Thomas Merton

Zen Thoughts | Thomas Merton

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“In all that he tried to say, whether in familiar or startling terms, Eckhart was trying to point to something that cannot be structured and cannot be contained within the limits of any system. He was not trying to construct a new dogmatic theology, but was trying to give expression to the great creative renewal of the mystical consciousness which was sweeping through the Rhineland and the Low Countries in his time. If Eckhart is studied in the framework of a religious and cultural structure, he is undoubtedly intriguing; yet we may entirely miss the point of what he was saying and become involved in side issues. Seen in relation to those Zen Masters on the other side of the earth who, like him, deliberately used extremely paradoxical expressions, we can detect in him the same kind of consciousness as theirs. Whatever Zen may be, however you define it, it is somehow there in Eckhart.”

“...let us remind ourselves that another, metaphysical, consciousness is still available to modern man.  It starts not from the thinking and self-aware subject but from Being, ontologically seen to be beyond and prior to the subject-object division.  Underlying the subjective experience of the individual self there is an immediate experience of Being… It has in it none of the split and alienation that occurs when the subject becomes aware of itself as quasi-object.  The consciousness of Being is an immediate experience that goes beyond reflexive awareness.  It is not ‘consciousness of’ but pure consciousness, in which the subject as such disappears.  Posterior to this immediate experience of a ground which transcends experience emerges the subject with its self-awareness.”


Thomas Merton | Passive Prayer

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To end this series, I’d like to post some brief audio from a collection called Thomas Merton on Contemplation. In this collection, Merton speaks about a wide variety of topics surrounding prayer and the contemplative life. Here, he addresses “passive prayer” – which is often how Centering Prayer, my own personal practice, is described.


A related quotation about passivity that I can’t pass up listing with this post comes from Aldous Huxley’s The Divine Within: Selected Writings in Enlightenment.

"Now, very briefly, I must just touch on the means for reaching this state. Here, again, it has been constantly stressed that the means do not consist in mental activity and discursive reasoning. They consist in what Roger Fry, speaking about art, used to call ‘alert passivity,’ or ‘determined sensitiveness.’ This is a very remarkable phrase. You don't do anything, but you are determined to be sensitive to letting something be done within you. And one has this expressed by some of the great masters of the spiritual life in the West. St. Francois de Sales, for example, writing to his pupil, St. Jeanne de Chantal, says: 'You tell me you do nothing in prayer. But what do you want to do in prayer except what you are doing, which is, presenting and representing your nothingness and misery to God? When beggars expose their ulcers and their necessities to our sight, that is the best appeal they can make. But from what you tell me, you sometimes do nothing of this, but lie there like a shadow or statue. They put statues in palaces simply to please the prince's eyes. Be content to be that in the presence of God: he will bring the statue to life when he pleases.'"

Thomas Merton | Starting From Being

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The final quotation for the Merton series comes from his Zen and the Birds of Appetite. A longer term project I have is to write a tract/book on comparative apophatic spiritual practice. This quotation seems to fit perfectly for that project.

“...let us remind ourselves that another, metaphysical, consciousness is still available to modern man.  It starts not from the thinking and self-aware subject but from Being, ontologically seen to be beyond and prior to the subject-object division.  Underlying the subjective experience of the individual self there is an immediate experience of Being. This is totally different from an experience of self-consciousness.  It is completely nonobjective. It has in it none of the split and alienation that occurs when the subject becomes aware of itself as a quasi-object. The consciousness of Being (whether considered positively or negatively and apophatically as in Buddhism) is an immediate experience that goes beyond reflexive awareness.  It is not ‘consciousness of’ but pure consciousness, in which the subject as such disappears.

Posterior to this immediate experience of a ground which transcends experience, emerges the subject with its self-awareness.  But, as the Oriental religions and Christian mysticism have stressed, this self-aware subject is not final or absolute; it is a provisional self-construction which exists, for practical purposes, only in a sphere of relativity.  Its existence has meaning in so far as it does not become fixated or centered upon itself as ultimate, learns to function not as its own center but ‘from God’ and ‘for others.’ The Christian term ‘from God’ implies what the nontheistic religious philosophies conceive as a hypothetical Single Center of all beings, what T.S. Elliot called ‘the still point of the turning world,’ but which Buddhism for example visualizes not as ‘point’ but as ‘Void.’ (And of course the Void is not visualized at all.)

In brief, this form of consciousness assumes a totally different kind of self-awareness from that of the Cartesian thinking-self which is its own justification and its own center.  Here the individual is aware of himself as a self-to-be-dissolved, in self-giving, in love, in ‘letting-go,’ in ecstasy, in God – there are many ways of phrasing it.

The self is not its own center and does not orbit around itself; it is centered on God, the one center of all, which is ‘everywhere and nowhere,’ in whose all are encountered, from whom all proceed.  Thus from the very start this consciousness is disposed to encounter ‘the other’ with whom it is already united anyway ‘in God.’”



