To write about prayer is a hazardous endeavor. Misunderstandings, misreadings, flawed perspectives, etc. can run rampant. And then of course this very project of writing/reading/understanding can replace the very reality one is pondering. Consider this quote from Merton in one of his talks at Redwoods:
“The talking, although important, isn’t the principal thing. Nothing that anybody says is going to be important. The great thing is prayer. Prayer itself. If you want a House of Prayer {he’s addressing the active religious in the gathering} the way to get to it is by praying. And if you want a life of prayer, the way to get it is by praying. We were indoctrinated to think so much in terms of means and ends—technologically achieving ends—we don’t realize that there’s a different dimension in the life of prayer. In the life of prayer you start where you are. You deepen what you already have. And you realize that you’re already there.”
Perfect…and funny. Here’s a guy who has written and spoken tens of thousands of words about prayer saying this, and you might think he is contradicting himself, his very teaching. But no, I think we get what he is pointing to. It is easy to get enchanted by and lost in the words of good spiritual writers like Merton himself, like Abhishiktananda, like Louf, like Rohr, like even the great spiritual classics, etc. And the danger is that we substitute the words for the reality—Merton’s “zen-mind” made him very sensitive to that. And there is something even more critical, more hazardous in our overrelying on any verbal “spiritual maps” out there or even worse on “well-planned programs of spiritual growth.” This should be principle #1: everyone’s spiritual journey, spiritual life, spiritual path, everyone’s prayer life is absolutely unique. This is very, very Important. Yes, there are significant common patterns to all spiritual journeys, similar dynamics in all spiritual lives, recognizable markers on all spiritual paths; but the bottom line is that nameless, absolutely unique element within this life and this prayer that makes it “my life, my prayer.” Yes, you can and you should get helpful insights, illuminating guidance, etc. from all these marvelous spiritual writers, but never forget: your life is your path….which is no-path….and it will not fit any pattern from any book….modern or ancient….and all attempts to make it fit will be futile. Merton himself, by the way, was an excellent example of this…and so a master teacher.
When we use the word “prayer,” lets be clear that we are not referring to liturgical prayer strictly speaking, nor to simple prayers of petition in our moments of need, nor to what some people called “personal prayer,” like saying the rosary or some other such devotions….although all these can be involved in our journey into deep prayer. What we are most emphatically referring to has usually been called “contemplative prayer,” but also with other terms…like “prayer of the heart.” Merton points out that the word “contemplation” is somewhat ambiguous and misleading. It infers a subject-object relationship: there is this reality “in front of you,” “out there,” which you
“contemplate.” No, that is not what Merton means when he speaks of “prayer,” contemplative or whatever else you want to call it. (And also its horrible misuse in calling a certain grouping of people as “contemplatives.” Merton says it was a designation reserved for religious that were locked up in “cold storage”….especially the nuns!). Merton prefers the simple term, “prayer,” or maybe “deep prayer,” or the classic, “prayer of the heart.” But he is also quite willing to use the problematic word “contemplative” as long as it is correctly understood.
Merton tells of a tiff he got into with Fr. McNamara of the Spiritual Life Institute, the Carmelite hermit group that he started in the ‘60s as a modern version of the ancient hermit ideal (and it also evaporated). Merton had written somewhere that people who wanted to lead lives of deep prayer should not be trying to “think about God all the time”—“Don’t keep God in your mind all the time…it will exhaust you, it will be futile, it won’t lead to anything like contemplative prayer,” he would teach his novices. McNamara wrote to him complaining that his teaching was contradictory to the teachings of the old masters who said our goal was to be “continual prayer.” Merton had to write back explaining that continual prayer is not a matter of constantly thinking about God but rather a kind of deep awareness of the Divine Presence in all reality….and that in fact the old masters also said that the highest form of prayer is when you don’t know you’re praying! Very zen-like!
