New Seeds of Contemplation

324 Pages·2007·1.06 MB·English

by  Thomas 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 Paper-book 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
INTRODUCTION BY SUE MONK KIDD
PREFACE
AUTHOR’S NOTE
1 WHAT IS CONTEMPLATION?
2 WHAT CONTEMPLATION IS NOT
3 SEEDS OF CONTEMPLATION
4 EVERYTHING THAT IS, IS HOLY
5 THINGS IN THEIR IDENTITY
6 PRAY FOR YOUR OWN DISCOVERY
7 UNION AND DIVISION
8 SOLITUDE IS NOT SEPARATION
9 WE ARE ONE MAN
10 A BODY OF BROKEN BONES
11 LEARN TO BE ALONE
12 THE PURE HEART
13 THE MORAL THEOLOGY OF THE DEVIL
14 INTEGRITY
15 SENTENCES
16 THE ROOT OF WAR IS FEAR
17 HELL AS HATRED
18 FAITH
19 FROM FAITH TO WISDOM
20 TRADITION AND REVOLUTION
21 THE MYSTERY OF CHRIST
22 LIFE IN CHRIST
23 THE WOMAN CLOTHED WITH THE SUN
24 HE WHO IS NOT WITH ME IS AGAINST ME
25 HUMILITY AGAINST DESPAIR
26 FREEDOM UNDER OBEDIENCE
27 WHAT IS LIBERTY?
28 DETATCHMENT
29 MENTAL PRAYER
30 DISTRACTION
31 THE GIFT OF UNDERSTANDING
32 THE NIGHT OF THE SENSES
33 JOURNEY THROUGH THE WILDERNESS
34 THE WRONG FLAME
35 RENUNCIATION
36 INWARD DESTITUTION
37 SHARING THE FRUITS OF CONTEMPLATION
38 PURE LOVE
39 THE GENERAL DANCE
Introduction:
New Seeds of Contemplation
Sue Monk Kidd
I OPENED New Seeds of Contemplation for the first time during the winter of 1988 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.

Preface
THIS is not merely a new edition of an old book. It is in many ways a completely new
book. The full substance of the former work has been retained, only a sentence here and
there has been discarded. Minor corrections have been made in the original text, and
there have been very numerous additions. Almost every chapter has been considerably
expanded and several completely new chapters have been added. The purpose of this
revision was not simply to make a larger book out of a small one, but to say many new
things that could profitably be added to the old. And there was very good reason for
saying these new things within the context of what was said before, in a different way.
More than twelve years have passed between the first and second redactions of this
text. When the book was first written, the author had no experience in confronting the
needs and problems of other men. The book was written in a kind of isolation, in which
the author was alone with his own experience of the contemplative life. And such a
book can be written best, perhaps only, in solitude. The second writing has been no less
solitary than the first: but the author’s solitude has been modified by contact with other
solitudes; with the loneliness, the simplicity, the perplexity of novices and scholastics of
his monastic community; with the loneliness of people outside any monastery; with the
loneliness of people outside the Church….
As a result of this new perspective, many questions confronted the writer on taking
up this old work again. Not least was the very use of the word contemplation. It is a
misleading word in many respects. It raises great hopes that are all too likely to be
illusory because misunderstood. It can become almost a magic word, or if not magic,
then inspirational, which is almost as bad.
But the worst disadvantage of the word is that it sounds like “something,” an
objective quality, a spiritual commodity that one can procure, something that it is good
to have; something which, when possessed, liberates one from problems and from
unhappiness. As if there were a new project to be undertaken, among all the million
other projects suggested to us in our lifetime: to become contemplatives.
One of the things that was misleading about the earlier version of this work is that it
seemed to teach the reader “How to become a contemplative.” That was not the author’s
intention, because it is impossible for one man to teach another “how to become a
contemplative.” One might as well write a book: “how to be an angel.”
To refuse to use the word contemplation would make the task of revision impossible.
So the book has been revised in its own original terms. Explanations have been added,
and the first two chapters of the new book are devoted to some descriptive notes on the
contemplative experience which the reader will peruse at his own risk.
The first version of the book, without intending to be popular, was read by many. It
does not matter whether or not many read the second version, so long as it reaches some
of the few for whom it is intended. It is not intended for everybody. It is not intended
for all religious people. It is not addressed primarily to Catholics, though it should be