New Seeds of Contemplation

189 Pages·2007·0.86 MB·English

by  Merton

New Seeds of
Contemplation
Thomas Merton
Introduction by Sue Monk Kidd
TU QUI SEDES IN TENEBRIS
SPE TUA GAUDE:
ORTA STELLA MATUTINA
.
SOL NON TARDABIT
Copyright © 1961 by the Abbey of Gethsemani, Inc.
Introduction copyright © 2007 by Sue Monk Kidd
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, or television review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permision in writing from the publisher.
First published clothbound in 1962. First published as New Directions Paperbook 337 in 1972; reissued in 2007 as New Directions Paperbook 1091 with an Introduction by Sue Monk Kidd.
ISBN: 978-0-8112-1724-8
New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin
by New Directions Publishing Corporation,
80 Eighth Avenue New York 10011
Nihil obstat
James F. Rigney, S.T.D.
Censor Librorum
Imprimatur
Francis Cardinal Spellman
Archbishop of New York
EX PARTE ORDINIS
Nihil obstat
Fr. M. Paul Bourne, O.C.S.O.
Fr. M. Thomas Aquinas Porter, O.C.S.O.
Imprimi Potest
Fr. M. Gabriel Sortais
Abbot General
April 10, 1961
Contents
I S M K
NTRODUCTION BY UE ONK IDD
P
REFACE
A
UTHOR’S NOTE
1 W I C ?
HAT S ONTEMPLATION
2 W C I N
HAT ONTEMPLATION S OT
3 S C
EEDS OF ONTEMPLATION
4 E T I , I H
VERYTHING HAT S S OLY
5 T T I
HINGS IN HEIR DENTITY
6 P Y O D
RAY FOR OUR WN ISCOVERY
7 U D
NION AND IVISION
8 S I N S
OLITUDE S OT EPARATION
9 W A O M
E RE NE AN
10 A B B B
ODY OF ROKEN ONES
11 L T B A
EARN O E LONE
12 T P H
HE URE EART
13 T M T D
HE ORAL HEOLOGY OF THE EVIL
14 I
NTEGRITY
15 S
ENTENCES
16 T R W I F
HE OOT OF AR S EAR
17 H H
ELL AS ATRED
18 F
AITH
19 F F W
ROM AITH TO ISDOM
20 T R
RADITION AND EVOLUTION
21 T M C
HE YSTERY OF HRIST
22 L C
IFE IN HRIST
23 T W C S
HE OMAN LOTHED WITH THE UN
24 H W I N M I M
E HO S OT WITH E S AGAINST E
25 H D
UMILITY AGAINST ESPAIR
26 F O
REEDOM UNDER BEDIENCE
27 W I L
HAT S IBERTY?
28 D
ETATCHMENT
29 M P
ENTAL RAYER
30 D
ISTRACTION
31 T G U
HE IFT OF NDERSTANDING
32 T N S
HE IGHT OF THE ENSES
33 J W
OURNEY THROUGH THE ILDERNESS
34 T W F
HE RONG LAME
35 R
ENUNCIATION
36 I D
NWARD ESTITUTION
37 S F C
HARING THE RUITS OF ONTEMPLATION
38 P L
URE OVE
39 T G D
HE ENERAL ANCE
Introduction:
New Seeds of Contemplation
Sue Monk Kidd
I New Seeds of Contemplation for the first time during the winter of 1988
OPENED
while visiting Thomas Merton’s hermitage in the Kentucky woods about a mile
from the Abbey of Gethsemani. I’d made several trips to the monastery, but this
was my first to the small, cinder-block house where Merton lived for the last few
years of his life. I doubt there could be a more ideal location in which to read
Merton’s masterpiece on the contemplative life, but I’m pretty sure I could have
read the book on a bench in a shopping mall and it would have affected me
similarly—as an occasion of awe and awakening. As an event that changed me.
I cannot help feeling an inclination to describe my experience. I’m aware that
some believe it’s indecorous to refer to oneself while introducing the work of
another author, and still others insist that an introduction should steer away from
the narrative form. But, I’m a memoirist and a novelist. It’s my propensity both
to be personal and to tell a story.
When I made my pilgrimage to the hermitage, I was thirty-nine years old,
flailing about in a profusion of busyness, struggling to balance my roles as
mother, wife and writer, and keep pace with what seemed like a preposterous
assortment of demands. People were often surprised by my gravitation to
monasteries. I joked to them that my maiden name was, after all, Monk, and they
joked that I was just tired and wanted to go off somewhere and lie down.
My guide that day was a thin, amiable monk with horn-rimmed glasses. As we
set off from the monastery through the empty trees, he inquired how I’d become
interested in Merton.
“Reading The Seven Storey Mountain,” I told him. When he smiled, I added:
“That’s practically a religious cliche, isn’t it?”
I’d read the autobiographical account of Merton becoming a Trappist monk
ten years earlier at the age of twenty-nine. The book fairly stunned me. Having
grown up in a Baptist family in a small town in the South, I’d had no religious
orientation to the contemplative life, no idea about monasteries or what sort of
infectious mystery might compel someone to actually go to one.
Merton, himself, wrote about literature that “initiates” the reader into “the
ultimate cause of things,” calling it “wisdom literature,” and applying the term to
the work of Faulkner, for one. It was easy for me to apply the term to The Seven
Storey Mountain. My experience of reading it initiated me into my first real
awareness of the interior life, igniting an impulse toward being that I still felt a
decade later.
I’d gone on to read other of Merton’s books, mostly his journals, but
somehow, inexplicably, I hadn’t yet read New Seeds of Contemplation, which
was tucked in my purse, along with a small journal.
“So, for you, Merton was essentially a contemplative?” the monk said.
I nodded, startled slightly by the notion that Merton might be viewed as
anything else. (Later I would wonder if that wasn’t what my guide had in mind.)
I’d understood Merton almost exclusively as a man drawn by prayer, solitude
