The Climate of Monastic Prayer by Thomas Merton

Author:Thomas Merton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liturgical Press
Published: 2018-03-19T16:00:00+00:00

XI

WHAT IS THE PURPOSE of meditation in the sense of “the prayer of the heart”? In the “prayer of the heart” we seek first of all the deepest ground of our identity in God. We do not reason about dogmas of faith, or “the mysteries.” We seek rather to gain a direct existential grasp, a personal experience of the deepest truths of life and faith, finding ourselves in God’s truth. Inner certainty depends on purification. The dark night rectifies our deepest intentions. In the silence of this “night of faith” we return to simplicity and sincerity of heart. We learn recollection which consists in listening for God’s will, in direct and simple attention to reality. Recollection is awareness of the unconditional. Prayer then means yearning for the simple presence of God, for a personal understanding of his word, for knowledge of his will and for capacity to hear and obey him. It is thus something much more than uttering petitions for good things external to our own deepest concerns.

Our desire and our prayer should be summed up in St. Augustine’s words: Noverim te, noverim me.38 We wish to gain a true evaluation of ourselves and of the world so as to understand the meaning of our life as children of God redeemed from sin and death. We wish to gain a true loving knowledge of God, our Father and Redeemer. We wish to lose ourselves in his love and rest in him. We wish to hear his word and respond to it with our whole being. We wish to know his merciful will and submit to it in its totality. These are the aims and goals of meditatio and oratio. This preparation for prayer can be prolonged by the slow, “sapiential” and loving recitation of a favorite psalm, dwelling on the deep sense of the words for us here and now.

In the language of the monastic fathers, all prayer, reading, meditation and all the activities of the monastic life are aimed at purity of heart, an unconditional and totally humble surrender to God, a total acceptance of ourselves and of our situation as willed by him. It means the renunciation of all deluded images of ourselves, all exaggerated estimates of our own capacities, in order to obey God’s will as it comes to us in the difficult demands of life in its exacting truth. Purity of heart is then correlative to a new spiritual identity—the “self” as recognized in the context of realities willed by God—Purity of heart is the enlightened awareness of the new man, as opposed to the complex and perhaps rather disreputable fantasies of the “old man.”

Meditation is then ordered to this new insight, this direct knowledge of the self in its higher aspect.

What am I? I am myself a word spoken by God. Can God speak a word that does not have any meaning?

Yet am I sure that the meaning of my life is the meaning God intends for it? Does God impose a meaning on

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