Thomas Merton | Disposition to Humility and Pliability

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“The gift of prayer is inseparable from another grace: that of humility, which makes us realize that the very depths of our being and life are meaningful and real only in so far as they are oriented toward God as their source and their end.

...even the capacity to recognize our condition before God is itself a grace.  We cannot always attain it at will. To learn meditation does not, therefore, mean learning an artificial technique for infallibly producing ‘compunction’ and a ‘sense of our nothingness’ whenever we please.  On the contrary, this would be the result of violence and would be inauthentic. Meditation implies the capacity to receive this grace whenever God wishes to grant it to us, and therefore a permanent disposition to humility, attention to reality, receptivity, pliability.”


Thomas Merton | Meditation to Contemplation in the Catholic Tradition

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“Direct exposure to supernatural light darkens the mind and heart, and it is precisely in this way that, being led into the ‘dark night of faith,’ one passes from meditation, in the sense of active ‘mental prayer,’ to contemplation, or a deeper and simpler intuitive form of receptivity, in which, if one can be said to ‘meditate’ at all, one does so only by receiving the light with passive and loving attention…

The purpose of monastic prayer: psalmodic, oratio, meditation, in the sense of prayer of the heart, and even lectio, is to prepare the way so that God’s action may develop this ‘faculty for the supernatural,’ this capacity for inner illumination by faith and by the light of wisdom, in the loving contemplation of God.  Since the real purpose of meditation must be seen in this light, we can understand that a type of meditation which seeks only to develop one’s reasoning, strengthen one’s imagination and tone up the inner climate of devotional feeling has little real value in this context. It is true that one may profit by learning such methods of meditation, but one must also know when to leave them and go beyond to a simpler, more primitive, more ‘obscure’ and more receptive form of prayer.”

Thomas Merton | Always Beginners

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“The work of the spiritual father consists not so much in teaching us a secret and infallible method for attaining to esoteric experiences, but in showing us how to recognize God’s grace and his will, how to be humble and patient, how to develop insight into our own difficulties, and how to remove the main obstacles keeping us from becoming men of prayer.

Those obstacles may have very deep roots in our character, and in fact we may eventually learn that a whole lifetime will barely be sufficient for their removal.  For example, many people who have a few natural gifts and a little ingenuity tend to imagine that they can quite easily learn, by their own cleverness, to master the methods – one might say the ‘tricks’ – of the spiritual life.  The only trouble is that in the spiritual life there are no tricks and no short cuts. Those who imagine that they can discover special gimmicks and put them to work for themselves usually ignore God’s will and his grace. They are self-confident and self-complacent.  They make up their minds that they are going to attain this or that, and try to write their own ticket in the life of contemplation. They may even appear to succeed to some extent. But certain systems of spirituality – notably Zen Buddhism – place great stress on severe, no-nonsense style of direction that makes short work of this kind of confidence.  One cannot begin to face the real difficulties of the life of prayer and meditation unless one is first perfectly content to be a beginner and really experience himself as one who knows little or nothing, and has a desperate need to learn the bare rudiments. Those who think they ‘know’ from the beginning will never, in fact, come to know anything.  

People who try to pray and meditate above their proper level, who are too eager to reach what they believe to be ‘a high degree of prayer,’ get away from the truth and from reality.  In observing themselves and trying to convince themselves of their advance they become imprisoned in themselves. Then when they realize that grace has left them they are caught in their own emptiness and futility and remain helpless.  Acadia follows the enthusiasm of pride and spiritual vanity. A long course in humility and compunction is the remedy!

We do not want to be beginners.  But let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything else but beginners all our life!”

Thomas Merton | Face to Face with the Sham

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“After all, some of the basic themes of the existentialism of Heidegger, laying stress as they do on the ineluctable fact of death, on man’s need for authenticity, and on a kind of spiritual liberation, can remind us that the climate in which monastic prayer flourished is not altogether absent from our modern world.  Quite the contrary: this is an age that, by its very nature as a time of crisis, of revolution, of struggle, calls for the special searching and questioning which are the work of the monk in his meditation and prayer. For the monk searches not only his own heart: he plunges deep into the heart of that world of which he remains a part although he seems to have ‘left’ it.  In reality the monk abandons the world only in order to listen more intently to the deepest and most neglected voices that proceed from its inner depth.

This is why the term ‘contemplation’ is both insufficient and ambiguous when it is applied to the highest forms of Christian prayer.  Nothing is more foreign to authentic monastic and ‘contemplative’ (e.g. Carmelite) tradition in the Church than a kind of Gnosticism which would elevate the contemplative above the ordinary struggles and sufferings of human existence, and elevate him to a privileged state among the spiritually pure, as if he were almost an angel, untouched by matter and passion, and no longer familiar with the economy of sacraments, charity and the Cross.  The way of monastic prayer is not a subtle escape from the Christian economy of incarnation and redemption. It is a special way of following Christ, of sharing in his passion and resurrection and in his redemption of the world. For that very reason the dimensions of prayer in solitude are those of man’s ordinary anguish, his self-searching, his moments of nausea at his own vanity, falsity and capacity for betrayal. Far from establishing one in unassailable narcissistic security, the way of prayer brings us face to face with the sham and indignity of the false self that seeks to live for itself alone and to enjoy the ‘consolation of prayer’ for its own sake.  This ‘self’ is pure illusion, and ultimately he who lives for and by such an illusion must end either in disgust or madness.

