Book 5  - Spiritual masters for All Seasons by Michael Ford published Hidden Spring 2009

This book explores the work of Thomas Merton, Henri Nouwen, Anthony de Mello and John O’Donahue

We shall look at the first of these two in this introduction to the book

 

Dark Night of the Soul expert

 

“Thomas Merton was, then, one of the greatest exponents of the apophatic tradition in Christian spirituality, a guide to those who experience crises of faith and doubt in their lives. Echoing the mystical theology of St John of the Cross, Merton speaks of he “curtain of darkness, “ the “night of aridity and faith”, and the “power of an obscure love”. The Dark Night is a turning point on the spiritual journey as we are beckoned to move away from our safety and defences, beyond our limits and beyond ourselves. The way of faith involves travelling by night. The closer we get to God, the less our faith is diluted with the half-light of created images and concepts. The more obscure the path becomes, the greater the certainty. While the journey may cause anguish and doubt, it is in the deepest darkness that we possess God most fully. We are filled with God’s infinite light, which, to our own reasoning, seems like pure darkness”. P 27

 

“Merton realized that women and men could exist almost entirely at the superficial level without an awareness of the inner depths of their being. But there could be no real love of life unless it were orientated towards the discovery of one’s true, spiritual self, a process often hampered, if not blocked, by a perfunctory concentration on external joys and fears. But when the road toward interiority was opened up and people began to live in communion with the unknown in them, they would taste freedom.

As the core of Merton’s spirituality lies the distinction between our real and false selves. The false self is the identity we assume in order to function in society, the springboard of all our egocentric desires such as honour, power and knowledge. We expend our energies constructing this nothingness into something objectively real. If we take our masks to be our true faces, observes Merton, we will protect them with the bandages of pleasures and glory, even at the cost of violating our own truth. If we do not know who we are, it is because we live out the fantasies of what everyone else wants us to be. But the real self, toward which we should move, is a religious mystery known only in its entirety to God. The deep secrecy of our own being if often hidden from us by our own estimates or illusions of what we are. The way to find the real “world” is not about observing what is outside us but about discovering our inner ground. For that, says Merton, is where the world is first and foremost – in our deepest selves. It is not a visible, determined structure with fixed laws but a living and self-creating mystery of which we are all a part and to which we have our own unique doors.

 

 

Merton writes

“The only true joy on earth is to escape from the prison of our own false self and enter by love into union with Life who dwells and sings within the essence of every creature and in the core of our own souls. In His love we possess all things and enjoy fruition of them, finding Him in them all. And thus as we go about the world, everything we meet and everything we see and hear and touch, far from defiling, purifies us and plants in us something more of contemplation and of heaven. Short of this perfection, created things do not bring us joy but pain. Until we love God perfectly, everything in the world will be able to hurt us. And the greatest misfortune is to be dead to the pain they inflict on us, and not realise what it is””   p.29

 

“Merton encouraged people to listen to their inner voice and not imitate the behaviour of people around them. Merton’s life had been a love affair with God. Every now and then God did that, said Father Matthew. “He was a man of God and he realised how funny God was because he was just an ordinary man. There was nothing special about him”. P.29

 

Merton wrote much about prayer and the power of contemplation

“Contemplation is more than a consideration of abstract truths abou God, more even than affective meditation on the things we believe. It is awakening, enlightenment and the amazing intuitive grasp by which love gains certitude of God’s creative and dynamic intervention in our daily life. Hence contemplation does not simply “find” a clear idea of God and confine Him within the limits of that idea, and hold Him there as a prisoner to Whom it can always return. On the contrary, contemplation is carried away by Him into His own realm, His own mystery and His own freedom. It is a pure and virginal knowledge, poor in concepts, poorer still in reasoning, but able, by its very poverty and purity, to follow the Word “wherever He may go”.” P.33

 

Merton also wrote much about the importance of solitude, but a sort of solitude that brings you closer to God and to your fellow man and woman:

“Some men have perhaps become hermits with the thought that sanctity could only be attained by escape from other men. But the only justification for a life of deliberate solitude is the conviction that it will help you to love not only God but also other men. If you go into the desert merely to get away from people you dislike, you will find neither peace nor solitude; you will only isolate yourself with a tribe of devils.

