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Tuesday, May 6, 2008
8:46:59 PM EDT
Finca de Sueños Encontrados
It is in deep solitude that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brothers. The more solitary I am the more affection I have for them…. Solitude and silence teach me to love my brothers for what they are, not for what they say.
Thomas Merton
Do not allow yourself to be imprisoned by any affection. Keep your solitude. The day, if it ever comes, when you are given true affection there will be no opposition between interior solitude and friendship, quite the reverse. It is even by this infallible sign that you will recognize it.
Simone Weil
Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self.
Mary Sarton
The rain came. When it came, it came hard and the land was lit with a hundred fingers of light as the angels played in the sky. I could well imagine the sparks from a celestial horse race as the hooves stuck the stars and sparks flew from the running feet. Raindrops the size of small hail pounded against the windows and the dogs took cover. I hoped the wind did not pull the roof from the shed over the corrals.
Asthma attack or not, I opened the windows as soon as the worst of the storm passed to smell the freshness of the wet air which had blown in from the Gulf of Mexico and across Texas, to then be carried up against the mountains where it spun back east and opened in a torrent. Now everything is green. It greens fast here. The earth here does not waste and even the slightest drop of water is turned into a green leaf or a tiny bloom. Although it would be early this year, I am in hope that this is the beginning of the monsoon season, that time of the year when our weather flows from the south east and our water comes, sometimes in torrents like last night. When I was a child I loved the rain but then after living in Florida for twenty years began to take it for granted. Such a shame on me. Now I am learning to love rain again and understand its relationship to the earth. Joy on me.
Life on this small "Farm of Found Dreams," my Finca de Sueños Encontrados, is slowly turning from a life of loneliness, with all the desperation that entails, into a life of joyful solitude and in that solitude I am finding a richness that I have not enjoyed since childhood. It is not so much being a hermit, though those qualities are blooming and ripening, it is the fact that I am truly beginning to enjoy my “self” for the first time in many, many years. I find that the more I embrace solitude the more peace I have. I find I would like to live a life which instead of rushing out to the problems of the world I could spend more time working on the property and taking time to write.
Writing does not just occur on the page, the page is the fruit, it comes deep from the quietness of the soul. I think all art comes from there and the reason we are all not more creative is that we are over whelmed with our “busy-ness,” our searching “out there’ for the answers that God places “in here, “ in the relationship He has with us.
"We are so obsessed with doing that we have no time and no imagination left for being. As a result, men are valued not for what they are but for what they do or what they have-for their usefulness " -Thomas Merton.
Our busy-ness in the outer world drains us as all to often we allow the “world” to take pieces of us to meet its own purposes and in doing so we loose our peace. I think at times we take it all too seriously, trying to make up for those around us who we think do not take it seriously enough. In the end we loose our balance and the harmony needed to live a joyful life.
In my own struggle to find balance and harmony between the needs of others and the needs of my self I have found that solitude is essential and that solitude is distinctly different from loneliness.
Loneliness is the symptom of suffering. Suffering, and the despair accompanying it, is an attitude toward life we adopt, nothing more. Solitude is peace, a peace of connectedness to something larger than our self and in being connected, as Mary Sarton says, we find a a richness of the self. That too is simply an attitude we adopt.
I have come to disagree with the First Noble Truth I learned from the Buddha so long ago, “Life is suffering.” Life is not suffering, living apart from the Divine is suffering, life is simply what it is, some days hard and some days not. It is only when we live apart form the Divine that we feel alone and suffer. The Buddhist annihilation of the self is not the answer.
T"he truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering the more you suffer because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you in proportion to your fear of being hurt." Thomas Merton
Our separation from the Divine is the source of our suffering, our loneliness. Suffering and its symptom, loneliness, is simply our fear of our isolation, our separation, a feeling that we are not loved, that we do not matter in the universe. Suffering and loneliness also comes from placing too much power on the thoughts and feelings others have about us, our value placed in their hands, the hands of those just as afraid and lonely as we are. We forget they cannot fill that God sized and God shaped hole we all have in our soul. In the end, having too many people in one’s life to stop the “suffering” is like taking drugs, it simply wears one out, we awake hung over and emptied.