On the other hand, we must admit that social life, so-called ‘worldly life,’ in its own way promotes this illusory and narcissistic existence to the very limit.  The curious state of alienation and confusion of man in modern society is perhaps more ‘bearable’ because it is lived in common, with a multitude of distractions and escapes – and also with opportunities for fruitful action and genuine Christian self-forgetfulness.  But underlying all life is the ground of doubt and self-questioning which sooner or later must bring us face to face with the ultimate meaning of our life. This self-questioning can never be without a certain existential ‘dread’ – a sense of insecurity, of ‘lostness,’ of exile, of sin.  A sense that one has somehow been untrue not so much to abstract moral or social norms but to one’s own inmost truth.”

Thomas Merton | Contemplative Prayer Series

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Recently I’ve been re-reading some Thomas Merton.  I have never read his autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, but know him only through some of his shorter works – New Seeds of Contemplation, The Inner Experience, Zen and the Birds of Appetite, and Contemplative Prayer.  Merton is an author who I feel differently about depending on which of his works I’m reading. At times, he seems overly harsh (for instance in some portions of The Inner Experience), and this may stem from the fact that he often writes to other monastics.  A true monastic life is one that I will likely never experience and some of the advice given by Christian monastics don’t seem to fit readers who are “in the world.” I feel the same way when I read St. John of the Cross and he advises his readers to “reject attachment to all creatures.”  Nevertheless, there is hardly a more well-known Christian contemplative in modern times than Merton and overall I find him extremely edifying. He is also clearly well-versed in modern biblical scholarship, seemingly falling much more on the liberal end of things, and is open to other religious traditions which I also resonate with.

In this series, I’d like to post some excerpts from Merton’s Contemplative Prayer.  In it, he documents a variety of his opinions on the spiritual life, writing mainly to other monks.  The reader gets to overhear this advice and decide how it may or may not apply to the life of the novice.

In this first excerpt, Merton introduces the work and writes about the earliest form of Christian monasticism, that of the “Desert Fathers.”

“The monk is a Christian who has responded to a special call from God, and has withdrawn from the more active concerns of a worldly life, in order to devote himself completely to repentance, ‘conversion,’ metanoia, renunciation and prayer.  In positive terms, we must understand the monastic life above all as a life of prayer.  The negative elements, solitude, fasting, obedience, penance, renunciation of property and ambition, are all intended to clear the way so that prayer, meditation and contemplation may fill the space created by the abandonment of other concerns.

What is written about prayer in these pages is written primarily for monks.  However, just as a book about psychoanalysis by an analyst and primarily for analysts may also (if not too technical) appeal to a layman interested in these matters, so a practical non-academic study of monastic prayer should be of interest to all Christians, since every Christian is bound to be in some sense a man of prayer.  Though few have either the desire for solitude or the vocation to monastic life, all Christians ought, theoretically at least, to have enough interest in prayer to be able to read and make use of what is here said for monks, adapting to the circumstances of their own vocation. Certainly, in the pressures of modern urban life, many will face the need for a certain interior silence and discipline simply to keep themselves together, to maintain their human and Christian identity and their spiritual freedom.  To promote this they may often look for moments of retreat and prayer in which to deepen their meditative life. These pages discuss prayer in its very nature, rather than special restricted techniques. What is said here is therefore applicable to the prayer of any Christian, though perhaps with a little less emphasis on the intensity of certain trials which are proper to life in solitude.

Monastic prayer is, first of all, essentially simple.  In primitive monasticism prayer was not necessarily liturgical, though liturgy soon came to be regarded as a specialty of monks and canons.  Actually, the first monks in Egypt and Syria had only the most rudimentary liturgy, and their personal prayer was direct and uncomplicated. For example, we read in the sayings of the Desert Fathers that a monk asked St. Marcarius how to pray.  The latter replied: ‘It is not necessary to use many words. Only stretch out your arms and say: Lord, have pity on me as you desire and as you well know how! And if the enemy presses you hard, say: Lord, come to my aid!’ In John Cassian’s Conferences on Prayer we see great stress laid by the early monks on simple prayer made up of short phrases drawn from the Psalms or other parts of Scripture.  One of the most frequently used was Deus in adjutorium meum intende, ‘O God, come to my aid!’

At first sight one might wonder what such simple prayers would have to do with a life of ‘contemplation.’  The Desert Fathers did not imagine themselves, in the first place, to be mystics, though in fact they often were.  They were careful not to go looking for extraordinary experiences, and contented themselves with the struggle for ‘purity of heart’ and for control of their thoughts, to keep their minds and hearts empty of care and concern, so that they might altogether forget themselves and apply themselves entirely to the love and service of God.”