New Seeds of Contemplation

New Seeds of Contemplation
by Thomas Merton

Completed July 2001

I cannot claim to really understand New Seeds of Contemplation. Merton is a deep writer. He's grappling with a topic -- how to bring oneself closer to God in what he terms as contemplation -- a topic which he is the first to admit cannot be written about in a straight-forward way. This work is interesting and challenging...and would probably lend itself to continual re-reading, as I don't think that I understood and really processed even a small fraction of what is here. I understood many of the more specific insights and exhortations, but really only grasped a part of the more significant piece (peace) which can't be captured in a quotation or in a synopsis. Read the book and you will take away a sense of a different way to live life, to love life by learning and loving God's will in your life.

Some of Merton's individual passages are exceedingly clear and helpful to our daily lives, though. For instance, when he writes about the balance of the spiritual and contemplative life with the life of work to which God calls us, he says:

When I act as His instrument my labor cannot become an obstacle to contemplation, even though it may temporarily so occupy my mind that I cannot engage in it while I am actually doing my job. Yet my work itself will purify and pacify my mind and dispose me for contemplation. Unnatural, frantic, anxious work, work done under pressure of greed or fear or any other inordinate passion, cannot properly speaking be dedicated to God, because God never wills such work directly (p. 19).

As I have struggled a lot with this issue -- balancing work with a more contemplative spirituality -- I found this particularly true.

Merton talks a fair amount about humility, too: "A man becomes a saint not by conviction that he is better than sinners but by the realization that he is one of them, and that all together need the mercy of God!" (p.57). I've heard it said (and it's not surprising from having read this book), that Merton struggled a lot with humility. I thought this passage, in which he connects humility with love was particularly meaningful...pride IS "the heaviest of burdens," in that it becomes an obstacle to love:

But give me the strength that waits upon You in silence and peace. Give me humility in which alone is rest, and deliver me from pride which is the heaviest of burdens. And possess my whole heart and soul with the simplicity of love. Occupy my whole life with the one thought and the one desire of love, that I may love not for the sake of merit, not for the sake of perfection, not for the sake of virtue, not for tthe sake of sanctity, but for You alone (p. 45).

Merton's advice on humility is not purely philosophical, either. I was particularly convicted by his articulation of one of the symptoms of pride, one of the side effects of a person living their life with a lack of humility: "every moment of the day will bring him some frustration that will make him bitter and impatient and in his impatience he will be discovered" (p. 58). Too often, my days are filled with impatience, and I think Merton is partly (maybe entirely) correct that the impatience is really an ego response.

Merton is a master of the insightful sentence, too. A few samples:

"It is the rankling, tormenting sense of unworthiness that lies at the root of all hate" (p. 74).
"At the root of all war is fear: not so much the fear men have of one another as the fear they have of everything" (p. 112).
"Hell is where no one has anything in common with anybody else except the fact that they all hate one another and cannot get away from one another and from themselves" (p. 123).
"Until a man yields himself to God in the consent of total belief, he must inevitably remain a stranger to himself, an exile from himself, because he is excluded from the most meaningful depths of his own being: those which remain obscure and unknown because they are too simple and too deep to be attained by reason" (p. 137).
"A man who is not humble cannot accept praise gracefully" (p. 188).

And for someone (me!) who enjoys solitude, this was a good reminder: "the man who locks himself up in private with his own selfishness has put himself into a position where the evil within him will either possess him like a devil or drive him out of his head. That is why it is dangerous to go into solitude merely because you like to be alone" (p. 79).

Finally, Merton's prose is at times both beautiful and compelling. One of my favorite passages:

Souls are like wax waiting for a seal. By themselves they have no special identity. Their destiny is to be softened and prepared in this life, by God's will, to receive, at their death, the seal of their own degree of likeness to God in Christ. And this is what it means, among other things, to be judged by Christ. The wax that has melted in God's will can easily receive the stamp of its identity, the truth of what it was meant to be. But the wax that is hard and dry and brittle and without love will not take the seal: for the hard seal, descending upon it, grinds it to powder.

Therefore if you spend your life trying to escape from the heat of the fire that is meant to soften and prepare you to become your true self, and if you try to keep your substance from melting in the fire -- as if your true identity were to be hard wax -- the seal will fall upon you at last and crush you. You will not be able to take your own true name and countenance, and you will be destroyed by the event that was meant to be your fulfillment." (p. 161).

But it is also not as though Merton believes that doing God's will (the "heat of the fire") is a painful experience: "God's will enters into the depths of our own freedom and carries our lives and all our acts and desires away on the tide of His own joy. True peace is only found by those who have learned to ride and swim wit the strong current of this stream. For them life becomes simple and easy. Every moment is rich in happiness. All events are intelligible, if not in their details at least in their relation to the great wholeness of life" (p. 266).

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