Many years ago a boy my daughter was dating asked me a simple question , “Have you ever lived alone?” I think now he was asking if I had come to peace with solitude. At the time I thought I had. Many times I lived on my own but looking back I had a pattern of searching for connection, much as I did even up until very recently. It was as if being “alone” was some failure on my part, now each day choosing solitude I know that solitude is not a failure but a choice to open oneself to something deeper, to connect with the secret well-spring of life. In that choice I find a deepening relationship with the Divine and even with myself and find what I was looking for all along an end to suffering.
Until now, no matter how many times I lived on my own I never lived in solitude. As Simone Weil aptly describes it, I was a prisoner of affection and I thought that affection would cure the ills in my soul. Affection is not love, however. Love comes from a different source and is not something we get it is something we give out of that secret well-spring only found solitude and our ability to walk with the Creator in the cool of the day.
We all need people in the right way, even hermits. I also know that real peace comes from accepting solitude. As a child, and even as a young man, I knew this but as family died and friends departed into their own lives I had a growing sense of “aloneness” which I hoped to fill with the creation of my own family and association with people. That is not the purpose of a relationship, a family or other people. Relationship, family, people are simply to be enjoyed, not used to heal the fears of our soul.
So today I can enjoy my self, this farm and this blessed rain and in my solitude know that I have God's companionship and His peace and it is enough. What more could anyone ask?
In His Service
Written by walaw717
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Monday, May 5, 2008
11:06:28 AM EDT
The Bleating of Sheep and Goats
In the last analysis, the individual person is responsible for living his own life and for "finding himself." If he persists in shifting his responsibility to somebody else, he fails to find out the meaning of his own existence. Thomas Merton
The sheep in the field across the street are bleating so loudly this morning that it is more like screaming. The goats in the fields beside me were doing the same last night, to a point I went out with my pistol to check to make sure a coyote was not in the neighborhood. I never discovered the cause of the seeming anxiety, even Movie had her head over the fence watching curiously. The weather here is trying to change, the sky this morning is gray and the humidity is up. The sheep and goats could be sensing the change.
We need a change. Our drought continues and fires have broken out all over the state. In the small section of the Southern Rockies called the Manzano Mountains, just south of Albuquerque, a fire has raged for two weeks now, driven by the wind to burn over 12,000 acres and at last count had destroyed fifty houses. On the Mescalaro Reservation in the next set of named mountains, the Sacramentos, is a 6,000 acre burn. East of here on the prairie toward Hobbs is a 2000 acre fire. It feels like New Mexico is burning and with the relative humidity in the single digits the place is a tender box. Even the irrigation of last month did not recover my pasture and I am watering with sprinklers to get the grass to grow.
I have not been out to any of these fires. I was called to the Hobbs fire but the call was canceled and we came back. That spared us a hundred mile drive and I was glad for that, I have been really tired lately. For the first time since I have moved to New Mexico my asthma has started and yesterday I seriously thought of heading for the ER but have had that type of chest pain before so didn't. I simply hit the inhalers and my neighbor gave me some stuff to help clear my lungs.
In this spiritual journey of rediscovery in this small isolated New Mexican town I have found myself and have found the meaning of my own existence and know that the daily events of life are good enough, the seeking, the desire for “I know not what” eases as I become clearer that the purpose of life just “is.” In the racket of farm animals, the hooting of train horns, the concern about the fires in the mountains of my new home state, the return of an illness so long gone I had forgotten I had it, in the ordinary is peace. It is good to know the meaning of one’s own existence and to know this is good enough.
I opened a journal site on AOL to keep these efforts at writing and I am not sure that I will use it even thought it is snappy looking once they are posted. Posting them is a lot of work and takes as much time as the writing. I think as with all things I was guided there to discover something else. In the last couple of weeks I have wondered about the point of all this writing, knowing full well that I am not to become the great American writer and that these small essays become as obscure as yesterdays news the minute I send them. In the AOL journal site I found other “writer’s” journals; a woman writing of the death of her mother, another writing of her failure at weight watchers, a cartoonist posting a daily cartoon. In reading these I realized that in these efforts is the reality of the meaning of life. We reach out to one another, we attempt to connect and share and say that our lives, our joys and our pain have meaning. And we hope someone reaches back.
I have reflected much on Merton this last week. I am finding that it is in the isolation of this desert town on a farm which is becoming my own hermitage that I find meaning and in the end I am living more like he did, a man in solitude. I understand why he stepped away from people, some of us simply need solitude.
