Thoughts In Solitude by Thomas Merton

Author:Thomas Merton
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2011-04-13T16:00:00+00:00

XVII

It was necessary for Adam in Paradise to give the animals names. So too it is necessary for us to name the things that share our own silence with us, not in order to disturb their privacy or to disturb our own solitude with thoughts of them, but in order that the silence they dwell in and that dwells in them, may be concretized and identified for what it is. The beings that are in silence make silence real, for their silence is identified with their being. To name their being is to name their silence. And therefore it should be an act of reverence.

(Blessings make them more worthy of reverence.)

Prayer uses words to reverence beings in God. Magic uses words to violate the silence and the sanctity of beings by treating them as if they could be torn away from God, possessed, and vilely abused, before the face of His silence. Magic insults His silence by making it the mask of an intruder, of a malign power that usurps the throne of God and substitutes itself for His presence. But what can substitute itself for Him Who is? Only that which is not can pretend to usurp His place. In doing so, it only affirms Him all the more clearly for if you suppress that which is not from the phrase “is not” you are left with nothing but “IS.”

In the silence of God we have overcome magic by seeing through what is not there, and realizing that He Who IS, is closer to us than the “is not” that tries at all times to place itself between ourselves and Him.

His presence is present in my own presence. If I am, then He is. And in knowing that I am, if I penetrate to the depths of my own existence and my own present reality, the indefinable “am” that is myself in its deepest roots, then through this deep center I pass into the infinite “I Am” which is the very Name of the Almighty.

My knowledge of myself in silence (not by reflection on my self, but by penetration to the mystery of my true self which is beyond words and concepts because it is utterly particular) opens out into the silence and the “subjectivity” of God’s own self.

The grace of Christ identifies me with the “engrafted word” (insitum verbum) which is Christ living in me. Vivit in me Christus. Identification by love leads to knowledge, recognition, intimate and obscure but vested with an inexpressible certainty known only in contemplation.

When we “know” (in the dark certitude of faith illumined by spiritual understanding) that we are sons of God in the one Son of God, then we experience something of the great mystery of our being in God and God in us. For we grasp, without knowing how, the awe-inspiring and admirable truth that God, bending over the abyss of His own inexhaustible being, has drawn us forth from Himself, and has clothed us in the light of His truth,

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