In order to better grasp Merton’s teaching on prayer of the heart we need to divert to Merton’s view of modern consciousness to which he alludes many times in these conferences and is critical in his understanding of all approaches to contemplative prayer. The key word to describe modern consciousness is “alienation.” In Christian theology and spirituality this is simply what we call “the Fall,” “Original Sin.” So in a sense it has been with us from the beginning, but for the last few centuries more and more enhanced and exacerbated as first the Divine Reality is reduced to a concept we can argue about instead of it being a lived experience; and then this concept is deemed not needed nor wanted and all of society and civilization is built on a foundation of sand and your own reality is no more than “dust.” Recall Genesis 3: 8-19….”dust you are and to dust you shall return”…..alienation delineated in Biblical imagery and language. In modern terms we have bewilderment, loss, guilt, disorientation, helplessness, meaninglessness, estrangement, distance, etc. Alienation means our experience of ourselves as radically separate individuals…therefore a sense of loss of real community (like Merton realizing that in his special experience in Louisville at Fourth and Walnut, described in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander). Attempts to build community on a totally secular vision end up like the Tower of Babel Myth. Alienation also means our experience of separateness from wild nature….nature is merely a resource “out there” to exploit. But most Importantly, alienation also means there is this most profound loss of a sense of our deep self, our center, our “heart” if you will, in effect our separation from whom we really are, where we are one with God. Instead we live our everyday life on the level of this exterior self, this “I” which traffics in illusion and falsity as it tries to establish meaning and purpose for itself. Whatever this self manages to establish, however, it is so fragile and tenuous, like a puff of smoke, that it can rightfully be termed as “unreal,” and the consequent result is a deep sense of insecurity, anxiety, fear, etc. Western writers, artists and philosophers have all wrestled with this phenomenon one way or another: Kafka, the master storyteller of alienation. As an example recall his remarkable symbolic story, “The Metamorphosis,” where Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning having been mysteriously turned into an “ungeziefer,” sometimes translated as “cockroach”! Or consider Camus who saw modern man engaged in a Sisyphean effort to roll this boulder up the hill in a futile “effort to overcome the muteness of existence”(as one critic put it). Or Andy Warhol, the consummate artist depicting the superficiality and commodification in modern life and its enhancement of the transient. In 1968, one of his exhibits proclaimed, “In the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.”
On the ordinary everyday level this exterior ego self seeks to maximize his/her experiences because it has a desperate need “to be somebody,” as if that were to buttress our lives in the face of death. To be recognized, accepted, valued, esteemed, appreciated, admired, etc. this is the passion underlying all efforts, all achievements, all self-promotions, etc……all this underlies the seeking of power, wealth, fame, etc.
Needless to say, this alienation has a deleterious effect on any spiritual journey. As Merton puts it: “The call to contemplation is not, and cannot, be addressed to such an ‘I,’” So what happens when this person turns up at the gates of the monastery or simply at the gates of the contemplative path? Merton has a brutally detailed description of what happens interiorly:
“If such an ‘I’ one day hears about ‘contemplation,’ he will perhaps set himself to ‘become a contemplative.’ That is, he will wish to admire in himself something called contemplation. And in order to see it, he will reflect on his alienated self. He will make contemplative faces at himself like a child in front of a mirror. He will cultivate the contemplative look that seems appropriate to him and that he likes to see in himself. And the fact that his busy narcissism is turned within and feeds upon itself in stillness and secret love will make him believe that his experience of himself is an experience of God. But the exterior ‘I,’ the ‘I’ of projects, of temporal finalities, the ‘I’ that manipulates objects in order to take possession of them, is alien from the hidden, interior ‘I’ who has no projects and seeks to accomplish nothing, even contemplation…..
