Michael Krahn : A Mind Awake

THOUGHTS IN SOLITUDE

Merton’s Thoughts in Solitude was written in 1953 and 1954 during an intense time of solitude and meditation afforded to him, as he puts it, “by the grace of God and the favor of his Superiors.”1 There was no intention for the book to address advanced or sensational adventures in these disciplines, but rather to state their basic function and importance in the life of a contemplative.

Solitude and Silence

Solitude held a place of chief importance for Merton and he believed that the loss of solitude in society both caused and perpetuated much evil. “Society depends for its existence,” he says, “on the inviolable personal solitude of its members.”2 Merton believed that a society made up of people who knew no interior solitude could not be held together by love and as a consequence would be forcibly held together by violence and abusive authority.

Merton’s love and continuous search for God was without limits. “If a man is to live,” he says, “he must be all alive, body, soul, mind, heart, spirit. Everything must be elevated and transformed by the action of God, in love and faith.”3 The spiritual life needs both thought and feeling; to assign it to a single realm is to embrace it incompletely. If the spiritual life is consigned to merely thinking, we rely on our own limited reason and squelch the voice of God. Man is more than a disembodied mind.

The Conquest of True Self

The driving force of Merton’s thinking and subsequent writing was the nature and conquest of “true self.” Through strict discipline and a life of intentional physical and spiritual poverty, Merton believed that “true self” could be found. However, this was no self-absorbed, pop-psychology, self-fulfillment endeavor. Merton believed that the “true self” could only be found in God, that seeking God and seeking self was a singular pursuit. To seek and then know God’s will is to know one’s own purpose; to know what God has planned is to know how to proceed; to know what God is doing is to glory in the trials we face.

“Real self-conquest,” Merton says, “is the conquest of ourselves not by ourselves but by the Holy Spirit. Self-conquest is really self-surrender.”4 The search for self begins and ends in the search for God.

Knowing oneself is both the pursuit of self-knowledge and the pursuit of God. According to Merton, “before we can surrender ourselves we must become ourselves. For no one can surrender what he does not possess.”5 By seeking the One who created us, knows us, and has a plan for us, we will know both Him and ourselves. For we are only truly ourselves as we exist in His will and nothing short of that self is the “true self.”

Meditation

Merton describes meditation as one of the ways a spiritual man can “keep himself awake,” that meditation will nurture and maintain our sensitivity to spiritual things. “Meditative prayer is a stern discipline,” Merton acknowledges, and it is a discipline that requires “unending courage and perseverance, and those who are not willing to work at it patiently will finally end in compromise,”6 which is only another name for failure.

It is so difficult because it is not merely a prayer spoken with ones lips but a prayer of the entire self. In meditative prayer we turn all of ourselves towards Him.

Nothingness

Merton speaks of a “habitual realization” that in the grand scheme of the universe, God is everything and we are nothing, that He is the centrifugal force to whom all our actions are directed, whether intentionally or not. The only matter to be decided is whether we will willingly cooperate with His sovereign will or resist Him, at our own peril.

It is worth quoting at length Merton’s summary of this idea:

That our life and strength proceed from Him, that both in life and in death we depend entirely on Him, that the whole course of our life is foreknown by Him and falls into the plan of His wise and merciful Providence; that it is absurd to live as though without Him, for ourselves, by ourselves; that all our plans and spiritual ambitions are useless unless they come from Him and end in Him and that, in the end, the only thing that matters is His Glory.7

Abandoning oneself to God, trusting Him with our fate, is necessary if we are to find ourselves in Him. Through this trust and self-abandonment, this willing self-denial, we show our love for God and we truly discover that “all things work together for good.”8 Without this trust, everything simply leads to our destruction. Our purpose is found in the pursuit of His ultimate glory.

There is a paradoxical aspect to this seeking and self-abandonment. We cannot find Him unless He reveals Himself to us, and yet He is the one who forms in us a desire to seek Him. In the course of this search, there may still be times of dryness and distance. Merton, however, sees these times as God’s intentional withdrawing of the sense of His presence in order to strengthen our faith. In these times we find the value of our poverty and our weakness. They are, Merton says, “the earth in which God sows the seed of desire.”9 To be constantly enveloped in His presence would negate the need for the desire for His presence.

And since we worship a God who is unseen, to desire Him is to renounce the desire of anything that can be seen. We may still desire these things, but we must renounce the direct desiring of them and seek them only with a desire that is initiated by God.

Poverty

Trappist poverty is intentional and it is both physical and spiritual, but it is not something they are unwillingly subjected to or by which they are victimized. On the contrary, it is an intentional, self-imposed state for the purpose of mystical identification with those whom Jesus called “blessed.”10 This intentional poverty is meant to drive the willing participant to God, to rely on Him for everything so that he relies on himself for nothing, recognizing that we are given everything by God anyway. “As long as we remain poor,” Merton says, “as long as we are empty and interested in nothing but God, we cannot be distracted. For our very poverty prevents us from being ‘pulled apart’ (dis-tracted)”11

These gifts of grace – silence, solitude, and poverty – are meant to turn our focus so directly to God that everything we do becomes prayer. In this state Merton could most closely live out the biblical command to pray without ceasing.12

To be in a position where we must ask in order to receive is a concept foreign to an individualist society which prides itself on being self-sustaining and self-supportive, but this is what intentional poverty demands. “The solitary, more than anyone else is always aware of his poverty and of his needs before God. Since he depends directly on God for everything material and spiritual, he has to ask for everything.”13 In a society where we plan for decades into the future and consider living day-to-day, or “paycheck-to-paycheck”, a sign of poor financial management, this intentional poverty seems like foolishness.

Go to: Part 1|Part 2|Part 3|Part 4|Part 5|The Thomas Merton Page

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1 Thomas Merton, Thoughts In Solitude (New York, USA: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1980), 11.
2 Ibid., 12.
3 Ibid., 27.
4 Thomas Merton, Thoughts In Solitude (New York, USA: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1980), 29.
5 Ibid., 96.
6 Ibid., 48.
7 Thomas Merton, Thoughts In Solitude (New York, USA: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1980), 52-53.
8 Rom. 8:28 (ESV).
9 Thomas Merton, Thoughts In Solitude (New York, USA: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1980), 54.
10 Matt. 5:2 (ESV).
11 Thomas Merton, Thoughts In Solitude (New York, USA: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1980), 93.
12 1 Thess. 5:17 (ESV).
13 Thomas Merton, Thoughts In Solitude (New York, USA: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1980), 105.