing but silence, to feed
on silence, and to turn the very substance of their life
into a living and vigilant silence.



~ Thomas Merton
from Thoughts in Solitude

humility

In humility is the greatest freedom. 

 

As long as you have to defend the imaginary self

 that you think is important, you lose your peace of heart.

 

As soon as you compare that shadow with the shadows of other people,

 you lose all joy, because you have begun to trade in unrealities and

 there is no joy in things that do not exist.

~Thomas Merton

 with thanks to louie, louie

 

content to be lost

Desert and void. The uncreated is waste and emptiness to the creature. Not even sand. Not even stone. Not even darkness and night. A burning wilderness would at least be "something." It burns and is wild. But the Uncreated is no something. Waste. Emptiness. Total poverty of the Creator: yet from this poverty springs everything. The waste is inexhaustible. Infinite Zero. Everything wants to return to it and cannot. For who can return "nowhere?" But for each of us there is a point of nowhereness in the middle of movement, a point of nothingness in the midst of being: the incomparable point, not to be discovered by insight. If you seek it you do not find it. If you stop seeking, it is there. But you must not turn to it. Once you become aware of yourself as seeker, you are lost. But if you are content to be lost you will be found without knowing it, precisely because you are lost, for you are, at last, nowhere.

...

 The ALL is nothing, for if it were to be a single thing separated from all other things, it would not be ALL. This precisely is the liberty I have always sought: the freedom of being subject to nothing and therefore to live in All, through ALL, by Him who is ALL.  In Christian terms, this is to live "in Christ," for the Spirit is like the wind, blowing where He pleases, and He is the Spirit of Truth.  The "Truth shall make you free."

But if the truth is to make me free, I must also let go my hold upon myself, and not retain the semblance of a self which is an object of a "thing." I, too, must be no-thing. And when I'm no-thing I am in the ALL, and Christ lives in me.




~ Thomas Merton
from Merton's Palace of Nowhere by James Finley
sketch by the author

the inner ground

The way to find the real "world" is not merely to measure 

and observe what is outside us, but to discover our own inner ground.  

For that is where the world is, first of all: in my deepest self... 

This "ground," this "world" where I am mysteriously present 

at once to my own self and to freedoms of all other men,

 is not a visible, objective and determined structure 

with fixed laws and demands.  

It is a living and self-creating mystery 

of which I am myself a part, 

to which I am myself my own unique door.

~Thomas Merton

from Merton's Palace of Nowhere 
 by
James Finley

understanding fails

If one reaches the point where understanding fails, this is not a tragedy: it is simply a reminder to stop thinking and start looking.  Perhaps there is nothing to figure out after all: perhaps we only need to wake up.

A monk said: "I have been with you (Master), for a long time, and yet I am unable to understand your way.  How is this?"

The Master said: "Where you do not understand, there is the point for your understanding."

In the first two chapter of the first Epistle to the Corinthians, St. Paul distinguishes between two kinds of wisdom: one which consists in the knowledge of words and statements, a rational, dialectical wisdom, and another which is at once a matter of paradox and of experience, and goes beyond the reach of reason.  To attain to this spiritual wisdom, one must first be liberated from servile dependence on the "wisdom, of speech."

St. Paul compares this knowledge of God, in the Spirit, to the subjective knowledge that a man has of himself.  Just as no one can know my inner self except my own "spirit," so no one can know God except God's Spirit; yet this Holy Spirit is given to us, in such a way that God know Himself in us, and this experience is utterly real, though it cannot be communicated in terms understandable to those who do not share it.  Consequently, St. Paul concludes, "we have the mind of Christ."

~ Thomas Merton

excerpts from Zen and the Birds of Appetite

art by Van Gogh

.

an older unity

And the deepest level of communication 

is not communication, 

but communion. It is wordless. 

It is beyond words, 

and it is beyond speech, 

and it is beyond 

concept. 

Not that we discover a new unity. 

We discover an older unity. 

My dear brothers, we are already one. 

But we imagine that we are not. 