“Not all men are called to be hermits, but all men need enough silence and solitude in their lives to enable the deep inner voice of their own true self to be heard at least occasionally. ... For he cannot go on happily for long, unless he is in contact with the springs of spiritual life which are hidden in the depths of this own true soul.” Thomas Merton
I am far from a hermit but I am finding that this isolated place is slowing me down, making me change my paceand in slowing my pace allowing me to re-find “self” and beyond that become clearer on the Divine. It is not an easy journey, I give up pain only with difficulty because, like all ordinary people, I want to cling to the known.
God continues to unfold memories, though, to replay my life. I can only assume He continues to work me through a life not understood and not fully appreciated.
This weekend He brought back a buried memory of meeting the poet Alan Ginsberg and chanting with Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche one night at Ohio State. Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche is considered to be a driving force in bringing Buddhism to the United States, a holy man with the reputation of a bit of a scoundrel. It seems those two characteristics are never too far apart. The chanting took place in a room of the student union, no chairs but hundreds of students sitting cross legged on the floor, Ginsberg and Trungpa Rinpoche sitting on an elevated platform. At the end of the chanting Ginsberg and Rinpoche walked directly to me and spoke to me briefly. I never quiet knew what that was about but translated it through my youthful homophobia into something it probably wasn't. I bolted without much listening to what they said missing an opportunity as they clearly reached out to me.
That night I got lost in the chanting and looking back I can see why so many of my generation or any generation get caught up in “cults.” For a moment in the chant there was emptiness and life’s pains vanished. Don't get me wrong, I am not saying Rinpoche started a cult, even in the Christian tradition we have our own chanting creating the same peace of unknowing. We are drawn to escape, to leave the seeming pain of life, and the hypnotic rhythms of the chant can serve as a drug if we are not aware of what we are doing and the real purpose of chant and plainsong, to reach out to God.
I went more deeply into the Buddhist spiritual tradition after that night. Studied martial arts off and on for a while as a way of trying to figure out how to be engaged in the world and be apart at the same time. I guess that is why I was eventually brought back to this Christian faith. God does not want us to be disengaged. Yes, there is a place and a time for retreat, even Jesus retreated to the desert, but God wants us to reach out and to be engaged with one another. I look at Michelangelo’s painting, "The Creation of Adam," and see a snapshot of how God wants to relate to us and how He wants us to relate to Him. A snap shot of how He wants us to relate to one another.
To be engaged. A phrase used by us to mark the beginning of a marriage, to be more than passing strangers, the beginning of union.
My neighbor tells me I have had a full life. I know I have done a lot of different things and in the process have helped and hurt a lot of people, it has not been a perfect life, it has simply been a life. In memories like the one of the night of chanting I realize that in my own small way I have “known” people, had adventures but although that had an excitement of its own, real life for me is now taking place on this farm in this small town. Meditation has become brushing the horse, picking up the stuff the pup destroys as he plays in the yard, pulling weeds and planting flowers. Real life is writing each day and reaching out waiting to see who reaches back.
Isn't that God’s pattern, using the wind to brush our hair, growing flowers to cover our destruction of the Earth, flowing rivers to nourish our bodies and souls, reaching out to us and wondering if we will reach back. Imagine for one moment that, as in Michelangelo’s painting, that God is immanent, the same size as you, a real person, and He is reaching out to you, would you reach back? Maybe He is and maybe you should. Maybe in that moment you will find yourself, if dare to look, dare to reach out.
In the mean time I hear the calling bleat of a lost sheep, reaching out to the others. I seem to remember that Jesus referred to us as lost sheep, I guess that country boy knew himself and others pretty well.
In His Service.
Tags: spirituality, Alan Ginsberg, Thomas Merton, Buddhism, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, sheep, personal growth, New Mexico, fires, Carlsbad, reaching outWritten by walaw717
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Sunday, May 4, 2008
11:38:35 AM EDT
Feeling Happy
Hearing Amr Diab Neoul Eah
Things of Small Value That Matter
Things of Small Value that Matter
"The things I thought were so important - because of the effort I put into them - have turned out to be of small value. And the things I never thought about, the things I was never able to either to measure or to expect, were the things that mattered."
Thomas Merton
The peach tree is a "fooler" this year, in spite of the drought and few blooms it is "peaching." I had given up on the peaches thinking that we were past the season, they are "early rubies," but actually they are right on time. The dry winter and the early heat create the impression that summer is already here when in fact even in this desert it is still just spring.
