Thomas Merton begins No Man is an Island with the intent of helping the reader understand how best we can love ourselves, one another, and God well.  Then, from such a straightforward beginning, he takes a more circuitous route, tracing through hard truths about friendship and asceticism and hope.  In the third chapter of the book, Merton tackles the practice of prayer, asserting from the beginning that

As a man is, so he prays.  We make ourselves what we are by the way we address God.  The man who never prays is one who has tried to run away from himself because he has run away from God.  But unreal though he be, he is more real than the man who prays to God with a false and lying heart.

And so while the route seems circuitous, there is also a strong sense of the route being most fortuitous, as Merton reframes some of the simple truths of the Christian life in a way that builds a better argument.

All true prayer somehow confesses our absolute dependence on the Lord of life and death.  It is, therefore, a deep and vital contact with Him Whom we know not only as Lord but as Father.  It is when we pray truly that we really are.  Our being is brought to a high perfection by this, which is one of its most perfect activities.  When we cease to pray, we tend to fall back into nothingness.  True, we continue to exist.  But since the main reason for our existence is the knowledge and love of God, when our conscious contact with Him is severed, we sleep or we die.  Of course, we cannot always, or even often, remain clearly conscious of Him.  Spiritual wakefulness demands only the habitual awareness of Him which surrounds all our actions in a spiritual atmosphere without formally striking our attention except at certain moments of keener perception.  But if God leaves us so completely that we are no longer disposed to think of Him with love, then we are spiritually dead.

One of the most significant things I have read from Eugene Peterson was the simple assertion that his first and most important task as a pastor was to teach people how to pray.  That really is at the center of the “abiding reality” Jesus spoke of in John’s Gospel.  Note the idea of “spiritual wakefulness” demanding “habitual awareness,” which means such an approach can be learned.  The picture of spiritual death is a pivot to a powerful paragraph.

Most of the world is either asleep or dead.  The religious people are, for the most part, asleep.  The irreligious are dead.  Those who are asleep are divided into two classes, like the Virgins in the parable, waiting for the Bridegroom’s coming.  The wise have oil in their lamps.  That is to say they are detached from themselves and from the cares of the world, and they are full of charity.  They are indeed waiting for the Bridegroom, and they desire nothing else but His coming, even though they fall asleep while waiting for Him to appear.  But the others are not only asleep: they are full of other dreams and other desires.  Their lamps are empty because they have burned themselves out in the wisdom of the flesh and in their own vanity.  When He comes, it is too late for them to buy oil.  They light their lamps only after He is gone.  So they fall asleep again, with useless lamps, and when they wake up they trim to investigate, once again, the matters of a dying world.

It is not enough that we are asleep, Merton suggests.  As sleepers, we “are full of dreams and other desires.”  On a deep level we are distracted and distant.  Help us, Lord, to wake up.

(image from pronagger.com)