Radical Prayer
Just a little more than a year before his accidental death in Thailand in 1968, Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, penned a letter on the "Contemplative Life". A short letter, yet one which was filled with the humble and hard-earned insights of a monk living in a mix of community life and mystic solitude... here are a few "pregnant" selections from that letter:
"Can I tell you that I have found answers to the questions that torment the man of our time? I do not know if I have found answers. When I first became a monk, yes, I was more sure of 'answers'. But as I grow old in the monastic life and advance further into solitude, I become aware that I have only begun to seek the questions...
"I have been summoned to explore a desert area of man's heart in which explanations no longer suffice...
"If my word means anything to you, I can say to you that I have experienced the cross to mean mercy and not cruelty, truth and not deception; that the news of the truth and love of Jesus is indeed the true good news, but in our time it speaks out in strange places...
"If we once began to recognize, humbly but truly, the real value of our own self, we would see that this value was the sign of God in our being, the signature of God upon our being. Fortunately, the love of our fellow man is given us as the way of realizing this. For the love of our brother, our sister, our beloved, our wife, our child, is there to see with the clarity of God Himself that we are good. It is the love of my lover, my brother or my child that sees God in me, makes God credible to myself in me. And it is my love for my lover, my child, my brother, that enables me to show God to him or her in himself or herself. Love is the epiphany of God in our poverty...
"There is in our hearts and in the very ground of our being a natural certainty that says that insofar as we exist we are penetrated through and through with the sense and reality of God even though we may be utterly unable to believe or experience this in philosophic or even in religious terms...
"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 sharing 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 explanations because it is too close to be explained: it is the intimate union in the depths of your own heart, of God's spirit and your own secret inmost self, so that you and He are in all truth One Spirit."
-- Yours in Christ Jesus,
br. M. Louis
(Thomas Merton)
Yeshua, nursing at the breast of Mother Mary, is perhaps the most delightful and iconic Christian image of contemplative prayer. Adding to that image, perhaps the color black, wildly thrusts open that iconic window into vistas of imagination revealing essential aspects of Paradise that otherwise might be minimized or overlooked. The contemplation of paradise is the will to love beyond expected form and definition: and enter the abandonment of complete, universal, reconciliation: even the ultimate reconciliation of opposites...
The perfect unity of the unveiled breast, and the poverty, need, and powerlessness of a child, met by an embrace, food, security, comfort, and mutual adoration is the contemplative union of Paradise... Life -- every aspect of life -- is about this search or quest for Paradise: for the meeting of our human condition of poverty and powerlessness with the "Welcome Home" of Love embracing us with food, comfort, security, and adoration: from the moment we are born and our sacred first gulp of air, we are always all about "going home"... Understanding, recognizing, and honoring all of our "goings home" is genuine religion, culture, politics, and economics: that which I hunger for (food, comfort, security, and the embrace of adoration) is also the very same need of every other human being, and my access to "home" is contingent upon everyone else being able to "go home" as well...
Home is only recognizable by and in the heart... experientially, when centered in all the affections of the heart, we find the divine mutuality of both adoration and justice... a mutuality embracing both the Creator and the created; the Divine Consciousness and the ever-rising, evolving, human consciousness in the Mystery of One Love...
Some say that Yeshua never really existed, that the story of the Poet of Nazareth is a gnostic initiation myth that, over time, came to be seen as "true" by Christian literalists (but who themselves had never experienced initiation into the Gnostic Mysteries): and whose literalist opinions eventually formed Catholicism and Christianity... but even if the story of Yeshua were not true, someone would have needed to write it again and again because the wild seeds of our human divinity absolutely requires the translation of matter into consciousness, the mundane into the sacred, and the sacred into the always and everywhere "You are worthy of Love... Welcome Home!" ... And nowhere is the story of our human worth more clearly expressed than in Yeshua, Poet of the Broken Heart...
The rEvolutionary gifts of Yeshua are the "fruits of the Spirit" -- or human beings living as "pages of his poems"... and co-creating beauty, justice, equality, solidarity, and peace within every social institution and guiding every human relationship... extending further and further into a spirituality of reverence for the interbeing of all life and this precious blue Planet... This is the Christ Consciousness, personalized in Yeshua, penetrating through all consciousness and matter -- into the inter-play of Light and every Particle of Possibility...
