Our Christian destiny is,
in fact, a great one: but we cannot achieve greatness unless we lose all
interest in being great. For our own
idea of greatness is illusory, and if we pay too much attention to it we will
be lured out of the peace and stability of the being God gave us, and seek to
live in a myth we have created for ourselves.
Thomas Merton “No Man Is An Island”
My opening
journal entry read as follows:
We have arrived.
Our plane (and us) arrived without a hitch in Louisville at 4:55 PM as
promised. We rented a car at the airport
and were on our way. We had dinner in
Bardstown and met Sister Danielle at Bethany Spring at 8:00 PM. She was in the middle of a meeting, but took
time to set us up in a cottage.
Everything exceeds my expectations.
The countryside, the crickets, the quietness, all make me realize how
precious I find the stillness, how far away from God one can be in
busyness. I can’t believe I’m here,
after reading about Gethsemane for nearly twenty years. I am walking the roadways that inspired
Thomas Merton for most of his life.
After settling in, we went to bed early in order to get up at 5:45 AM
for morning prayer at the Abbey.
Mary Anne and
I made two trips to Gethsemane; a four day visit in September, 1996 which only
wet our appetites for the much longer five week visit in the spring of
1997. During these visits, I was given
the quiet moments I needed to explore more deeply the writings of Thomas
Merton, Thomas Moore, Thomas Keating, George Maloney and others. Through their insights, I began to unravel
some of the obstructions in my own mysterious journey.
Thomas Moore
wrote: “Care of the Soul”
“Writers are taught to “write what you know about”. The same advise applies to the quest for the
power of the soul: be good at what you’re good at. Many of us spend time and energy trying to be
something that we are not. But this is a
move against soul, because individuality rises out of the soul as water rises
out of the depth of the earth. We are
who we are because of the special mix that makes up our soul. Power begins in knowing this special soul,
which may be entirely different from our fantasies about who we are or who we
want to be.”
Thomas Keating,
in his trilogy of books, “Open Mind Open Heart”, Intimacy With God”, and
“Invitation to Love” would introduce me to a system of prayer called “centering”
which caused my prayer of stillness to blossom in ways that I would not have
previously imagined. His books also
brought me to a greater understanding of the struggle I was experiencing at
this point in my life, and thus provided some necessary assurance that many of
the things I was experiencing were normal, and to let go of the resistances.
According to
Keating, I possessed all of the symptoms of one who was experiencing the “dark
night of the senses” an expression coined by St. John of the Cross in his books
on spiritual growth.
These
symptoms included:
(i) a generalized aridity in both the conventional
methods of prayer and discursive meditation, and daily life in general,
(ii) a manifestation of a fear that one is going
backwards, and that through some personal fault or failure we have offended
God.
(iii) an inability or disinclination to practice
discursive meditation in which one ponders the teaching and example of Jesus
(iv) a desire to spend more time alone and in
solitude, not for the sake of isolating oneself from society, but to be
obscurely in God’s presence.
Let’s look at
each of these symptoms in a little more detail.
(i) I was quite aware that I could not find the
same interest in the conventional methods of prayer that use to be very
satisfying. As a deacon, my ordination
pledge included doing church prayer, either morning or evening. This prayer was very structured and
consistent in its approach from day to day.
Often I found that my attention in this prayer was very distracted,
sometimes to the point of having little recollection of the contents of the
psalms and readings after the fifteen or twenty minutes to complete. Also, the sense of satisfaction that use to
come from fulfilling these spiritual obligations was dulled and
ineffective. The old enthusiasm for them
was not there. In fact, these daily
activities often seemed like obstacles to a different way of life to which I
was drawn. Keating would explain this
phenomenon in this way:
“This aridity springs from the realization that no
created thing can bring us unlimited satisfaction, or the satisfaction previously
experienced. In light of this intuition,
we know that all the gratifications we were seeking when we were motivated by
our emotional programs cannot possibly bring us happiness. This creates a period of mourning, during
which all things that we had counted on to bring us happiness are slowly
relativized.”
(ii) Although I experienced much consolation
during my times of solitude and prayer of quiet, I carried with me a sense that
following God required that I become more rooted in activity (Christian
Service). In wanting to do otherwise, it was as if I was not being charitable,
that I was being self-centered. I
carried an underlying belief that this outward action is what God expected of
me, and I multiplied these actions in hopes of purging this self-centred
attribute. Again, Keating says:
“During these times, some people mistakenly think it is
the end of their relationship with God.
This is not true. What has ended
is there over dependence on the senses and reasoning. God is really offering a more intimate
relationship. If they would not reflect
on their anxious feelings, they would begin to perceive it.”
(iii) In
prayer, I spontaneously moved towards more times of quiet and solitude. I continued with the other types of prayer
and did find research and reflection for homilies very beneficial and
satisfying, but ultimately, stillness would result. My outward prayer activities, however, were
principally unsatisfying. Keating
remarks:
“Our ordinary ways of relating to God are being changed
to ways that we do not know. This pulls
the rug out from under our plans and strategies for the spiritual journey. We learn that the journey is a path that
cannot be mapped out in advance. God helps
us to disidentify from our preconceived ideas by enlightening us from within.
(iv) I discovered that looking too close at this
anxiety, or attempting to purge this anxiety through more activity just did not
work. It only split, to a greater
degree, the inner self (which truly wishes to be aligned with God’s will) from
the exterior person who identifies and sees him(her) self in the frantic
activity that never satisfies. However, during
this time it was difficulty to stop, to become composed, and then to place
complete trust in God to do what I was unable to do myself.
No comments:
Post a Comment