Man seeks unity because he is the image of the One God. Unity implies solitude, and hence the need to be physically alone. But unity and solitude are not metaphysical isolation. He who isolates himself in order to enjoy a kind of independence in his egotistical and external self does not find unity at all, for he disintegrates into a multiplicity of conflicting passions and finally ends in confusion and total unreality. Solitude is not and never can be a narcisstic dialogue of the ego with itself.” P.37

 

Thomas Merton saw the secular,modern world as still having distinctly religious characteristics. He wrote this

“Businesses are in reality quasi-religious sects. When you go to work in one you embrace a new faith. And if they are really big business, you progress from faith to a kind of mystique. Belief in the product, preaching the product, in the end the product becomes the focus of a transcendental experience. Through “the product” one communes with the cast forces of life, nature, and history that are experienced in business. Why not face it? Advertising treats all products with the reverence and the seriousness due to sacraments.” P 40

 

Merton wrote: “The message of hope the contemplative offers you is…is not that you need to find your way through the jungle of language and problems that today surround God: but that whether you understand or not, God loves you , is present to you, lives in you, dwells in you, calls you, saves you, and offers you an understanding and light which are like nothing you ever found in books or heard in sermons. The contemplative has nothing to tell you except to reassure you and say that, if you dare to penetrate your own silence and risk the sharing of that solitude with the lonely other who seeks God through you, then you will truly recover the light and the capacity to understand what is beyond words and beyond explanations because it is too close to be explained: it is the intimate union in the depths of your own heart, of God’s Spirit and your own secret inmost self, so that you and He are in all truth One Spirit.” P 55

 

Rowan Williams writes how anti-semitism in the Middle Ages by the church to Jews was a projection of the church’s “shadow”

“In Conjectures, Merton is very aware of society’s scapegoating instinct. It would be fascinating to put him alongside someone like Rene Girard in analysis there but he does have that sense that we consistently deal with our problems by projection. He comments fascinatingly in Conjectures that the profound and violent anti-semitism of the early Middle Ages in the Western church went with a kind of adoption of an Old Testament view of what the church was – the church identifying itself as the chosen people of God, on the march, heavily armed. He uses that as a way of saying that we project onto others the unacceptable image that we are, in fact, inhabiting ourselves. We see in others the unacceptable image that we are, in fact, inhabiting ourselves. We see in others the unacceptable face of what we are. There is a great deal there for us think about. All that he wrote about the Cold War is connected with that kind of analysis of displacement, scapegoating, projection and the “mimetic quality of violence” to quote Girard. We are violent because we learn violence from the other and we go on mirroring that backward and forward to infinity if we are not broken out of it.” P 58

 

 

 

Rowan Williams also writes about how solitude for Merton was a way of discovering more about himself and can do the same for us

 

“Far from being an evasive term, solitude is all about coming to terms with a lot most people don’t want to see. Therefore solitude is the deepest kind of connection, a familiar paradox. I think what he is saying here is that we all need to be quiet enough to be subject to our own scrutiny. For Christian and non-Christian alike, this is an absolute lifeline of sanity in a world which often encourages us not to face what we don’t want to look at in ourselves and so gives us endless distractions to prevent that happening”. P 60

 

Henri Nouwen – Trusting the Heart

Nouwen decided to follow a team of South African trapeze artists for a series of European tours. He said he was struck by the courage of performers who danced in the air. The fliers lived dangerously until they were caught by the strong hands of their partners. It was a feat of trust.

As Nouwen observes “Before they can be caught, they must let go. They must brave the emptiness of space.