And what we have to recover is our original unity. 

What we have to be is what we are.

~ Thomas Merton

from his Asian journal
art by Van Gogh

 

no such thing

contemplation is not trance or ecstasy
not emotional fire and sweetness that come with religious exaltation
not enthusiasm, not the sense of being "seized" by an elemental force
and swept into liberation by mystical frenzy.
contemplation is no pain-killer.

In the end the contemplative suffers the anguish of realizing
that he no longer knows what God is;
this is a great gain,
because "God is not a what,"
not a "thing."

There is "no such thing" as God
because God is neither a "what" or a "thing"
but a pure "Who,"
the "Thou" before whom our inmost "I" springs
into awareness.

~ Thomas Merton
from New Seed of Contemplation

sketch by the author

outside ourselves

When we live superficially … we are always outside ourselves, never quite ‘with’ ourselves, always divided and pulled in many directions … we find ourselves doing many things that we do not really want to do, saying things we do not really mean, needing things we do not really need, exhausting ourselves for what we secretly realize to be worthless and without meaning in our lives.



~ Thomas Merton
from Love and Living
art by Picasso
with thanks to louie, louie

dispair and humility

Despair is the absolute extreme of self-love ... It is reached when a man deliberately turns his back on all help from anyone else in order to taste the rotten luxury of knowing himself to be lost. In every man there is hidden some root of despair because in every man there is pride that vegetates and springs weeds and rank flowers of self-pity as soon as our own resources fail us. . . . But a man who is truly humble cannot despair, because in the humble man there is no longer any such thing as self-pity.

Humility, therefore, is absolutely necessary if man is to avoid acting like a baby all his life. To grow up means, in fact, to become humble, to throw away the illusion that I am at the center of everything and that other people only exist to provide me with comfort and pleasure…





~ Thomas Merton
from Seeds of Contemplation
with thanks to louie, louie
art by van gogh

epiphany

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race ... there is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun. 

I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God's eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all of the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed...

~ Thomas Merton

from Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

.

to heal

Sakyamuni (Buddha) himself refused to answer speculative questions, 

and he would not permit abstract philosophical discussion.  

His doctrine was not a doctrine but a way of being in the world.  

His religion was not a set of beliefs and convictions or of rites and sacraments,

 but an opening to love.  

His philosophy was not a world view but a significant silence,

 in which the fracture implied by conceptual knowledge 

was allowed to heal and reality appeared again in its mysterious

 "suchness."

~ Thomas Merton

from Zen and the Birds of Appetite

 

vocation to solitude

 To deliver oneself up, to hand oneself over, entrust oneself completely to the silence of a wide landscape of woods and hills, or sea, or desert; to sit still while the sun comes up over that land and fills its silences with light. To pray and work in the morning and to labor and rest in the afternoon, and to sit still again in meditation in the evening when night falls up on that land and when the silence fills itself with darkness and with stars… to belong completely to such silence, to let it soak into the bones, to breathe nothing but silence, to feed on silence, and to turn the very substance of life into a living and vigilant silence.

~ Thomas Merton 

from Thoughts in Solitude
  art by Odilon Redon, " Silence"

with thanks to Parabola

 

For Martin Luther King

On hearing if Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination Thomas Merton wrote this poem:
April 4 1968 

On a rainy night
On a rainy night in April
When everybody ---
Said the minister

On a balcony
Of a hotel in Tennessee
"We come at once
Upstairs

On a night
On a rainy night in April
When the shot was fired
Said the minister

"I've come at once upstairs
and found him lying
On the balcony ... after... the tornado...he came at once upstairs

On a --- ---
he was our hope
and we found a tornado
said the minister.

And a well dreamed white ---
said the minister
Propped a telescopic storm

and he never
(the well-deemed minister of death)
ran
ran away

And on the balcony
Said the minister
found
even lovely dying.... after... the tornado

... after the tornado

... after... the tornado
... after... the tornado

~ Thomas Merton

with thanks to louie,louie

Merton's letter to Coretta Scott King