Wednesday, June 8, 2011

A Year With Thomas Merton - June 8


Lost with the Lost, Desiring Lucidity

One only ceases to be absurd when, realizing that everything is absurd when seen in isolation from everything else, meaning and value are sought only in wholeness. The solitary must, therefore, return to the heart of life and oneness, losing himself, not in the massive illusion, but simply in the root reality, plunging through the center of his own nothingness, and coming out in the All which is the Voice and which is, if you like, the Love of God.

One cannot cease to be absurd by dint of metaphysics, or concentration, or meditation, or study, or knowledge: only by experiencing the fact that there is no wall between ourselves and others, in other words, by accepting the absurdity of our own life in terms of the suffering of others: no separating “my” pain, suffering, limitation, lostness, etc., from that of others. As long as a single person is lost, I am lost. To try to save myself by getting free from the mass of the damned (Augustine’s massa damnata), and becoming good by myself, is to be both damned and absurd—as well as antichrist. Christ descended into hell to show that He willed to be lost with the lost, in a certain sense emptied so that they might be filled and saved, in the realization that now their lostness was not theirs but His. Hence the way one begins to make sense out of life is taking upon oneself the lostness of everyone—and then realizing not that one has done something, or “made sense,” but that one has simply entered into the stream of realization. The rest will work out by itself, and we do not know what that might mean.

June 20, 1966, V.323-24

1 comment:

  1. Really? Am I that powerful after all this time that you feel compelled to "monitor" me on Google? Yeah, I know about that. Buzz off. I have moved on and I suggest you do the same and--oh--maybe you could work on something that would actually do you some good. Like making her happiness your #1 priority, instead of judging me in my very understandable grief. We have had NO CONTACT OF ANY KIND so again, buzz off and let me grieve in my own fashion. The wound is deep and probably permanent, but I have held up my end of the bargain for well over a year. If you (or she) come here, you have only yourself to blame for what you see.

    And for those of you reading this without a clue as to its meaning, move along, there's nothing to see here.

    ReplyDelete