One more Merton

Sometimes, when I read a passage or a prayer, I find I can learn more about my spiritual state by what repels me from it than by what draw me to it. I've been meaning to post this excerpt for some time, but for one reason or another it hasn't gone up. I've been holding it pretty closely in my all-too-irregular worship, and also in the much more frequent quiet moments on the train or in the park when my mind wanders a little nearer to God. This is a time of huge change for me - changes which I'll share when the time is ripe. More transition, more shifting, and I am searching more, and again, for what it is that stands fast, what is unchangeable, and secure, and tugging gently at my anchor-lines to see if I've come any closer to that silent, abiding and sustaining faith I aspire to. When things come to pieces, even for the better, do I come apart as well? Am I maintaining equilibrium at all? Is one's level of equilibrium a good way to measure one's faithfulness?

I'm not sure. I think God knocks us off our horses often, and that there's a way to fall off in faithfulness. But I do feel that in the past few weeks I've given my emotions far too much reign, and that if I were being more faithful I'd be less easily moved by superficialities.

As I've been meditating on this passage, there have been sentences and words that tugged me with slight discomfort, some that made me doubt my footing and balance. It begins with a long, gorgeous, and detailed prayer, too long to quote here, which has a lot more snags than this bit, and has given me a lot to consider. This quote has been, and continues to be, my Query to myself, and I go a little trembly before it when I stretch up beside it to see how I'm doing. This past week, just as God's blessings have become so abundant and visible in my life, and as I have been up to my armpits in worldly concerns, which have seemed so worthy, so all-important, and so capable of blocking out my whole sky, I have left it behind entirely. I've felt like there are eighty thousand things I must do, eighty thousand things I will surely fail to do, and eighty thousand reasons to fret and worry and plan and freak out, as if everything depended solely on me, as if I had much to do with it at all. I have not been empty at all, but full of my fears and my dreams and my ideas, leaving very little room for the guidance and help, not to mention comfort, of God. My journal this week is full of gloating and moaning and whining and spastic yelps of "what now!??!" It's been a bit pathetic. I'm taking this ideal up again tonight.


This then is what it means to seek God perfectly: to withdraw from illusion and pleasure, from worldly anxieties and desires, from the works that God does not want, from a glory that is only human display; to keep my mind free from confusion in order that my liberty may always be at the disposal of His will; to entertain silence in my heart and listen for the voice of God; to cultivate an intellectual freedom from the images of created things in order to receive the secret contact of God in obscure love; to love all men as myself; to rest in humility and find peace in withdrawal from conflict and competition with other men; to turn aside from controversy and put away heavy loads of judgment and censorship and criticism and the whole burden of opinions I have no obligation to carry; to have a will that is always ready to fold back within itself and draw on all the powers of the soul down from its deepest center to rest in silent expectancy for the coming of God, poised in tranquil and effortless concentration upon the point of my dependence on Him; to gather all that I am, and have all that I can possibly suffer or do or be, and abandon them all to God in the resignation of a perfect love and blind faith and pure trust in God, to do his will.

And then to wait in peace and emptiness and oblivion of all things.

Bonum est praestolari cum silentio salutare Dei.
("It is good to wait in silence for the salvation of God.")