Evelyn Underhill - Mysticism 30

pp. 139-146

WORDS/PHRASES: DETACHMENT, HOLY INDIFFERENCE, POVERTY-CHASTITY-OBEDIENCE, A SCRAP OF THE COSMOS

"As  little as the bright eye can endure aught foreign in it, so little can the pure soul bear anything in it, any stain on it, that comes between it and God.  To it all creatures are pure to enjoy; for it enjoyeth all creatures in God, and God in all creatures."  --Eckhart, quoted in Mysticism.

"Since spiritual no less than physical existence, as we know it, is an endless Becoming, it too has no end."


So, it is not things that are bad, but one's attachment to them.  All sin is idolatry of some sort, i.e., treating things--or, in older parlance, creatures--as God.

p. 143 - "Poverty, then, prepares man's spirit for that union with God to which it aspires."
p. 145 - "...the paramount importance to the soul of an undistracted vision of reality."
     - "The true rule of poverty consists in giving up those things which enchain the spirit..."

isaiah 40:31

but those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength,
   they shall mount up with wings like eagles,
they shall run and not be weary,
   they shall walk and not faint.

 

A Year With Thomas Merton - April 1

Love Flowers When It Is Obedient

Dawn is beginning (5:30) on a mild spring morning. Holy Week is about to begin and I was never more conscious of its solemnity and its importance. I am a Christian, and a member of a Christian community. I and my brothers are to put aside everything else and recognize that we belong not to ourselves but to God in Christ. That we have vowed obedience, which is intended to unite us to Christ "obedient unto death--even the death of the Cross." That without our listening and attention and submission, in total self-renunciation and love for the Father's will, in union with Christ, our life is false and without meaning. But in so far as we desire, with Christ, that the Father's will may be done in us, as it is in heaven and in Christ, then even the smallest and most ordinary things are made holy and great. And then in all things the love of God opens and flowers, and our lives are transformed. This transformation is a manifestation and advent of God in the world.

One of the fruits of a solitary life is a sense of the absolute importance of obeying God--a sense of the need to obey and to seek His will, to choose freely to see and accept what comes from Him, not as a last resort, but as one's "daily super-substantial bread." Liberation from automatic obedience into the seriousness and gravity of a free choice to submit. But it is not easy to see always where and how!

A Year With Thomas Merton - December 24

Raised from the Dead

Issac of Stella's Easter sermon--deep, deep intuition of faith as a resurrection because it is an act of obedience to God considered as supreme life. What matters is the act of submission to infinite life, to the authority of Creative and Redemptive Life, the Living God. Faith is this submission. The interior surrender of faith cannot have its full meaning except as an act of obedience, i.e., self-commitment in submission to God's truth in its power to give life, and to command one to live.

Hence Faith is not simply an act of choice, an option for a certain solution to the problem of existence, etc. It is a birth to a higher life, by obedience to the Giver of life, obedience to the source of life.

To believe is to consent to a creative command that raises us from the dead.

December 5, 1960, IV.72

A Year With Thomas Merton - October 30

Prayer Is All I Have Left

If everything centers on my obligation to respond to God's call in solitude, this does not mean simply putting everything out of my mind and living as if only God and I existed. This is impossible anyway. It means rather learning from what contacts and conflicts I still have how deep a solitude is required of me. This means now the difficult realization that I have relied too much on the support and approval of others--and yet I do need others. I must now painfully rectify this. That is to say that there is a sense in which some of God's answers must come to me from others, even from those with whom I disagree, even from those who do not understand my way of life. Yet it would be disastrous to seek merely to placate these people--the mere willingness to do so would make me deaf to whatever real message they might have. To do this job rightly is beyond my power. Prayer is all I have left--and patient, humble (if possible) obedience to God's will. One thing is certain: I do not possess my answers ready at hand in myself. (It almost seems an axiom that a solitary should be one who has his own answers....) But I cannot simply seek them from others either. The problem is in learning to go for some, perhaps for long periods, with no answer!!

End of 1965, V.347-48

A Year With Thomas Merton - October 26

Waiting for God

Now is the time to see what great strength comes out of silence--and not without struggle.

Obedience to God means, first of all, waiting, having to wait, sustine Dominum--waiting for the Lord. The first thing then is to accept the fact that one will have to wait. Otherwise obedience is undermined by an implicit condition that destroys it.

To say that I am a child of God is to say, before everything else, that I grow. That I began. A child who does not grow becomes a monster. That idea "Child of God" is therefore one of living growth, becoming, possibility, risk, and joy in the negotiation of risk. In this God is pleased: that His child grows in wisdom and grace.

God is the Father who fights to defend and rescue His child. The life of the Child of God is not in the "development of spirituality" but in obedience to the Good Shepherd who seeks him, knowing he is lost. It is in solitude that we recognize, with a shock, how lost we have been, and that now we are found, rescued, recovering conscience, returning to ourselves, to Truth, carried by Him who has sought and found us.

End of 1965, V.334

A Year With Thomas Merton - October 15

Walking on Water

Whether we live or die, we are the Lord's. Life and death alike can be offered up as penance. I can make reparations for my impiety by living as perfectly as I can the Rule and Spirit of St. Benedict--obedience, humility, work, prayer, simplicity, the love of Christ.

The light of truth burns without a flicker in the depths of a house that is shaken with storms of passion and of fear. "You will not fear the terror of the night." And so I go on trying to walk on the waters of the breakdown. Worse than ever before and better than ever before. It is always painful and reassuring when he who I am not is visibly destroyed by the hand of God in order that the simplicity in the depths of me, which is His image, may be set free to serve Him in peace. Sometimes in the midst of all this I am tremendously happy, and I have never in my life begun to be so grateful for His mercy.

And no more professional spirituality! Terrifically purged of ideas about prayer, and of all desire to preach them, as if I had something!

October 22, 1952, III.22

A Year With Thomas Merton - June 29

The Sacrifice of Obedience

Gehorsamopfer—to offer obedience.

To offer oneself to God as a sacrifice of obedience in faith. This is the crucial point. Too much emphasis on one’s own truth, one’s own authentic freedom, and one forgets the limitations and restrictions of this “my own.” Tendency to take “my own” truth and freedom as unlimited, ultimate, “in my own case.” This is a total loss. The paradox that only God’s truth is ultimately my truth (there is no one truth for me, another for my neighbor, another for God) and only God’s will is my freedom. When they appear to be opposed, am I acting freely?

“Blessed are the pure in heart who leave everything to God now as they did before they ever existed” (Meister Eckhart). This is what I have to get back to. It is coming to the surface again. As Eckhart was my life raft in the hospital, so now also he seems the best link to restore continuity: my obedience to God begetting His love in me (which has never stopped!).

June 30, 1966, VI.91-92