Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism - 15

Text, p. 75	Comment	Notes
Departing from the usual convention, they are hard—sometimes impossible—to understand.	Right now, is it enough to trust and hold my figurative hands in front of me and feel my way, with or without a map? After all, running has progressed that way. For the longest time, I was sure I would never get past running only a few minutes, and walking the rest. This morning I ran up a full block of 10% grade hill and, while winded at the top, I kept going to the end of the block. WE HUMANS HATE UNCERTAINTY. WE WANT CLARITY. WE WANT TO KNOW THAT WHAT WE HOLD DEAR WILL NOT CHANGE AND WILL ALWAYS BE THERE. WE GO A BIT CRAZY WHEN THAT DOESN’T HAPPEN. We yell “Heretic!” We yell “Queer!” We yell, “Ick!” We say no. Anything to get out of being in relationship with The Eternal I Am that I Am. Mystics try to express that, despite the scariness, we must be in relationship with this Dicey Deus. Genesis 32.30-32 So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, ‘For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved.’ It’s the only way my life is preserved.
As a result, the orthodox have been forced to regard their makers as madmen or heretics: when they were really only practical men struggling to disclose great matters by imperfect means.
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Without prejudice to individual beliefs, and without offering an opinion as to the exclusive truth of any one religious system or revelation—for here we are concerned neither with controversy nor with apologetics—we are bound to allow as a historical fact that mysticism, so far, has found its best map in Christianity.
Christian philosophy, especially that Neoplatonic theology which, taking up and harmonizing all that was best in the spiritual intuitions of Greece, India, and Egypt, was developed by the great doctors of the early and mediaeval Church, supports and elucidates the revelations of the individual mystic as no other system of thought has been able to do.	And now I will await her persuasive argument as to this. I’ve always intuited this, or taken it on faith, but did not feel equal to offering an argument that would persuade others to this conclusion.	How in Heaven’s name does one absorb the treasures of this book without having to tediously work through sentence by sentence? Yet, if I don’t, I will miss important gems. I think I do work through it sentence by sentence, and resign myself to being at this for a long time.
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We owe to the great fathers of the first five centuries—to Clement of Alexandria and Irenaeus, Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine; above all to Dionysius the Areopagite, the great Christian contemporary of Proclus—the preservation of that mighty system of scaffolding which enabled the Catholic mystics to build up the towers and bulwarks of the City of God.	These names are famililar to me, as is some of the substance of their work, but what does it mean in any given moment of Christian response to life’s details? Not everyone is able to or desirous of studying these doctors of the Church. Even those who are interested, do they say to themselves, “Should I do this? What would Irenaeus say?” To me, mysticism is a way to cut through the slog of studying the doctors of the Church, and have that in-Person encounter of the Jacob kind.

A Year With Thomas Merton - March 24

A Moment of Clarity

A flash of sanity: the momentary realization that there is no need to come to certain conclusions about persons, events, conflicts, trends, even trends toward evil and disaster, as if from day to day, and even from moment to moment, I had to know and declare (at least to myself) that this is so and so, this is good, this is bad. We are heading for a "new era" or we are heading for destruction. What do such judgments mean? Little or nothing. Things are as they are in an immense whole of which I am a part and which I cannot pretend to grasp. To say I grasp it is immediately to put myself in a false position, as if I were "outside" it. Whereas to be "in" it is to seek truth in my own life and action, moving where movement is possible and keeping still when movement is unnecessary, realizing that things will continue to define themselves and that the judgments and mercies of God will clarify themselves and will be more clear to me if I am silent and attentive, obedient to His will, rather than constantly formulating statements in this age which is smothered in language, in meaningless and inconclusive debate in which, in the last analysis, nobody listens to anything except what agrees with his own prejudices.

March 2, 1966, VI.366

A Year With Thomas Merton - September 10

Clarity and Redemption

How much I need clarity. I live in great darkness and weakness, occasionally getting some smell of the fresh air where light is outside my cellar. The center of the problem: my own pride, the pride of others, the pride of my monastery. I enter into dialogue with the pride of others, and it is my own pride that speaks. Hence I have to see their pride and not my own. Fury after Prime, or brief spasm of it, resentment, clearly seen. And the realization that the whole thing can someday break off like a cliff and fall into the sea, if I don't learn to not identify myself with my own angry, righteous and spiteful image. Moving words of Karl Barth preached on Good Friday, 1948, in Hungary at Debrecen, the great Calvinist center: "For in His meekness, which we remember today, He achieved the mightiest of all deeds ever fulfilled on earth. In His own person He restored and re-established the violated law of God and the shattered law of man. In this meekness the grace of God appeared in His person, and the obedient man, at peace with God and in whom God has pleasure, was revealed. In this meekness of His, Jesus Christ, nailed to the cross as a criminal, created order in the realm of creation, the order in which man can live eternally as the redeemed, converted child of God" (Against the Stream). September 18 and 23, 1960, IV.50-51

A Year With Thomas Merton - September 2

A Compassionate Transparency

And yet it seems to be that writing, far from being an obstacle to spiritual perfection in my own life, has become one of the conditions on which my perfection will depend. If I am to be a saint--and there is nothing else that I can think of desiring to be--it seems that I must get there by writing books in a Trappist monastery. If I am to be a saint, I have not only to be a monk, which is what all monks must do to become saints, but I must also put down on paper what I have become. It may sound simple, but it is not an easy vocation.

To be as good a monk as I can be, and to remain myself, and to write about it: to put myself down on paper, in such a situation, with the most complete simplicity and integrity, masking nothing, confusing no issue: this is very hard because I am all mixed up in illusions and attachments. These, too, will have to be put down. But without exaggeration, repetition, useless emphasis. To be frank without being boring: it is a kind of crucifixion. Not a very dramatic or painful one. But it requires much honesty that is beyond my nature. It must come somehow from the Holy Spirit.

A complete and holy transparency: living, praying and writing in the light of the Holy Spirit, losing myself entirely by becoming public property just as Jesus is public property in the Mass. Perhaps this is an important aspect of my priesthood--my living of my Mass: to become as plain as a Host in the hands of everybody. Perhaps it is this, after all, that is to be my way to solitude. One of the strangest ways so far devised, but it is the way of the Word of God.

September 1, 1949, I.365-66