Looking behind the curtain with Merton

Please read these carefully for their consistent, crystal clear message and unwavering, unified theme. They are not my words, but my heart is spoken through them - through the nature of the selection of these specific writings of Merton, for certain. I feel them as if they were mine.

We are living behind masks in our society - hiding from ourselves and each other while claiming (even exaggerating) the illusion of connection. It is mind-numbing, heart-wrenching, soul-murdering, spirit-draining. We are calmly, quietly, yet relentlessly invited deeper. It is very scary to go there, mind you. So few support it, and for obvious reasons. And yet deeper we must go to truly meet our Creator and each other.

"All men seek peace first of all with themselves. That is necessary, because we do not naturally find rest even in our own being. We have to learn to commune with ourselves before we can communicate with other men and with God. A man who is not at peace with himself necessarily projects his interior fighting into the society of those he lives with, and spreads a contagion of conflict all around him. Even when he tries to do good for and to others his efforts are hopeless, since he does not know how to do good for and to himself. In moments of wildest idealism he may take it into his head to make other people happy: and in doing so he will overwhelm them with his own unhappiness and need to be happy. He seeks to find himself somehow in the work of making others happy. Therefore he throws himself into the work. As a result he gets out of the work all that he puts into it: his own confusion, his own disintegration, his own unhappiness."

-- Thomas Merton, in No Man is an Island

"People who know nothing of God (even if they claim to know a lot about God) and whose lives are actually lived 'centered on themselves,' imagine that they can only find themselves by asserting their own desires and ambitions and appetites in a struggle with the rest of the world. They try to become real by imposing themselves or their beliefs on other people, and by appropriating for themselves some share of the limited supply of created goods and thus emphasizing the difference between themselves and the other men who have less than they, or nothing at all. They can only conceive one way of becoming real: cutting themselves off from other people and building a barrier of contrast and distinction between themselves and other men. They do not know that reality is to be sought not in division and separation but in unity and oneness, for we are ‘members one of another.’"

-- Thomas Merton, in New Seeds of Contemplation

"In our technological society, in which the means of communication and signification have become fabulously versatile, and are at the point of an even more prolific development, thanks to the computer with its inexhaustible memory and its capacity for immediate absorption and organization of facts, the very nature and use of communication itself becomes unconsciously symbolic. Though he now has the capacity to communicate anything, anywhere, instantly, man finds himself with nothing meaningful to say. Not that there are not many things he could communicate, or should attempt to communicate. He should, for instance, be able to meet with his fellow man and discuss ways of building a more peaceful world. He is incapable of this kind of confrontation, however. Instead of this, he has intercontinental ballistic missiles which can deliver nuclear death to tens of millions of people in a few moments. This is the most sophisticated message modern man has, apparently, to convey to his fellow man. It is, of course, a message about himself, his alienation from himself, and his inability to come to terms with life."

-- Thomas Merton, in Love and Living

If you'd like to experience the above quote more intimately and poignantly, check out the movie, "In the Valley Of Elah" (http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1809805319/info)

"Our vocation is not simply to be, but to work together with God in the creation of our own life, our own identity, our own destiny… This means to say that we should not passively exist, but actively participate in His creative freedom - in our own lives, and in the lives of others - by always choosing the truth. To put it better, we are even called to share with God the work of creating the truth of our identity. We can evade this responsibility by playing with masks and worldly obligations, and this pleases us because it can appear at times to be a free and creative way of living. It is quite easy, it seems, to please everyone. But in the long run the cost and the sorrow come very high. To work out our own identity in God, which the Bible calls 'working out our salvation,' is a labor that requires sacrifice and anguish, great risk and many tears. It demands close attention to His reality (vs. the world's) at every moment, and great fidelity to God as He reveals Himself, obscurely, in the mystery of each new situation."

-- Thomas Merton, in New Seeds of Contemplation

"There is a silent self within us whose presence is disturbing precisely because it is so silent: it can’t be spoken. It has to remain silent. To articulate it, to verbalize it, is to tamper with it, and in some ways to destroy it. Now let us frankly face the fact that our culture is one which is geared in many ways to help us evade any need to face this inner, silent self. We live in a state of constant semi-attention to the sound of voices, music, traffic, or the generalized noise of what goes on around us all the time. This keeps us immersed in a flood of racket and words, a diffuse medium in which our consciousness is half diluted: we are not quite ‘thinking,’ not entirely responding, but we are more or less there. We are not fully present and not entirely absent; not fully withdrawn, yet not completely available. It cannot be said that we are really participating in anything and we may, in fact, be half-conscious of our own alienation and resentment. Yet we derive a certain comfort from the vague sense that we are ‘part of’ something – although we are not quite able to define what that something is – and probably wouldn’t want to define it even if we could. We just float along in the general noise of it all, not willing to risk the vulnerability of true connection, so accepting a substitute. Resigned and indifferent, we share semiconsciously in the mindless mind of Muzak (and face of Facebook) and commercials which pass for ‘reality.’"

-- Thomas Merton, in Thomas Merton: Essential Writings

"This then is what it means to seek God perfectly: to withdraw from illusion and pleasure (and artificial connection), from worldly anxieties and frantic desires, from the works that God does not want, from a glory that is only human display (our so-called 'castles in the sand'); to keep my mind free from confusion in order that my liberty may be always at the disposal of His will; to entertain silence in my heart and listen for the voice of God; to cultivate both an intellectual and a spiritual freedom from the images of our created things in order to receive the secret contact of God in His obscure, yet overwhelming love; to luxuriate in the lavish riches of loving all men as myself..."

-- Thomas Merton, in New Seeds of Contemplation

"The Journey Within"

into and through the fog to the light of a new day

and as I saw this photo (above), I remembered this one (below):