Thomas Merton is simply a treasure, speaking profoundly to timeless questions and now particularly into the immediate moment with our nation endangered by hatred. This season, the next few days especially, cry for compassion toward persons caught, unconsciously or not, in the terrible web of hate. Merton points out how our perception of haters also usually reflects darkness in the beholder.
“It is not only our hatred of others that is dangerous but also and above all our hatred of ourselves: particularly that hatred of ourselves which is too deep and too powerful to be consciously faced. For it is this which makes us see our evil in others and unable to see it in ourselves” (New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 112).
Cleaning the mirror and “seeing into the mystery at the heart of life," then, marks an essential work of a person who hopes to pray, to contemplate, to draw nearer to the Divine. What a time this is!
I was drawn to his New Seeds of Contemplation because Richard Rohr and others reference it as a primary text in discerning the “False Self” and the “True Self.” The book has so many gems. Today I’m touched by his teaching on the nature of faith. Faith needed, perhaps most of all, in a darkened time.
“Too often our notion of faith is falsified by our emphasis on the statements about God which faith believes, and by our forgetfulness of the fact that faith is a communion with God’s own light and truth… But, above all, faith is the opening of an inward eye, the eye of the heart, to be filled with the presence of Divine light” (pp. 128, 130, New Seeds of Contemplation).
It’s a good season to listen for, to look for, and to soak up the special light, so manifest in the yellows of leaves, in the spaces created by fallen leaves, by the break in clouds and in the glistening given by stormy skies.
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