Guitar Cases and Dirty Clothes

Here are some really good things to chew on that I’m finding in Thomas Merton’s The Inner Experience. These might take a little bit to sit in.

“The great practitioners of contemplation who were the Desert Fathers of Egypt and the Near East did their best to dispel the illusion. [Of contemplation being merely based in aesthetics and intellect and social trendiness] They went into the desert not to seek pure spiritual beauty or an intellectual light, but to see the Face of God. And they knew before they could see His face, they would have to struggle, instead with His adversary. They would have to cast out the devil subtly lodged in their exterior self. They went in the desert not to study speculative truth, but to wrestle with practical evil; not to perfect their analytical intelligence, but to purify their hearts. They went into solitude not to get something, but in order to give themselves, for ‘He that would save his life must lose it, and he that will lose his life, for the sake of Christ, shall save it.’ By their renunciation of passion and attachment, their crucifixion of the exterior self, they liberated the inner man, the new man ‘in Christ.’”

“The important thing in contemplation is not just enjoyment, not pleasure, not happiness, not peace, but the transcendent experience of reality and truth in the act of a supreme and liberated spiritual love…It is not just the sleepy, suave, restful embrace of ‘being’ in a dark, generalized contentment: it is a flash of the lightning of divinity piercing the darkness of nothingness and sin. Not something general and abstract, but something, on the contrary, as concrete, particular, and ‘existential’ as it can possibly be. It is the awakening of Christ within us, the establishment fo the Kingdom of God in our own soul, the triumph of the Truth and of Divine Freedom in the inmost ‘I’ in which the Father becomes one with the Son in the Spirit who is given to the believer.”

Oh man. Good stuff. Comments welcome.