Living with this kind of willingness to let go is one of the greatest challenges we face. Whether it concerns a person, possession or personal reputation, in so many areas we hold on at all costs. We become heroic defenders of our dearly gained happiness. We treat our sometimes inevitable losses as failures in the battle of survival.

The great paradox is that it is in letting go, we receive. We find safety in unexpected places of risk. And those who try to avoid all risk, those who would try to guarantee that their hearts will not be broken, end up in a self-created hell” p.67

 

Dying is trusting in the catcher

“Dying is trusting in the catcher. To care for the dying is to say “Don’t be afraid. Remember that you are the beloved child of God. He will be with you when you make your long jump. Don’t try to grab him; he will grab you. Just stretch out your arms and hands and trust, trust, trust.” P.68

 

The heart as the source of our physical, emotional, intellectual, volitional and moral energies.

“A mystic of moods and feelings, Henri Nouwen claimed the heart as the source of our physical, emotional, intellectual, volitional, and moral energies. The way to God was only through the hear. He followed the teachings of the desert fathers who said that to enter the heart was to enter the kingdom of God. He liked to quote the Russian mystic Theopan the Recluse: “To pray is to descend with the mind into the heart, and there to stand before the face of the Lord ever present, all-seeing within you”. In “The Way of Heart” Nouwen writes

“From the heart arise unknowable impulses as well as conscious feelings, moods, and wishes. The heart too has its reasons and is the centre of perception and understanding. Finally, the heart is the seat of the will: it makes plans and comes to good decisions. Thus the heart is the central and unifying organ of our personal life”

No stranger to the paralyzing power of fear, Nouwen was not afraid, though, to share his vulnerability on the page, swiftly gaining respect as a tried and tested “wounded healer” who understand the complex dymanics of the human heart as the intimate core of personal experience and encounter with God. For him, insecurity was not simply an expression of neurosis but a vocation that could lead to a deep spiritual life. The challenge for Nouwen always revolved around the need to become so convinced of God’s love for him that human affirmations were not necessary. But it proved to be a lifelong battle.” P. 69

 

Nouwen was in favour of the role of solitude

“Like Merton, whose influence is always noticeable, Nouwen has an acute sense of calling and an openness to the process of conversion, not least through solitude, which is not a therapeutic retreat center in the country but a critical place where the old self can die and the new self can be born. It is where Christ remodels us in his own image and liberates us from the compulsions of the world. Solitude is the way in which we can grow into the realization that where we are most alone, we are most loved by God. It is a quality of the heart that helps us accept our aloneness as a divine gift. Then it becomes possible to convert the aloneness into deep solitude from where we can reach out to others. In this way, a healthy sense of community can be realized because people are not clinging to one another out of loneliness.”

“Loneliness is about feeling isolated and separate”, he said. “Solitude is about dealing with your aloneness in a positive way. You say “I feel alone but I am well. I claim my aloneness. I embrace it as a source of life” To speak about solitude is basically making a print of the negative which is loneliness. It’s a way of living and can take a lifetime. Every day I feel lonely again. Every moment that is new, I discover my loneliness into solitude. The whole spiritual life is a constant choice to let your negative spiritual experiences become an opportunity for conversion and renewal, whether it’s despair, doubt, loneliness, sexual confusion, or anger. We have to really look at these, not put them away and live virtuously. It’s much more like trusting that, if I embrace my loneliness, depression and struggle in faith that somewhere, in the middle, I find light and hope.

