Yesterday, I was feeling a bit spiritually sick after allowing myself to be sucked into the circus that is the Tiger King docuseries on Netflix. I felt so naive and idealistic watching the show as it proved that truth is stranger than fiction. Who could write a character like Joe Exotic?
To push down the bile that was building in my throat, I turned to my book shelf to see if I could discover some age-old wisdom to calm my emotions and reorient me toward my path. I was immediately drawn to New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton, a Catholic priest who was on the forefront of exploring the nexus between Eastern and Western religions.
The book was a gift from my dear friends Rachel and Liam back when I graduated from the University of San Francisco School of Management with my MBA in the summer of 2015. On the front page, my friends wrote:
“To Kayleigh – Some food for thought for this next leg of your journey.”
How appropriate this message still is as I have embarked on the wildest journey yet! I had read the book when I first received it – I can see my underlines, notes, and dog ears throughout the book – but as I sat on the balcony yesterday afternoon with a cool breeze on my face and started in for the second time, Merton’s work hit me in a whole new way.
Here are just a few of my favorite passages found within the first hundred pages:
On Co-Creating Our True Selves
“For me to be a saint means to be myself. Therefore the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and discovering my true self….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….
All sin starts from the assumption that my false self, the self that exists only in my own egocentric desires, is the fundamental reality of life to which everything else in the universe is ordered. Thus I use up my life in the desire for pleasures and the thirst for experiences, for power, honor, and knowledge, and love, to clothe this false self and construct its nothingness into something objectively real….
I am hollow, and my structure of pleasures and ambitions has no foundation….Therefore there is only one problem on which all my existence, my peace and my happiness depend: to discover myself in discovering God. If I find Him I will find myself and if I find my true self I will find Him.” (34-36)
I loved this passage. Is this the missing link? Is it futile for us to acquire more knowledge and more experiences if they are only satisfying a false or superficial version of ourselves? Can we really discover and be our true selves without working together with God? Is this the same thing as co-creating with the Universe?
It’s no surprise that Merton champions the contemplative life where “contemplation is the highest expression of man’s intellectual and spiritual life” and “contemplation is a sudden gift of awareness, an awakening to the Real within all that is real.”
Perhaps it is in our ability to contemplate, to reconnect with our intuition, to create space for the insight of God and the Universe to flow through us that we begin a new process of co-creating our identity with God instead of accepting an identity that was likely bestowed upon us by our family, friends, or circumstances in life.
On Living in Communion with Others
“Where men live huddled together without true communication, there seems to be greater sharing and a more genuine communion. But this is not a communion, only an immersion in the general meaninglessness of countless slogans and cliches repeated over and over again so that in the end one listens without hearing and responds without thinking.
Each individual in the mass is insulated by thick laters of insensibility. He doesn’t care, he doesn’t hear, he doesn’t think. He does not act, he is pushed. He does not talk, he produces conventional sounds when stimulated by the appropriate noises. He does not think, he secretes cliches….
To live in communion, in genuine dialogue with others is absolutely necessary if man is to remain human. But to live in the midst of others, sharing nothing with them but the common noise and the general distraction, isolates a man in the worst way, separates him from reality in a way that is almost painless.” (55)
This passage feels so relevant to our current time in living through Coronavirus. We have been living around each other for so long in apparent communion, but was that what it was? Were we just going through the motions? Are we being called to take more responsibility for ourselves, our families, and our neighbors? Are we having better conversations on FaceTime with people we care about? How do we continue to ward off the mindless fear-based chatter and tune into the deeper conversations that are begging to be be had about life right now?
On The Faith that One is Loved – Mercy
“It is the rankling, tormenting sense of unworthiness that lies at the root of all hate….he who cannot love feels unworthy, and at the same time feels that somehow no one is worthy….
The beginning of the fight against hatred, the basic Christian answer to hatred, is not the commandment to love, but what must necessarily come before in order to make the commandment bearable and comprehensible. It is a prior commandment, to believe. The root of Christianity is not the will to love, but the faith that one is loved. The faith that one is loved by God. That faith that one is loved by God although unworthy – or, rather, irrespective of one’s worth!
…Humanistic love will not serve. As long as we believe that we hate no one, that we are merciful, that we are kind by our very nature, we deceive ourselves; our hatred is merely smoldering under the gray ashes of complacent optimism. We are apparently at peace with everyone because we think we are worthy. That is to say we have lost the capacity to face the question of our unworthiness at all. But when we are delivered by the mercy of God the question no longer has meaning.” (74-75)
This passage really struck me. Despite growing up Catholic, fervently receiving my sacraments, and participating in church life in intense bursts as a reader, volunteer, and teacher over the years across multiple parishes, I can’t say that I had every really thought or conceived of faith, love, or mercy in this way. This conception of love is so freeing!
Imagine thinking that to be a Christian is simply to love unconditionally. This feels quite difficult to do. It feels like a courage one must muster up each morning or a martyr-esque quest that one must endure. Merton reminds us that we must simply receive the faith that we are loved by God and that this love is independent of our worthiness. Imagine! We are being asked to surrender, receive, believe – we are being asked to tap back into our feminine energy.
His call-out of humanistic love really struck me, because it is what we see so much of today. It is a superficial, optimistic, and in a sense, holier-than-thou love that permeates current culture. It forces us to say we are all the same, we are all worthy without understanding or believing why this is so. And these behaviors snuff out individual expression and a deeper yearning to discover who we really are and how we are meant to serve in this world. Can we accept that we are loved? Can we allow that to infuse our beings and influence how we operate in the world?
P.S – I finally unpacked my box of books that made the cross-country journey from San Francisco to Fort Lauderdale. I donated most of my books, but kept a handful of staples, the ones that I return to because they contain so much wisdom. You can see a few of the ones I kept on my bookshelf here:
