Sheltering In Place With An Extraordinary Spiritual Guide
In these months of staying close to home, I have enjoyed the company of an exceptional spiritual guide and companion. His name is Thomas Merton.
I am not alone. Last weekend, I guided an online retreat for the Prairiewoods Franciscan Spirituality Center on Merton’s “Contemplative Wisdom for the 21st Century.” This Trappist monk, who died 52 years ago, is the companion of choice for many others too.
The retreat drew people from the Jewish, Mennonite, Episcopalian, evangelical Christian, and Catholic faith traditions — with at least one devotee of Zen Buddhist practices. They included a lawyer, poet, software entrepreneur, computer programmer, clergy members, educators, and monastic lay associates.
Their passion for Merton underscores the enduring reach of his insights.
As I delve anew into Merton’s writings, it is as though he is speaking to us out of time, directly addressing many of the struggles we face in this current crisis.
“There are times, then, when in order to keep ourselves in existence at all, we simply have to sit back for a while and do nothing,” he writes in 1958 in Thoughts in Solitude.
“And for a person who has let himself be drowned completely out of himself by activity, nothing is more difficult than to sit still and rest and do nothing at all.”
As someone who has long suffered from what I jokingly call my “dual diagnosis” of workaholism and over-acheiverism, I have often felt myself drowning in my own activity.
The current crisis forced me to press the pause button on a busy life of travel, writing and speaking that often left too little time for tending my relationships and my interior life.
Difficult as this time has been for so many, I believe Merton would encourage us to embrace this period of enforced stillness. Such an opportunity might not soon come again.
Merton’s words also cause me to reflect on what might, in part, have motivated the protests we’ve seen against remaining in place.
Did the demonstrations emerge solely out of a desire to get the economy rolling again, or concern over an infringement of rights? Or are the protests a symptom of the fact that so many of us simply can’t stand to be alone with ourselves?
Merton probably would say it’s more the latter.
One of his primary preoccupations is the search for the true self. To spend time in solitude is one of the ways he believed we discover our true self. For Merton, the true self is that spark of God that resides in each of us — what he calls the “point of all truth … untouched by sin and illusion.”
The tragedy, he would say, is that so many of us go through life as the person we think we should be, or the person others think we should be.
“We are at liberty to be real or to be unreal. We may be true or false. The choice is ours,” he writes in 1949 in New Seeds of Contemplation. “We may wear now one mask and now another, and never, if we so desire, appear with our own true face.”.
I for one would hate to come to the end of my life never having discovered the “true face” of the person I was meant to be.
Merton believed every person is called to deep communion with God. I’ve long struggled to live a more contemplative life — that is, a life that is more prayerful, reflective, and attentive. Here again Merton is a guide.
He described contemplation as “life itself, fully awake, fully active, fully aware that it is alive. It is spiritual wonder. It is spontaneous awe at the sacredness of life, of being … It is a vivid realization of the fact that life and being in us proceed from an invisible, transcendent, and infinitely abundant Source.”
Merton assures us we don’t have to reside within a monastery to experience spiritual wonder. We can become everyday contemplatives.
A religious sister once asked him for advice on deepening her prayer life. He responded:
“Have you a garden or somewhere you can walk in by yourself? Take half an hour or just 15 minutes a day and walk up and down among the flower beds with the intention of offering up this walk as a meditation and prayer to our Lord. Do not try to think about anything in particular … Our Lord is with you.”
In one of his essays, he famously described his monastic life as, “What I wear is pants, what I do is live, how I pray is breathe.”
Laura Weber, the director of the Prairiewoods Spirituality Center, encourages us to look upon this period of time not as a “pandemic,” but as an opportunity for “pan-deepening.”
There is wisdom in that. How can we not feel a sense of awe at waking each day to a new dawn?
How can we not feel particular gratitude this spring for the leaves returning to the trees and flowers bursting out of the soil?
How can we not feel blessed to share a meal with someone we love?
How can we not cherish the people who stock our supermarket shelves, who bring us the mail? How can we not bless our neighbors, our friends, the doctors, nurses and staff who show up for work each day at the hospital down the street?
This weekend, our country will take the first tentative steps toward returning to a more normal rhythm. I pray we do not lose what Merton called “awe at the sacredness of life.”
“Every moment of every (person’s) life on earth plants something in his soul,” he once observed. In the coming week, can we reflect on what seeds of change this extraordinary time has planted in our soul? How are we bringing those seeds to life?
