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 ideas of greatness are 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”
There seems to be passages through which we must
go at certain intervals in our lives.
The most obvious one would be the transition from adolescence to
adulthood. The events of this passage
are well documented; raging hormones, a striving for independence, a general
lack of maturity in dealing with life’s situations. But are there not other passages in life that we must go through as well?
If one were to look at Jesus’ life, three passages are
easily observable:
The first being His baptism in the river Jordan when He was more fully awakened to His own personal
identity as one with a special mission.
The second being the forty days He spent in the desert overcoming the world, the flesh, and the devil so that He
could begin His ministry unobstructed by worldly ambitions, compulsions, desires, and anything else that
might become an obstacle to following His inner voice.
His third passage being His final surrender in the garden of Gethsemane where, in obedience to faith, He gave consent to let go of
His very life.
Many of these passages we are also called to experience. And the more we resist these movements of Grace, the
greater our suffering.
Through the process of letting go, we eventually discover that something
of greater value lies beyond. The only
difficulty is that as we are passing through, the fear of being cut off
from the familiar obscures our vision and confuses our mind. We experience what Thomas Merton and other
mystics call “spiritual dread”.
In my first posting, I began by describing early graced
moments as times of wonder and awe, something that we desire and seek. We must realize too that graced moments are
also those times of passages, times of tension, when life is calling us to
emerge like butterflies from a caterpillar’s cocoon. These graced moments can be frightening to us
because they are asking us to move away from the familiar. And we do not know what to expect as we are
drawn into these uncharted waters. We
do not look forward to or seek these times as they go against some of our natural
build-in defense mechanisms that seek comfort and certainty.
One such passage (and therefore grace) began for me in my late forties. The following tension was noted in my journal at that time.
“The tension that I’m trying so hard to overcome is this growing lack of interest in exterior things. This becomes evident in how I feel about activities that use to be an important part of my life. I struggle to understand why this is happening, but I'm beginning to believe that I may have to learn
to live with it.
Deep within myself, I'm beginning to experience a growing sense
of presence and peace to which I am drawn. It resides interiorly when I am in silence
and solitude. During these times, exterior
things lose their relevance. My outward striving,
plans and worldly concerns disappear into insignificance. It is from within that I am at peace, knowing
that I’m loved for who I am. It is here
that I experience God; loving, nourishing, healing, allowing the inner fire of
His love to glow, assuring me that what I search for cannot be found in any
other place. ”
At this time of passage, it was apparent that I was
beginning to experience increasing dissatisfaction with my exterior life; but
this was being compensated by a richer and more satisfying interior life. It seemed that a solution to such a dilemma
would be to escape entirely to this interior reality and leave the exterior behind. Of course, on quick reflection, one could
easily conclude that such, if even possible, was not the solution.
Thomas Merton in his book “No Man Is An Island” touched on
what I was experiencing with the following:
“When a man constantly looks at himself in the mirror of his
own acts, his spiritual double vision splits him into two people. And if he strains his eyes hard enough, he
forgets which one is real. In fact, reality
is no longer found either in himself, or in his shadow. The substance has gone out of itself into the
shadow, and he has become two shadows instead of one real person.
Then the battle begins.
Whereas one shadow was meant to praise the other, now one shadow accuses
the other. The activity that was meant
to exalt him reproaches and condemns him.
It is never real enough; never active enough. The less he is able to be the more he has to
do. He becomes his own slave driver – a
shadow whipping a shadow to death, because it cannot produce reality,
infinitely substantial reality, out of his own nonentity.
Then comes fear. The
shadow becomes afraid of the shadow. He
who “is not” becomes terrified at the things he cannot do. Where for a while he had illusions of
infinite power, miraculous sanctity (which he was able to guess at in the
mirror of his virtuous actions) now it had all changed.
Why do we have to spend our lives striving to be something
that we would never want to be, if we only knew what we wanted. Why do we waste our time doing things which,
if we only stopped to think about them, are just the opposite of what we were
made for.
We cannot be ourselves unless we know ourselves. But self-knowledge is impossible when
thoughtless and automatic activity keeps our souls in confusion. In order to know ourselves, it is not
necessary to cease all activity in order to think about ourselves. That would be useless, and would probably do
most of us a great deal of harm. But we
have to cut down our activity to the point where we can think calmly and
reasonably about our actions. We cannot
begin to know ourselves until we can see the real reasons why we do the things
we do, and we cannot be ourselves until our actions correspond to our
intentions, and our intentions are appropriate to our own situation. “
The way through this uncertain and turbulent passage, I
discovered, would be through inward stillness.
In quiet stillness, allowing my body, my thoughts, my feelings to be
at rest, an inner light began to guide me through the difficult passage until a new life blossomed. And it would
never fail that I would be in a better place after than before, emerging once
again more whole, and more accepting of the mystery contained
in the human journey.
In the spring of 1997, this passage took me to the Abbey of
Gethsemane in Bardstown Kentucky, the Trappist monastery that captivated and
inspired Thomas Merton for the majority of his life.
