Today we [sit] with Thomas Merton’s description of the True Self as written following his “conversion” at Fourth and Walnut. It is so inspired, I want to quote it at length:

At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us. It is so to speak [God’s] name written in us, as our poverty, as our indigence, as our dependence, as our sonship [and daughtership]. It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely . . . . I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere. [1]

Most people spend their entire lives living up to their false self, the mental self-images of who they think they are, instead of living in the primal “I” that is already good in God’s eyes. But all I can “pay back” to God or others or myself is who I really am. This is what Merton is describing above. It’s a place of utter simplicity. Perhaps we don’t want to go back there because it is too simple and almost too natural. It feels utterly unadorned. There’s nothing to congratulate myself for. I can’t prove any worth, much less superiority. There I am naked and poor. After years of posturing and projecting, it will at first feel like nothing.

But when we are nothing, we are in a fine position to receive everything from God. As Merton says above, our point of nothingness is “the pure glory of God in us.” If we look at the great religious traditions, we see they all use similar words to point in the same direction. The Franciscan word is “poverty.” The Carmelite word is nada or “nothingness.” The Buddhists speak of “emptiness.” Jesus speaks of being “poor in spirit” in his very first beatitude.

The Bible as a whole prefers to talk in images, and the desert is a foundational one. The desert is where we are voluntarily under-stimulated—no feedback, no new data. Jesus says to go into the closet or the “inner room.” That’s where we stop living out of other people’s response to us. We can then say, I am not who you think I am. Nor am I who you need me to be. I’m not even who I need myself to be. I must be “nothing” in order to be open to all of reality and new reality. Merton’s reservoir of solitude and contemplation allowed him to see the gate of heaven everywhere, even on a common street corner.

A Zen master would call the True Self “the face we had before we were born.” Paul would call it who you are “in Christ, hidden in God” (Colossians 3:3). It is who you are before having done anything right or anything wrong, who you are before having thought about who you are. Thinking creates the false self, the ego self, the insecure self. The God-given contemplative mind, on the other hand, recognizes the God Self, the Christ Self, the True Self of abundance and deep inner security. We start with mere seeing; we end up with recognizing.

Gateway to silent meditation (20 minutes of silence):

You live in me; I live in you.

References:

[1] Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Image Books: 1968), 158.

Adapted from Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer (Crossroad Publishing: 1999, 2003), 76-78.

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The Via Negativa

The darkness of the Via Negativa includes the darkness of grief and suffering, the darkness of the cross, the darkness of the dark night.

Thomas Merton recognized this truth when he wrote from a hospital bed of “a flat impersonal song” and of “bleeding in a numbered bed/…all my veins run/with Christ and with the stars’ plasm.” :

from With The World In My Blood Stream, by Thomas Merton

I lie on my hospital bed

Water runs inside the walls

And the musical machinery

All around overhead

Plays upon my metal system

My invented back bone

Lends to the universal tone

A flat impersonal song

All the planes in my mind

Sing to my worried blood

To my jet streams

I swim in the world’s genius

The spring’s plasm

I wonder who the hell I am.

The world’s machinery

Expands in the walls

Of the hot musical building

Made in maybe twenty-four

And my lost childhood remains

One of the city’s living cells

Thanks to this city

I am still living

But whose life lies here

And whose invented music sings?

All the freights in the night

Swing my dark technical bed

All around overhead

And wake the questions in my blood

My jet streams fly far above

But my low gash is no good

Here below earth and bone

Bleeding in a numbered bed

Though all my veins run

With Christ and with the stars’ plasm.

Ancestors and Indians

Zen Masters and Saints

Parade in the incredible hotel...

I have no more sweet home

I doubt the bed here and the road there

And WKLO I most abhor

My head is rotten with the town’s song.

Here below stars and light

And the Chicago plane

Slides up the rainy straits of night

While in my maze I walk and sweat

Wandering in the low bone system

Or searching the impossible ceiling

For the question and the meaning

Till the machine rolls in again

I grow hungry for invented air

And for the technical community of men

For my lost Zen breathing

For the unmarried fancy

And the wild gift I made in those days

For all the compromising answers

All the gambles and blue rhythms

Of individual despair.

So the world’s logic runs

Up and down the doubting walls

While the frights and the planes

Swing my sleep out the window

All around, overhead

In doubt and technical heat

In oxygen and jet streams

In the world’s enormous space

And in man’s enormous want

Until the want itself is gone

Nameless bloodless and alone

The Cross comes and Eckhart’s scandal

The Holy Supper and the precise wrong

And the accurate little spark

In emptiness in the jet stream

Only the spark can understand

All that burns flies upward

Where the rainy jets have gone

A sign of needs and possible homes

An invented back bone

A dull song of oxygen

A lost spark in Eckhart’s Castle.

World’s plasm and world’s cell

I bleed myself awake and well

Only the spark is now true

Dancing in the empty room

All around overhead

While the frail body of Christ

Sweats in a technical bed

I am Christ’s lost cell

His childhood and desert age

His descent into hell.

Love without need and without name

Bleeds in the empty problem

And the spark without identity

Circles the empty ceiling.

Merton invokes Eckhart’s image of the “spark of the soul” where the Christ is born in all of us and where the Holy Spirit’s fire never goes out, to name what was left of him when he was stripped of so much in his hospital sojourn.

His good friend, Sister Lentfoehr, calls this poem Merton’s “most poignant and anguished poem.” A return to nothingness where only the spark remains.

Merton addresses “Eckhart’s castle” in this poem. Eckhart talks about the soul as a “castle” as in the Biblical phrase, “the kingdom of God.” Kingdoms in Eckhart’s day boasted castles and Eckhart invokes the castle as an archetype for the soul and as the deepest part of the soul where our divinization occurs. “God glows and burns with all his wealth and all his bliss” in this castle.

Jesus enters into this castle “in his being rather than in his acting, giving graciously to the mind the divine and deiform being. This regards the essence of being according to the words: ‘By the grace of God I am what I am.’”

This castle, “free of all names and bare of all forms,” is the “place” that “the Father begets his only begotten Son as truly as in himself.” Here “with this part of itself the soul is equal to God and nothing else.” The castle for Eckhart is the place/space where the Divine marries the human.

Adapted from Matthew Fox, A Way To God: Thomas Merton’s Creation Spirituality Journey, pp. 74f.

And Matthew Fox, Passion for Creation: The Earth-Honoring Spirituality of Meister Eckhart, pp. 279f., 289