“In the world sadness and gladness are always separate. If you are sad, you cannot be glad. If you are glad you cannot be sad. We say “Be happy so we can forget all our troubles.” In the spiritual life it’s precisely the opposite. Sadness and gladness can never be separate. You embrace your sadness and trust that, right there, you will find gladness. That is what the cross is all about. You look at the cross, a sign of execution, pain and torture. But you say “Well, the cross is my hope. The cross is a source of life for me. The cross brings me joy.” By embracing the pan you are speaking about joy. That’s a very, very spiritual thing.” P 71

 

 

Nouwen taught that God is love

“A vibrant communicator of the Christian faith, Nouwen taught that the spiritual life was one guided by the Spirit of God, the same Spirit that had guided the life of Jesus. Spiritual discipline was the concentrated effort to create space where the Spirit of God could touch, guide, and lead people to unexpected places where they found themselves no longer in control. The core experience of Jesus’ public life was his baptism in the Jordan when he had heard the affirmation: “You are my beloved on whom my favour rests.” The entire life of Jesus had been about claiming that identity in the midst of everything. Prayer was about listening to the voice that called each person the beloved. It meant opening your heart in order to enter into communion with the one who loved you before you could love. This “first love” was disclosed to us in prayer. Nouwen believed we should go back time and again to that first love in which we were created, redeemed and made holy. As an act of returning, prayer was about constantly going back to the truth of our spiritual identity and claiming it for ourselves. That was the meaning of faith. A contemplative discipline required people to divest themselves of all false belongings and identities so that they could become free to belong to God and God alone. Each person was a different refraction of the same love of God, the same light of the world, coming toward us. “We can’t see God in the world”, he would say. “Only God can see God in the world. If I have discovered God as the center of my being, then the God in me recognises God in the world. Do we see God with our own eye that wants to please or control – or with God’s eye?

A preacher with a message independent of any theological movement, Nouwen believed the future of Western Christianity depended on the ability of people to live mystically The antithesis of any form of religious fundamentalism, this meant journeying by blind faith, not proseltyzing with shall certainties. The mystical life was one in which people could move away from illusion and through periods of darkness and doubt, grow into a true relationship with the divine. He said that when Christianity failed to claim the truth that everything was in God, it lost its transforming power and was little more than a series of moral obligations. And in order to thwart demonic manipulation, the spiritual life required people to practice a constant vigilance, deepening and enlivening the presence of God in their hearts.” P 73

 

 

 

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Deconditioning the Mind – Antony de Mello

 

De Mello ways we need to become like Christ internally

“You know sometimes people want to imitate Christ but, when a monkey plays a saxophone, that doesn’t make him a musician. You can’t imitate Christ by imitating his external behaviour. You’ve got to be Christ. Then you’ll know exactly what to do in a particular situation, given your temperament, your character, and the character and temperament of the person you’re dealing with. No one has to tell you. But to do that you must be what Christ  was. An external limitation will get you nowhere.” P 103

 

De Mello is heavily influenced by Buddhism

“De Mello proposes a four-step guide to wisdom, which involves first getting in touch with negative feelings (such as self-hatred or guilt) we might not even be aware of. We have, then, to grasp the fact that the feeling is in us and not in reality. The third step is to stop identifying with the feeling that has nothing to do with the “I”. We should not define our intrinsic selves with any such feeling. We should say, “I am experiencing depression”, rather than “I am depressed”. The final step lies in recognising the need for change in ourselves rather than in others. We always want someone else to change, says de Mello, so that we will feel good. But we ourselves need to medicine. The mystics did not say “I feel good because the world is right” but “The world is right because I feel good.”

“De Mello insists we will feel more at ease with the people around us when we are no longer afraid of being hurt or not liked – or when we overcome the desire to impress or rid ourselves of the compulsion to explain or apologise. Nobody ever rejects us. They merely reject what they think we are. By the same token, nobody ever accepts us either. Asleep, they simply affirm the image they have constructed of us. Although being woken up is not always pleasant, it is easier to love others when we no longer identify with what we image they are or they imagine us to be.” P 106

 

The Path of True Happiness

“De Mello distinguishes between acquired happiness (material accumulation, academic success, career promotion, pleasures of body and mind, recognition and fame) and real happiness (a state of mind in which people experience peace, joy, contentment, love, compassion and thanksgiving – all in one). Acquired happiness is fleeting and as it passes from our grasp the thirst for more intensifies. It creates suffering in the form of frustration, depression, or even suicide. While happiness cannot be purchased with money or power, it can be experienced in the here and now as well as in eternity.” P 107