Sad is the case of that exterior self that imagines himself contemplative, and seeks to achieve contemplation as the fruit of planned effort and of spiritual ambition. He will assume varied attitudes, meditate on the inner significance of his own postures, and try to fabricate for himself a contemplative identity: and all the while there is nobody there. There is only an illusory fictional ‘I’ which seeks itself, struggles to create itself out of nothing, maintained in being by its own compulsion and the prisoner of his private illusion.”
(This quote is from a short masterpiece of his, The Inner Experience, which along with Contemplative Prayer, another insightful piece, illumine a lot of what he has to say in these conferences at Redwoods.)
Now Merton is NOT talking about some “bad contemplatives” somewhere out there—“Thank God I am not like those people,” a temptation here, right? No, he is saying this about ALL of us, no exceptions, Merton included, It is a “been there, done that” statement on behalf of all of us, more or less, now and then. We come to this gate in bad shape, but something in us has been awakened. Merton loves to invoke the Sufi/Islamic vision: God is All-Mercy, All-Compassion everywhere and always; and so the Divine Mercy is awakening us in all our situations, no matter how bad, how confused, how lost…. But at first this call to awakening will feel like a very negative thing: a sense that we are not who we should be, a sense of lostness perhaps, of seeking some ground of meaning to stand on, a dim realization that society, social life will not satisfy what is nagging at our hearts, etc. Consider these two moments from Genesis: Adam and Eve after the Fall…God asks them, “Where are you?” And Cain after he murders his brother Abel, God asks him, “Where is your brother?” God is not seeking information in these questions! That “where” is intended for their hearts and our hearts, an awakening to the condition we are in. That “where are you” is also a question of “who are you,” a self-questioning and an awakening to one’s estrangement from your real self, your heart, and only this self can be in the Divine Presence everywhere and at all times. Merton, again:
“….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. ‘Dread’ in this sense…is the profound awareness that one is capable of ultimate bad faith with himself and with others: that one is living a lie.”
Merton was very impressed and truly influenced by Sufi teachings. This is obvious in the conferences at Redwoods. He was particularly struck by the fact that a Muslim became a Sufi not in order to be a “better Muslim,” but he/she was looking for a complete transformation, a finding of their true heart, and a total surrender to the Divine Reality. This is the path of deep prayer, contemplative prayer. Merton pointed out time and again that this was what contemplative monastic life was all about, and this is what it should open up for the people that showed up at its gate with all their spiritual problems. Did it? In his read of it and his experience the situation was very ambiguous, and the answer would be, largely no. Traditional monastic life had mostly ossified into indoctrinating the young monk into the “contemplative mystique”(somewhere Merton says that in most “contemplative communties” there are very few true contemplatives)—won’t get into that here, but it was simply a “religious” version of what the young monk had left behind. Often devout, pious young people came to monastic life trying to respond to a silent call within their heart, “Friend, come up higher.” But instead of being helped to see that they are being called/led to a total transformation of heart and consciousness, they became trained to act in a certain “holy” way, play a role, like you play a certain role in society; the image, you want to “look good,” being part of an “elite” Church group, etc. Merton said, for example, that people were taught to act humble and so they would be humble…nothing there about any deep transformation! Everyone knows that “monastic image,” the monk with that hood up! “Progressive” monasticism, on the other hand, was becoming a mixed bag of some necessary changes, and also an embrace of modernity in all its superficiality…a kind of smogasbord of stuff to keep you “happy,” “satisfied.” It seemed to ignore the real awakening a person was experiencing but unable to interpret it correctly. A novice once told Merton, “I came here for personal fulfillment; why all this talk of trials?” But for a Christian contemplative the path of deep prayer, the path of true transformation, follows the pattern of the Paschal Mystery. There is no Easter without Good Friday. Merton:
“Let no one hope to find in contemplation an escape from conflict, from anguish or from doubt. On the contrary, the deep, inexpressible certitude of the contemplative experience awakens a tragic anguish and opens many questions in the depths of the heart like wounds that cannot stop bleeding. For every gain in deep certitude there is a corresponding growth of superficial ‘doubt.’ This doubt is by no means opposed to genuine faith, but it mercilessly examines and questions the spurious ‘faith’ of everyday life, the human faith which is nothing but the passive acceptance of conventional opinion. This false ‘faith’ which is what we often live by and which we even come to confuse with our ‘religion’ is subjected to inexorable questioning… Hence, it is clear that genuine contemplation is incompatible with complacency and with smug acceptance of prejudiced opinions. It is not mere passive acquiescence in the status quo, as some would like to believe – for this would reduce it to the level of spiritual anesthesia.”
