Thomas Merton’s Simple Approach to Contemplation

From New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton

“I speak only of contemplation that springs from the love of God.

“Contemplation is the highest expression of man’s intellectual and spiritual life. It is that 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 gratitude for life, for awareness and for being. It is a vivid realization of the fact that life and being in us proceed from an invisible, transcendent and infinitely abundant Source. Contemplation is, above all, awareness of the reality of that Source. It knows the Source, obscurely, inexplicably, but with a certitude that goes both beyond reason and beyond simple faith. For contemplation is a kind of spiritual vision to which both reason and faith aspire, by their very nature, because without it they must always remain incomplete. Yet contemplation is not vision because it sees “without seeing” and knows “without knowing.” It is a more profound depth of faith, a knowledge too deep to be grasped in images, in words or even clear concepts. It can be suggested by words, by symbols, but in the very moment of trying to indicate what it knows,  the contemplative mind takes back what it has said, and denies what it has affirmed. For in contemplation we know by “unknowing”. Or, better, we know beyond all knowing or ‘unknowing.’“

As Merton says, in contemplation we know by “unknowing”. Or better, we know beyond all knowing or “unknowing”. Contemplation is beyond poetry, music, art, philosophy, or theology. Contemplation is beyond our own self. To enter into the realm of contemplation one must in a certain sense, die: but this death is in fact the entrance into a higher life. It is a death for the sake of life, which leaves behind all that we can know or treasure as life, as thought, as experience, as joy, as being.

Merton continues: “And so, contemplation seems to supersede and to discard every other form of intuition and experience. This rejection is of course only apparent. Contemplation is and must be compatible with all the other human levels of love and belief for it is their highest fulfilment. But in the actual experience of contemplation all other experiences are momentarily lost. They “die” to be born again on a higher level of life.

“Contemplation reaches out to the knowledge and even the experience of the transcendent and inexpressible God. Contemplation is a sudden gift of awareness, an awakening of the Real within all that is real.”

An example of this happened to me recently:  I was walking the dog one morning after an hour of meditation, and I suddenly became aware that I was somehow a sacrament of the presence of God, in fact, everybody is a sacrament of the presence of God. Didn’t they teach us in religion class that a sacrament was an outward sign signifying an inner reality that can never be totally understood?  We are sacraments, signs of an inner reality that is infinitely unknowable. Merton calls this “A vivid awareness of infinite Being at the roots of our own limited being. An awareness of our contingent reality as received, as a present from God, as a free gift of love.

“Contemplation is a deep resonance in the inmost center of our spirit in which life loses its separate voice and re-sounds with the majesty and the mercy of the Hidden and Living One.”

Now here is my take on Merton’s explanation of contemplation. Merton says that we have to leave our own self to be taken by God into infused contemplation. How does one leave one’s own self. For now we’ll just say, metaphorically, that the self is the Ego that we have formed in our human lifetime around our inner soul that comes from God.It is our inner soul that is the image of God that Scripture calls us, present in God from all eternity. Our Ego is a psychological construct that was formed beginning at birth, by all the people around us: our parents, siblings, extended families, friends, teachers, priests, sisters- all the influences of our society and culture. Our Ego, with our name and sense of self, was not created directly by God. It was co-created by all these other people and influences. Your Ego is a child of American media, of radio, television, the internet, the press. Our real self, according to Merton, is the ‘soul child’ we were at birth which came directly from God’s own eternal “I am.”

Thus, my self can be symbolized by two words: my soul, and my Ego.

First, my soul is the image of God which existed from all eternity, because God is Pure Act, according to Thomas Aquinas, therefore everything in God is from eternity to eternity.

Second, my Ego is not eternal. It is on a temporary pilgrimage to eternity. My Ego begins with birth as a human “being.” To contemplate God, I have to let go of my Ego self, and center myself deep inside my eternal soul where God is.

To contemplate God, my Ego has to die, meaning: I must let go of all my feelings, all my thoughts, all my regrets, all my expectations, all my fears, all my failures, all my successes, all my desires, all my achievements, all my degrees, (graduate or undergraduate). I lose my name, all my identities, and favorite teams. I enter into the “Cloud of Unknowing,” like my soul child with a tabula rasa, a clean slate, in my awareness. And I wait for God. Who knows what happens? Can a finite mind know the infinite? Can the limited know the unlimited? Can the temporary know the eternal? That’s why you have to leave your Ego at the door.

A good example of what I am talking about is Centering Prayer as taught by Trappist Father Basil Pennington. Back in the 90’s Father Pennington came to Freeport, L.I., his hometown, where I was living. He gave us a talk in Holy Redeemer Church and told us that when he was a child he would go over his grandparents’ house for supper, and after supper, they would go out on the front porch and rock in silence for a half hour. They would silently listen to the chirping of the birds. That’s a lot like the old man in the Cure of Ars’ church. “ I just look at God, and God looks at me.”