“He makes a careful distinction between pain and suffering. In life pain is inevitable, part of the process of living. But if people immunize themselves against all pain, they will never grow. Pain comes from the outside and is not of a person’s making. Suffering, on the other hand, arises from within and should be avoided and eliminated.” P 107

Suffering caused by attachment

 

“Suffering is caused by attachment which is the craving for possessing (or the craving for shunning) someone on something. As people expect to be happy according to their own models of happiness, attachment can manifest itself in two ways: in craving for a desire object like a new partner – or by craving to eliminate an undesired object. For example, “I like Jane but hate Juliette. I seek the company of Jane to make myself important”. That is attachment. But “I seek all means to push out Juliette because I hate her age and appearance” is also attachment in de Mello’s eyes because it implies that “I believe that I will be happy when I will have eliminated her (the undesired object).

People become programmed through attachments in the form of expectations toward oneself and toward others, and expectations of others toward oneself and toward one’s life. But in trying to find meaning in their lives in this way people become only restless and unsatisfied. What they are seeking is not happiness (joy, peace and contentment) but their own distorted idea of happiness, which they keep craving for through attachments. Developing the Ignatian principle of discernment, de Mello teaches that the way out of such psychological imprisonment is through self-observation and by being challenged. This leads to detachment. A detached person is free. There is joy in possessing the objects of a person’s desires but joy also when a person does not possess them. Success and failure can, therefore, be received with equal pleasure” p 109

 

Heavy influence from Buddhism

 

Also a need to recognise our humanity

“For de Mello, the more human you became, the more in touch you were with God. Searchers of the spiritual, haunted by the memory of disturbing religious imagery or oppressive preachers of their past, found solace in the reassuring waters of Anthony de Mello, who tossed overboard jargon that he felt had been overused or misused in religious upbringing” p 111

 

“De Mello was the ultimate nonfundamentalist but, at the same time, not a relativist. He was in search of the living God and came in touch with God through other people.” P.116

 

“According to de Mello, awareness leads to the inner discovery that everything has a beginning, a moment of becoming, and an end. The world is transitory and flows like a river. This inner realization creates a freedom that is the experience of true happiness, the crowning point of the spiritual life, causing a person to marvel at creation, wonder at beings and be grateful to God for his continuous grace. Salvation and freedom begin, then, in the here and now when life is celebrated as a wellspring of joy and love. Nothing really changes through enlightenment, but the world is seen through new eyes.” P 116

 

Religious beliefs and signposts

“A religious belief is a signpost pointing the way to the truth, remarks de Mello in one of his books. When you cling to the signpost, you are prevented from moving toward the truth because you think you have found it already” p 120

 

De Mello speaks prophetically into our age, using a language which is appealing to the non religious person

“Describing de Mello as a “fire-maker from the East”, Anand Nayak said that, far from being a danger to the church, he was a prophetic and mystical teacher whose works had brought immense help and healing to vast numbers. He incorporated religious concepts and themes into his teachings, not to fuel theological debate, but to help free people from fear and anguish “in order to lighten their burden created through imaginary and structural conditions and to give people a taste for life and a joy for living.” P 130

 

All will be well

Spirituality for Anthony de Mello was always a process of waking up, and his message of inner liberation could not be more germane to these times. He stresses that all mystics are united in the belief that all is ultimately well. “Though everything is a mess, all is well”, de Mello writes. “Strange paradox to be sure. But, tragically, most people never get to see that all is well because they are asleep. They are having a nightmare….” P 131

 

John O’Donohue

 