There is a profound paradox in this journey. The more we “awaken,” the more we become aware of our “exile” from God, our alienation from our inmost self, our “blind wanderings in the region of unlikeness” as Merton put it. But at a certain point we discover ourselves as the “prodigal child” in that Gospel parable. and we undertake a “homecoming journey” to “our Father’s House,” our deep heart, our true self, where we find all mercy and all compassion, our meaning, our true hope, our true faith, the only real peace, and the secret of our real identity hidden in Christ. In the beginning there has to be a division. There has to be a seeker as well as something that he/she is seeking (cf. Rule of St. Benedict on the entering monk). But then comes a time when that division is no longer there. You do not deny that you have an ordinary everyday ego, but now you know what it is.
In conclusion we have an excerpt from another remarkable piece by Merton: Day of a Stranger. Some South American literary journal sent a request to Merton that he write down how he spends his time now that he was a hermit. He sent them this piece, which eventually got reprinted in the Hudson Review and is available here: https://hudsonreview.com/1967/07/day-of-a-stranger/
Read the whole thing; In an indirect way it sheds light on what this whole contemplative vision is. It is essential reading to better understand Merton’s teaching on prayer and monastic life and even also to truly understand the ancient teachings in modern clothes as it were. Here is just an excerpt:
“This is not a hermitage—it is a house. (“Who was that hermitage I seen you with last night? . . .”) What I wear is pants. What I do is live. How I pray is breathe. Who said Zen? Wash out your mouth if you said Zen. If you see a meditation going by, shoot it. Who said “Love?” Love is in the movies. The spiritual life is something people worry about when they are so busy with something else they think they ought to be spiritual. Spiritual life is guilt. Up here in the woods is seen the New Testament: that is to say, the wind comes through the trees and you breathe it. Is it supposed to be clear? I am not inviting anybody to try it. Or suggesting that one day the message will come saying NOW. That is none of my business.
I am out of bed at two-fifteen in the morning, when the night is darkest and most silent. Perhaps this is due to some ailment or other. I find myself in the primordial lostness of night, solitude, forest, peace, a mind awake in the dark, looking for a light, not totally reconciled to being out of bed. A light appears, and in the light an ikon. There is now in the large darkness a small room of radiance with psalms in it. The psalms grow up silently by themselves without effort like plants in this light which is favorable to them. The plants hold themselves up on stems which have a single consistency, that of mercy, or rather great mercy. Magna misericordia. In the formlessness of night and silence a word then pronounces itself: Mercy. It is surrounded by other words of lesser consequence: ‘destroy iniquity’ ‘Wash me’ ‘purify,’ ‘I know my iniquity.’ Peccavi. Concepts without interest in the world of business, war, politics, culture, etc. Concepts also often without serious interest to ecclesiastics. Other words: Blood. Guile. Anger. The way that is not good. The way of blood, guile, anger, war.
Out there the hills in the dark lie southward. The way over the hills is blood, guile, dark, anger, death: Selma, Birmingham, Mississippi. Nearer than these, the atomic city, from which each day a freight car of fissionable material is brought to be laid carefully beside the gold in the underground vault which is at the heart of this nation.
‘Their mouth is the opening of the grave; their tongues are set in motion by lies; their heart is void.’
Blood, lies, fire, hate, the opening of the grave, void. Mercy, great mercy.”