Each week The Merton Institute sends out one or more reflections taken from Thomas Merton's writings. Here is the week's reflection:True contemplation is the work of a love that transcends all satisfaction and all experience to rest in the night of pure and naked faith. This faith brings us so close to God that it may be said to touch and grasp Him as He is, though in darkness. And the effect of such a contact is often a deep peace that overflows into the lower faculties of the soul and thus constitutes an "experience." Yet that experience or feeling of peace always remains an accident of contemplation, so that the absence of this "sense" does not mean that our contact with God has ceased. Thomas Merton. (New Seeds of Contemplation. New York: New Directions Press, 1961, 211)
You will never be able to have perfect interior peace and recollection unless you are detached from even the desire of peace and recollection. You will never be able to pray perfectly until you are detached from the pleasures of prayer. (New Seeds of Contemplation, 208)
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"You will never be able to have perfect interior peace and recollection unless you are detached from even the desire of peace and recollection. You will never be able to pray perfectly until you are detached from the pleasures of prayer. (New Seeds of Contemplation, 208)"
This quote sent me into several sessions of brain wrestling, until it finally occurred to me that perhaps the point is to STOP chewing on it and STOP analyzing to death my efforts at Centering Prayer and just experience the experience. *lightbulb clicks on*
Some get "it" (what you just said) and some don't. Or at least it takes a while. Then, as our Buddhist friends say, "ker-plop"--the frog jumps in the lake and you his splash. Ain't it wonderful? Just no-thinging at all. As Keating says, "It's the most non-violent praying in the world." There's nothing to struggle against, not even prayer itself. No chewing on or over any-thing unless you've got some gum in your mouth. If so, wrap it up in some tissue and let it go too. All Silence and towards that no-thing-ness. The mystery of Christ at the quiet center.
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