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As the soul becomes more pure and bare and poor, and possesses less of created things, and is emptied of all things that are not God, it receives God more purely, and is more completely in Him; and it truly becomes one with God, and it looks into God and God into it, face to face as it were; two images transformed into one.
*Meister Eckhart, Meister Eckhart, A Modern Translation, Ed. Raymond B. Blackney
A seeker after the gift of contemplation visited a Master. The seeker, questioning the Master, asked, “Master, please tell me of your visions.” The Master replied, “I have had none.” Stunned, the seeker asked, “Then, Master, tell me of your trances.” “I have had no trance,” replied the Master. “The seeker,” dumbfounded, asked, “Master, then, tell me of your locutions.” The Master, again befuddling the seeker, spoke, “I have never heard even one voice, my child.” The seeker asked, “And what of your raptures?” “I,” said the Master, “have not had a single moment of rapture?” The seeker, disappointed, said to the Master, “Sir, I came a long way thinking you had the gift of contemplation, but it is clear to me that you are not what I was told.” “No,” replied the Master, “I must not be what you were told. And, neither, sir, are you prepared to receive the gift of contemplation.”
At the heart of Thomas Merton’s works is contemplation. Merton wrote, in New Seeds of Contemplation, that contemplation is “the union of the simple light of God with the simple light of our spirit, in love.”
In 1940 Merton had an experience that was formative for his teaching and experience of contemplation, and which he wrote of in Seven Storey Mountain. During a visit to Cuba, one Sunday, while attending Mass in Havana, he heard children at the front of the church cry out the creed in glad unison. Merton was struck with a sudden awareness of God’s Presence. He later wrote, “It was a light that was so bright that it had no relation to any visible light and so profound and so intimate that it seemed like a neutralization of every lesser experience.” His first clear thought was, “Heaven is right here in front of me: Heaven, Heaven!” Still, Merton was clear that this light was in fact ordinary and available to everyone. Therefore, Merton taught that contemplation is for all Christians, not for a certain disposition of persons or a spiritual elite. Every Christian can become “fused into one spirit with Christ in the furnace of contemplation” and benefit other persons with the fruit of her spirituality.
Obscure touch
Ineffable contact
God here
God not here
God transcending
God immanent
God everything
God nothing
God me
God Other
What am I to make of this?
Everything
Nothing
“Receive this knowing
that does not know… this love
flowering from the stem of understanding
and opening to Mystery—For I AM the Sun
drawing you Here, to Me alone,
alone.”
*brian k. wilcox
OneLife Ministries is a pastoral outreach and nurture ministry of the First United Methodist Church, Fort Meade, FL. For Spiritual Direction, Pastoral Counseling, spiritual formation workshops, Christian meditation retreats, or more information about OneLife, write Rev. Dr. Brian K. Wilcox at briankwilcox@comcast.net.
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