Space Enough, and Time

At this point in life’s journey, I’m pretty sure I’ve not heard enough good sermons about suffering.  In fact, it’s only been in the last couple of months that I can really say that I’ve heard suffering spoken of appropriately and practically from the pulpit (particularly in light of the sufferings of Jesus).  On some level, suffering is a silver thread through Merton’s No Man is an Island.  He spends one chapter on the topic particularly, though.  Here are some of his thoughts.

Useless and hateful in itself, suffering without faith is a curse.

A society whose whole idea is to eliminate suffering and bring all its members the greatest amount of comfort and pleasure is doomed to be destroyed.  It does not understand that all evil is not necessarily to be avoided.  Nor is suffering the only evil, as our world thinks.

Especially so, today, the more comfortable and affluent parts of our lives are about eliminating (or even ignoring) suffering.

. . . But the grace of Christ is constantly working miracles to turn all useless suffering into something fruitful after all.  How?  By suddenly staunching the wound of sin.  As soon as our life stops bleeding out of us in sin, suffering begins to have creative possibilities.  But until we turn our wills to God, suffering leads nowhere except our own destruction.

We must face the fact that it is much harder to stand the long monotony of slight suffering than a passing onslaught of intense pain.  In either case what is hard is our own poverty, and the spectacle of our own selves reduced more and more to nothing, wasting away in our own estimation and in that of our friends.

Suffering transformed into something else, something better, truly is a work of grace.  How odd to name sin so close to the wounds we too often hold dear and precious.

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)

During one of my first summers in Hawaii, I taught a course at church using Larry Crabb’s Soul Talk.  The basic premise of the book was that Christians should be able to communicate with one another in such a way that the Holy Spirit can bring real encouragement and even healing through how we listen and what we say.

I am convinced more now than then that Crabb was on to something.  Unfortunately, many Christians aren’t at a place where they can imagine such things as possible.  Our busyness is a big part of of our lack of imagination.  Our anemic language is another.  As I mentioned yesterday in the quote from Bonhoeffer, I can’t help but feel that the biblical story can help us move in a better direction.

In No Man is an Island, Thomas Merton attempts to articulate the struggle people might experience trying to live by the “supreme importance that we consent to live not for ourselves but for others.”  This is a struggle because

Man is divided against himself and against God by his own selfishness, which divides him against his brother.  This division cannot be healed by a love that places itself only on one side of the rift.  Love must reach over to both sides and draw them together.  We cannot love ourselves unless we love others, and we cannot love others unless we love ourselves.  But a selfish love of ourselves makes us incapable of loving others.  The difficulty of this commandment lies in the paradox that it would have us love ourselves unselfishly, because even our love for ourselves is something we owe to others.

And so what of love?  How do we learn to talk about love?  Merton speaks of love (charity) and friendship in a way that I think is illuminating.

Charity must teach us that friendship is a holy thing, and that it is neither charitable nor holy to base our friendship on falsehood.  We can be, in some sense, friends to all men because there is no man on earth with whom we do not have something in common.  But it would be false to treat too many men as intimate friends.  It is not possible to be intimate with more than very few, because there are only very few in the world with whom we have practically everything in common.

Many of us do not think of friendship as anything like something holy.  And while we might not be able to hold many close in the embrace of intimate friendship, there still is something to consider when it comes to how we relate to one another in the church.

There is, however, one universal basis for friendship with all men: we are all loved by God, and I should desire them all to love Him with all their power.  But the fact remains that I cannot, on this earth, enter deeply into the mystery of their love for Him and of His love for them.

Merton is, of course, writing from a monastic perspective.  From what I understand of such traditions, there is a sense of spiritual advocacy in how monastic orders view their work between God and the world.  Perhaps their particular stations help them be acutely aware of God’s love for His creation.

When all has been said, the truth remains that our destiny is to love one another as Christ has loved us.  Jesus had very few close friends when He was on earth, and yet He loved and loves all men and is, to every soul born into the world, that soul’s most intimate friend.  The lives of all the men we meet and know are woven into our destiny, together with the lives of many we shall never know on earth.  But certain ones, very few, are our close friends.  Because we have more in common with them, we are able to love them with a special selfless perfection, since we have more to share.  They are inseparable from our own destiny, and, therefore, our love for them is especially holy; it is a manifestation of God in our lives.

And so we must learn to live in the balance of those we love because they are like us (and like us, presumably) and those we may not know well but are loved by God regardless because they know the love of Christ.  Both are a kind of friendship; both are a kind of love.  And both have a precarious place in a society where marriage is seen as the ultimate sign of blissful maturity and where those outside of familial bonds are meant mostly to be used as receptacles for whatever message we are offering or as pawns for whatever task we might need done.

(image from amazon.com)