All of creation is penetrated through and through with the Cosmic -- Quantum -- Consciousness of Only One / One Love... there is no part, not even the 'least' particle of possibility, not penetrated by this Consciousness... matter and life endlessly strive "upward" into greater and greater complexity / consciousness, relationship / reverence... Religion is whatever -- and all -- that contributes to this "rising"... There are no boundaries to genuine religion, as there are no boundaries to Paradise: save that of total, complete, absolute Love-without-Limits...
There are only horizons in the contemplation of Paradise: each view extending further into the nature of Reality: an organic whole serving as the vehicle of Consciousness: the gifting of Love, without limits, to Love Itseslf... As "observers" of this Reality, we co-create with every breath, with every thought, with every movement of our hearts into action... Mysticism is this essential "quantum awareness" that observer and observed are always "Only One"... (which is also true for the Divine -- Quantum -- Consciousness)...
Contemplative practice is the cultivation of an attitude and intention of unity: "Only One"... Every human being exists within the paradox of body, soul, and spirit rising into a transfigured Unity... exemplified by Yeshua rising from the "death" of separation into the All-in-All of the Christ Consciousness... a journey of purpose and destiny for every other human being: the resurrection of the secret divine into the obvious fullness of Paradise...
Contemplative practice is each humble breath, taken in and given away, as if suckling at the Divine Mother's breast... contemplative practice is the radical acceptance of this sacred responsibility: "We are all responsible for one another. We will enter Paradise together as One -- or not enter at all". Contemplative practice is the absolute trust that: as the Mother suckles her babe, so she also lets go and seems to push away: how else are we going to grow, learn to walk, and discover all the other things we need to learn that we might come fully alive and awaken into all of our possibilities? Contemplative practice is the sure knowing that the blanket of the Mother's Love always surrounds us... and that we, too, become the "Mothers of God" as we extend that Blanket of Love to cover others -- everyone in any kind of need -- with food, comfort, security, and the embrace of "Welcome Home"... This is the Radical Grace of the Christ Event happening on this very day, everywhere, on this precious blue Planet! The only remaining question is whether or not, by our lives, economics, politics, and religions, we are ourselves giving birth to Yeshua again, in this, our time...
"Can I tell you that I have found answers to the questions that torment the man of our time? I do not know if I have found answers. When I first became a monk, yes, I was more sure of 'answers'. But as I grow old in the monastic life and advance further into solitude, I become aware that I have only begun to seek the questions...
"I have been summoned to explore a desert area of man's heart in which explanations no longer suffice...
"If my word means anything to you, I can say to you that I have experienced the cross to mean mercy and not cruelty, truth and not deception; that the news of the truth and love of Jesus is indeed the true good news, but in our time it speaks out in strange places...
"If we once began to recognize, humbly but truly, the real value of our own self, we would see that this value was the sign of God in our being, the signature of God upon our being. Fortunately, the love of our fellow man is given us as the way of realizing this. For the love of our brother, our sister, our beloved, our wife, our child, is there to see with the clarity of God Himself that we are good. It is the love of my lover, my brother or my child that sees God in me, makes God credible to myself in me. And it is my love for my lover, my child, my brother, that enables me to show God to him or her in himself or herself. Love is the epiphany of God in our poverty...
"There is in our hearts and in the very ground of our being a natural certainty that says that insofar as we exist we are penetrated through and through with the sense and reality of God even though we may be utterly unable to believe or experience this in philosophic or even in religious terms...
"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 sharing 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 explanations because it is too close to be explained: it is the intimate union in the depths of your own heart, of God's spirit and your own secret inmost self, so that you and He are in all truth One Spirit."
-- Yours in Christ Jesus,
br. M. Louis
(Thomas Merton)
Yeshua, nursing at the breast of Mother Mary, is perhaps the most delightful and iconic Christian image of contemplative prayer. Adding to that image, perhaps the color black, wildly thrusts open that iconic window into vistas of imagination revealing essential aspects of Paradise that otherwise might be minimized or overlooked. The contemplation of paradise is the will to love beyond expected form and definition: and enter the abandonment of complete, universal, reconciliation: even the ultimate reconciliation of opposites...