The pasture is recovering from the extra horses as is Movie, finally getting over her "snootiness" and realizing where her attention and feed come from, is becoming more civil to me. Purposely ignoring her while I went about my business seems to have brought her more to me than when I was so intent on "chasing" her. Maybe there is a lesson in that for me about all females. As difficult as it feels to me as she stands sad eyed at the gate, her hay ration needs to be cut even more, her efficient mustang genes converting even the smallest amount of grass and hay in to a big belly. Before the grass came in, her half rations had allowed her to begin to trim down. George Bush's tax bonus will go toward a new saddle, an Australian stock saddle, light in weight, 24 lbs, and a nice balance between my heavy western stock saddle (50 lbs) and the postage stamp dressage saddle I tried last year.
It is still a bit cool today and the water in the lower Tansill, the second and smaller lake in town made by damming the Pecos River, is sure to be cold but last week Cody was introduced to swimming and we need a follow up lesson today. I will don my waders and we will go into the pool just below the dam where there is a local flock of geese. Cody has some adolescent moments now, obedient mostly but pushing to assert himself in the pack. In the last week I have not had as much focus on his training as I would like. We are beginning to work on doubles and blind retrieves.
Jake just seems to take it all in stride. From the window I can watch him encourage Cody to do things in the yard that Jake knows he is not allowed to do and which will get Cody in trouble, like digging. He is also making a point to keep Cody in place. Jake roams the property as the king of the roost and has gotten more self important in his demeanor since I told him his job was to guard the property not to go to work with me like Cody does. I swear he understood what I said and he took it seriously, now he is more assertive toward those walking past the property and his barking has become a minor nuisance.
I picked up my mail yesterday. I have a bad habit of leaving it in the mail box until Saturday. Most of it was junk. My daughter sent a nice card announcing that they were having an adoption party, that was definitely not junk. I cherish her rare communications in any form.
Emma is official now, so I now have three grandchildren. I had already thought of her that way but at least now only the Lord can take her. I have mixed feelings for the birth family, having been on the other end of that conversation for many years, knowing how they feel. In this case the out of control drug addiction of the parents would have destroyed Emma and I know that this is best. My daughter is a good mother and works hard at it. I am happy for Emma, my daughter and her whole family. I was flying back to Florida this summer for a visit anyway and look forward to seeing all of them, this is simply a bonus.
Also there was a brochure from a travel company. The brochure offered a variety of international tours: Peru, New Zealand, China, just to name a few. I can see Chile for about 2000 dollars on a guided tour. I have in the past been disinclined to take tours but this packs a lot into eleven days, a stop in Buenos Aries, a cruse in Cape Horn, stopping near the town which is right now being buried by its own volcano (bet they change the itinerary) then on to Santiago. Each stop has guided tours. It seems a good introduction and preparation to a follow up trip to take on my own later to fly fish. I found it interesting that as I focused more on believing that I will go the Lord saw fit to get this in my mail box. I no longer believe in coincidence. He read my heart and sent me a message, now it is up to me.
Life and what we do in life is about attitude and belief. It is about what we value and focus upon. Most of us put our focus believing that we can't do things not realizing that if we make our minds up we can do anything we want, not everything we want, but anything we want. It is in believing and understanding that God knows our hearts and wants to fulfill our good desires. All to often he places the feast before us and then, we ignore it looking for a feast of our own preparation.
Jesus is quoted in the Gospel of Mark saying it this way,
Mar 11:22 "Have faith in God. Truly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, 'Be taken up and thrown into the sea,' and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him. Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours. And whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone, so that your Father also who is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses."
Believe you have received it, and it will be yours. I guess we have to figure out what really matters, what we value and what matters to Him and what He values and once we do that we must begin to believe in our heart that it "is" so, the blessings already are, "baruch bashan." We have to come to understand that our happiness is a matter of the small things in our lives being in balance, not a matter of the intensity we have, that God wants us to have joy and, though joy is sometimes found in the quiet of a church, God means us to live a life each moment, a life of balance, peace and harmony.
There is an old saying, "God is in the small things." This farm is full of small things all in balance everyday, it is only my own lack of balance and harmony which will make those small things invisible to me, much as God is only invisible to me when I am out of harmony and balance with His presence.