and silence, the real essence of his life and work rooted in his pull toward being.
As I would discover, however, the light of Merton can be both wave and
particle, one’s vision of him highly influenced by one’s own experience, need
and initiation. Merton was, in fact, multi-faceted, complex, even self-
contradictory, meaning he was able to hold within his extravagant personality a
wide range of ambiguities, paradoxes and selves. Out of the great fertility and
imagination of his soul rose a contemplative, monk, hermit, writer, poet, artist,
intellectual, cultural critic, dissident, peace activist, ecumenical seeker, lover of
nature and ordinary guy. A kind of Everysoul, he possessed an extraordinary
ability to connect with deep, universal places inside of people. His life became a
remarkably clear lens through which others glimpse their own self, especially the
self their soul most demands. So, even before we reached the hermitage, it
occurred to me I may have sculpted a personal image of Merton that had as
much to do with my own longing to be, as it did with his.
The hermitage was enclosed by drifting floes of brown leaves, its cement-slab
porch laden with firewood. I walked slowly through each room: a small kitchen;
a bedroom with a quilt-draped bed pushed against the wall; a tiny room used for
a chapel, its altar adorned with origami-shaped seed pods; a living room with a
fireplace, a shelf of books, a wooden rocker (was this where Jacques Maritain sat
on his visit here?), walking sticks propped in a corner, and an oil lamp on a desk
before the front window. It smelled heavily of wood smoke.
With a stretch of time to myself, I settled at the desk and pulled New Seeds of
Contemplation from my bag. In its pages I discovered Merton’s powerful
evocations on the true self.
Our vocation is not simply to be, but to work together with God in the creation
of our own life, our own identity, our own destiny.… To work out our identity in
God. (32)
I’ve never attempted to describe the experience I had upon reading that
passage. Even now, so many years later, I don’t know what to say about it except
that it caused something hidden at the core of me to flare up and become known.
If my reading of The Seven Storey Mountain inducted me into the mysteries of
the interior life, waking an urge to be, New Seeds of Contemplation initiated me
into the secrets of my true identity and woke in me an urge toward realness.
While seated at the desk, I copied a number of sentences from the book into
the journal, which I recently dug out of its long obscurity in the back of a closet
in order to read again. The lines I chose to write down reveal my own subjective
experience with the book. They seem to me now like tiny panes through which I
can glimpse the intimate yearnings of an earlier self.
I copied this rather telling passage:
Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self … We are not
very good at recognizing illusions, least of all the ones we cherish about
ourselves. (34)
And this one:
Contemplation is not and cannot be a function of this external self. There is an
irreducible opposition between the deep transcendent self that awakens only in
contemplation, and the superficial, external self which we commonly identify
with the first person singular. (7)
And this, which is written on a page by itself, surrounded by astonished, blank
space:
Our reality, our true self, is hidden in what appears to us to be nothingness …
We can rise above this unreality and recover our hidden identity…. (281) God
Himself begins to live in me not only as my Creator but as my other and true
self. (41)
My last excerpt captured the polarity I felt inside.
We have the choice of two identities: the external mask which seems to be real
… and the hidden, inner person who seems to us to be nothing, but who can give
himself eternally to the truth in whom he subsists. (295)
As I read, my understanding of Merton and the spiritual life began to pivot.
Who am I? Who is my real self? How shall I become that self? The questions
suddenly seemed to form the nucleus of Merton, and somehow, the nucleus of
me, too. The shift that occurred in me had to do with discovering an intention of
contemplation previously unknown to me—the process of confronting the false
self, the illusions and tenacity of the ego, and finding and surrendering to the
true self. Merton poetically referred to it as a movement from opaqueness to
transparency.
Again Merton’s wisdom literature had taken me into the ultimate cause of
things. The encounter has impacted my spirituality and my writing to this day.
Not long ago, as I recovered the little journal containing the passages I’d
inscribed, a photograph tumbled from inside the cover. It was a picture of me
standing on the hermitage porch, burrowed in a white coat, looking young and
noviciate. Gazing at it nearly twenty years later, I was struck by the realization
that I’d read New Seeds of Contemplation several times since then, experiencing
the book differently each time: as a classical, theological work on the nature of
contemplation, as a collection of personal meditations that tend the soul, as a
mystical vision of what Merton called the “cosmic dance.” Yet, I savor most that
reading in 1988 when my first awareness of the true self appeared in the portal
of a winter afternoon.