The perfect unity of the unveiled breast, and the poverty, need, and powerlessness of a child, met by an embrace, food, security, comfort, and mutual adoration is the contemplative union of Paradise... Life -- every aspect of life -- is about this search or quest for Paradise: for the meeting of our human condition of poverty and powerlessness with the "Welcome Home" of Love embracing us with food, comfort, security, and adoration: from the moment we are born and our sacred first gulp of air, we are always all about "going home"... Understanding, recognizing, and honoring all of our "goings home" is genuine religion, culture, politics, and economics: that which I hunger for (food, comfort, security, and the embrace of adoration) is also the very same need of every other human being, and my access to "home" is contingent upon everyone else being able to "go home" as well...
Home is only recognizable by and in the heart... experientially, when centered in all the affections of the heart, we find the divine mutuality of both adoration and justice... a mutuality embracing both the Creator and the created; the Divine Consciousness and the ever-rising, evolving, human consciousness in the Mystery of One Love...
Some say that Yeshua never really existed, that the story of the Poet of Nazareth is a gnostic initiation myth that, over time, came to be seen as "true" by Christian literalists (but who themselves had never experienced initiation into the Gnostic Mysteries): and whose literalist opinions eventually formed Catholicism and Christianity... but even if the story of Yeshua were not true, someone would have needed to write it again and again because the wild seeds of our human divinity absolutely requires the translation of matter into consciousness, the mundane into the sacred, and the sacred into the always and everywhere "You are worthy of Love... Welcome Home!" ... And nowhere is the story of our human worth more clearly expressed than in Yeshua, Poet of the Broken Heart...
The rEvolutionary gifts of Yeshua are the "fruits of the Spirit" -- or human beings living as "pages of his poems"... and co-creating beauty, justice, equality, solidarity, and peace within every social institution and guiding every human relationship... extending further and further into a spirituality of reverence for the interbeing of all life and this precious blue Planet... This is the Christ Consciousness, personalized in Yeshua, penetrating through all consciousness and matter -- into the inter-play of Light and every Particle of Possibility...
All of creation is penetrated through and through with the Cosmic -- Quantum -- Consciousness of Only One / One Love... there is no part, not even the 'least' particle of possibility, not penetrated by this Consciousness... matter and life endlessly strive "upward" into greater and greater complexity / consciousness, relationship / reverence... Religion is whatever -- and all -- that contributes to this "rising"... There are no boundaries to genuine religion, as there are no boundaries to Paradise: save that of total, complete, absolute Love-without-Limits...
There are only horizons in the contemplation of Paradise: each view extending further into the nature of Reality: an organic whole serving as the vehicle of Consciousness: the gifting of Love, without limits, to Love Itseslf... As "observers" of this Reality, we co-create with every breath, with every thought, with every movement of our hearts into action... Mysticism is this essential "quantum awareness" that observer and observed are always "Only One"... (which is also true for the Divine -- Quantum -- Consciousness)...
Contemplative practice is the cultivation of an attitude and intention of unity: "Only One"... Every human being exists within the paradox of body, soul, and spirit rising into a transfigured Unity... exemplified by Yeshua rising from the "death" of separation into the All-in-All of the Christ Consciousness... a journey of purpose and destiny for every other human being: the resurrection of the secret divine into the obvious fullness of Paradise...
Contemplative practice is each humble breath, taken in and given away, as if suckling at the Divine Mother's breast... contemplative practice is the radical acceptance of this sacred responsibility: "We are all responsible for one another. We will enter Paradise together as One -- or not enter at all". Contemplative practice is the absolute trust that: as the Mother suckles her babe, so she also lets go and seems to push away: how else are we going to grow, learn to walk, and discover all the other things we need to learn that we might come fully alive and awaken into all of our possibilities? Contemplative practice is the sure knowing that the blanket of the Mother's Love always surrounds us... and that we, too, become the "Mothers of God" as we extend that Blanket of Love to cover others -- everyone in any kind of need -- with food, comfort, security, and the embrace of "Welcome Home"... This is the Radical Grace of the Christ Event happening on this very day, everywhere, on this precious blue Planet! The only remaining question is whether or not, by our lives, economics, politics, and religions, we are ourselves giving birth to Yeshua again, in this, our time...