Working with damaged adolescents, I see the effort they create to have "intensity" thinking that when they feel that "intensity" they are then only truly alive. All too often they later complain because of that intensity and the chaos they create to have the intensity, draining them. Yet, they are unwilling to look at their desire for "intensity" as a part of the problem. Adults are however not much different than adolescents in this. I cannot tell how many times I have heard women say to me in my office that they want a man who can "dance" with them intensely, it is symbolic to them of "fun," "excitement" and "danger, " their words not mine. Yet they later complain that these same intense men are abusive to them as these same men cast around elsewhere for more and newer intense experiences because "she" is not enough. Intensity does wear off pretty quickly.
Intensity is not where peace is found and peace, though seemingly boring, really isn't. In fact it is the most valuable thing we have, the thing we in the end desire the most. It is where we find in our selves and the presence of God.
I have found on this small farm, this "finca" as the Spanish here call it, that so many of the things I thought were important are not and are of little value and small things which I never expected or respected really matter. Like the “peaching” of my tree, or the flash of green of a hummingbird in my honeysuckle, like the joy of a pup running circles chasing his tail or the pride of an old dog as he establishes his place in life.
Being away, so far away from family has also taught me that,
"We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone-we find it with another. Love seeks one thing only: the good of the one loved. It leaves all the other secondary effects to take care of themselves. Love, therefore, is its own reward."
Thomas Merton
My daughter and her husband adopting Emma is an good illustration of that, Emma's biological parent's drug addictions illustrate it as well.
I find it interesting that, like Merton, who realized this living in a monastery and later a hermitage, I too had to come to a place alone to find true perspective on the real value of relationship. I gained that by valuing the "first and primary relationship," that which when one is without no other relationship makes sense, a relationship with the living God. Only now can I truly understand that it is in loving Him that I really know how to love others, passionately as He loves me, not frenetically, not intensely, not excitedly but in balance and in harmony with the simple rhythms and pleasures of life.
In His Service.
Written by walaw717
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Saturday, May 3, 2008
9:41:06 PM EDT
Feeling Quiet
Thomas Merton
Having Also Climbed the Seven Story Mountain,
Reflections on Thomas Merton
What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone, in the forests, at night, cherished by this wonderful, unintelligible, perfectly innocent speech, the most comforting speech in the world, the talk that rain makes by itself all over the bridges, and the talk of the water courses everywhere in the hollows!
Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it. It will talk as long as it wants, this rain. As long as it talks I am going to listen.
-- Thomas Merton (Trappist monk and Catholic theologian), from Rain and the Rhinoceros)
I was in college when I first found Thomas Merton. I was a student at Ohio State University browsing in Long’s Book Store on a cold autumn afternoon. A picture of a bald, thin young man in white with a black cowl, the uniform of a Trappist monk was on the cover of a paperback pocket sized book, The Seven Story Mountain. I was fascinated by the thought, as I read, browsing the pages, that someone of such intense spirituality was so close to my own neighborhood, just down the road a few hundred miles in Kentucky. I bought that book and his Seeds of Contemplation. It was my first understanding that the spirituality I was looking for was not simply in exotic and distant lands but was local.
Merton introduced me to a different and contemporary Catholic mystical thought and laid the foundations for a long journey back to Christianity. He showed me that faith, even Christian faith, is truly ecumenical and that one can reach out across the artificial barriers of denomination and even religious practice and meet God.
In his life time he was often in conflict with those at the monastery due to his ecumenicalism, though now the monastery capitalizes on his fame and name. He grew deeply over the years in his faith and in his later years, those practicing the "narrow Christianity" he had stepped away from,often attempted to bring him back into the fold. Finally he moved out of the Chapter House and built his hermitage in the rolling hills of the monastery grounds. One of the last pictures I have seen of him is at his hermitage sitting under a tree, his monkish robes gone, dressed in the bib overalls of the local Kentucky farmers. If one were to meet him on the street one would have simply mistaken him for an ordinary man and not the internationally famous writer, priest and monk. Maybe that is really the spiritual message of life, the Divine lives in the ordinary.
I am not sure why Merton came to mind today. Maybe it is because I thought I refused the call he accepted. In my secret heart I felt a calling to a spiritual life and assumed it meant the priest hood or a ministry but being a priest or minister did not "fit" with the other desires of my heart. I thought that such a life would cramp my "style," not understanding that I could lead a deeply spiritual life and a perfectly ordinary life and God would fulfill my heart through both. I was afraid of the commitment I felt this spiritual calling was asking of me and I felt would miss something if I answered, yet it never went away no matter how much I ignored it. In the end, wrestling between the desire for a "muscular" outdoor and physical life and a quiet and contemplative life I almost missed both and also almost missed the most important thing as well, God is in the ordinary. That too was Merton's message.