Donohue writes about the effect of modernity on our spirituality

“In the post-modern world the hunger to belong has rarely been more intense, more urgent. With many of the ancient traditional shelters now in ruins, it is as if society has lost the art of fostering community. Consumerism propels us towards an ever more lonely and isolated existence. As consumerism numbs our longing, our sense of belonging becomes empty and cold. And although technology pretends to unite us, more often than not all it delivers are simulated images that distance us from our lives. The “global village” has no roads or neighbours; it is a faceless, impersonal landscape from which all individuality has been erased. Our politicians seem devoid of imagination and inspiration, while many of the keepers of the great religious traditions now appear to be little more than frightened functionaries. In a more uniform culture, the management skills they employ would be efficient and successful. In a pluralistic and deeply fragmented culture, they are unable to speak to the complexity of our longings” p 139

 

Michael Ford on O’Donohue

 

“In his writings O’Donohue recognizes that the human soul is hugry for beauty, seeking it through landscape or the arts, companionship or religion. When we encounter the Beautiful, there is a sense of homecoming. We feel most alive in its presence because it meets the needs of the soul. In the experience of beauty, we awakes and surrender in the same act and become aware of the new ways of being in the world. The wonder of the Beautiful is its ability to surprise.

The Greek for “the beautiful” is to kalon, related to the world kalein, which includes the notion of “call”. O’Donahue says that when we experience beauty, we feel called to an awakening of a forgotten brightness. The beauty of the earth is a constant play of light and dark, the visible and the invisible, yet beauty is always more than the senses can perceive. Beauty awakens the soul, and its entrance is the imagination:

“When we bring in the notion of the imagination, we begin to discover a whole new sense of God. The emphasis on guilt, judgement and fear begins to recede. The image of God as a tabloid moral accountant peering into the regions of one’s intimate life falls away. The notion of the Divine Imagination brings out the creativity of God, and creativity is the supreme passion of God.”

This insight always needs to be balanced against the unknown in God, which remains “beyond the furthest dream of the mind’s light”. The creation of the world is not God’s desire for experimentation. On the contrary, like an artist, God follows his imagination and reaches towards expression:

“Everything that is – every tree, bird, star, stone and wave – existed first as a dream in the mind of the divine artist. Indeed, the world is the mirror of the divine imagination and to decipher the depths of the world is to gain deep insights into the heart of God. The traces of the divine imagination are everywhere. The beauty of God becomes evident in the beauty of the world.”

O’Donahue told me that he felt religion had become unpopular because, in its obsession with morality, rules and regulations, it had forgotten “the beauty of the mystical flame which is at the heart of it”. In ecological terms, he saw how so much modern development had desecrated the earth, turning it into a wasteland because there had been a failure to recognize the sheer beauty of nature. Beauty had become confused with glamour. Glamour was a multimillion dollar industry that thrived on dislocating or unhousing people from their own bodies and transferring all the longing toward the perfection of image. Glamour was insatiable because it lacked interiority. Beauty was a more sophisticated and substantial presence with an eternal heart – a threshold place where the ideal and the real touched each other. People on the bleakest frontiers of desolation, deprivation and povery were often sustained by small glimpses of beauty.

One of the deepest longings of the human heart, he said, was for real presence, the goal of trust, the ideal of love, and intentionality of prayer here and in the beatific vision herafter.” P 145-146

 

Modern society had become spiritually bankrupt

“Echoing Merton, O’Donahue critiqued modern society as a place where people appeared to inhabit the world of absence, rather than presence, because of technology and virtual reality. Its driven nature turned women and men into the ultimate harvesters of absence. They emerged as ghosts in their own lifetimes. The postmodern mind, particularly, was homeless, haunted by a sense of absence that it could neither understand nor transfigure. Many of the traditional shelters had collapsed. Religion, at least in its official presentation, seemed increasingly to speak in an idiom that was unable (or perhaps unwilling) to converse with the spiritual hunger of the age. Politics appeared devoid of vision and was becoming more and more synonymous with economics. Consumerist culture worshiped accumulation and power, arrogantly creating “its own hollow and gaudy hierarchies””. P 147