So, I sit now on my little farm, my own small hermitage, in New Mexico and realize that the "holy life" was a life I was living all along and that the fight was mainly against myself. No matter the form my life/faith walk has taken it seems to inexorably to have moved me to be what I was in my secret heart and so now I live a somewhat monkish life, having fought it every step of the way and find myself come to accept it and in the accepting seeing things open to me which were only hopes and dreams: travel, home horses, friends, work that matters, a physical life and a contemplative life.
I have learned along the way that the spiritual life and mucular life are really one. The forms we take upon ourselves, our roles in life, are pretty meaningless, whether it is a wooded hermitage in Kentucky, an active priesthood in Manhattan, an artist or teacher in Florida or a busy psychotherapy practice in New Mexico. Our lives simply are the patterns of the expression of the Divine if we will only surrender to the will that guides our lives.
Like Jacob, maybe like you, I have wrestled with God and demanded that before I let Him go He bless me on my terms. It worked out for Jacob so I too refused to let go, only recently realizing the blessing comes once one lets go and that the blessing for Jacob, as for us, was in the ordinary world, not in some far off after death life.
I think we all are drawn to the spiritual life in some manner, called in some way. Our struggle is that we divorce the Divine from the ordinary. Merton stated once that advertisers treat products like we should treat the sacraments. We think that somehow "the world" that Jesus told us to be "in" but not "of " is either to be embraced or rejected, not realizing the world He spoke of is the world of selfishness and greed, not the world of God’s creation.
I have seen in others as well as myself the potential we all have to experience and express the Divine. I have wanted it all, not getting it all because I though it "all" was two separate things. In spite of myself, I have had a "full life," yet at times I catch myself thinking I have nothing to show, neither pew nor bank account. Other moments I think, What is there for any of us to show when we have everything to show by just being? Yesterday a hummingbird was in my back yard. A flash of green, a gentle blur on the landscape, is that not enough to have to show? Here and gone but glorious for the being.
The worst battles of our lives are within ourselves, our inability to surrender to good orderly direction and realize there is a balance in living life, not over embracing it and not rejecting it. Knowing that even the simple act of casting a lure to a bone fish, taking a child to school, holding the hand of a dying friend, photographing a bride on her special day, doing what we do well and as a service to others as the hummingbird draws nectar from the flower as a service to her young, is Divinity.
Life is strange. I am mystic, reprobate, husband, father, grandfather and bachelor. I am healer, scoundrel, cowboy, fly-fisherman, dog trainer, redneck and intellectual. The list goes on and I am certain that your list would be as long and varied if you made it. The labels and titles do not matter any more than the name hummingbird means to that flash of green, or Jehovah or Jesus or Christ or Vishnu or Brahma or Allah means to God. It is not in a name but in being that He and we matter.
Being is really best when focused on the ordinary where God is daily found. Even the hummingbird knows Divinity.
It is interesting to reconcile the opposites of my life - the mystic who is cowboy, the reprobate who is healer. I like both guys though the reprobate and the mystic, cowboy and healer coming together, seeming opposites, confuse me as well as you some days. In the reconciliation of opposites is the Divine.
Maybe I thought of Merton again because in this hermitage like farm and in the life I am beginning to live the conflict of self begins to reconcile. Like Merton, as I grow and deepen in my faith walk, I discover I am becoming an "ordinary local" training a gun dog, a horse in the back field, a part of the local flow and character indistinguishable from the ordinary, just one of the "boys."
Merton left the world to be closer to God in a monastery, in the end he traveled the world, meeting those from all walks of life and with his life, a very ordinary life, left a legacy to the world, touched the world. He lived a life of simplicity, chopping wood and drawing water. A mundane death, electrocuted while getting out of a bath in 1968, he left a life that was profound.
In the end Merton showed me the way, a man who left the world to find God and returned to the world an ordinary man, truly Godly in ways most still do not understand. I wish sometimes I had a chance to meet Merton but he was called home before I knew his story. I wonder what he was really like. I bet he was just an average guy like you and me, but different.
In His Service now, just like Merton, but different.
Formatia trans sicere educatorum
(enter all ye who seek knowledge)
Written by walaw717
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