Pete Gall's Pulp Theology

From Thomas Merton’s Contemplative Prayer (page 23-25 in my version):

Nothing is more foreign to authentic monastic and “contemplative” tradition in the Church than a kind of gnosticism which would elevate the contemplative above the ordinary Christian by initiating him into a realm of esoteric knowledge and experience, delivering him from the ordinary struggles and sufferings of human existence, and elevating him to a privileged state among the spiritually pure, as if he were almost an angel, untouched by matter and passion, and no longer familiar with the economy of sacraments, charity and the Cross. The way of monastic prayer is not a subtle escape from the Christian economy of incarnation and redemption. It is a special way of following Christ, of sharing in his passion and resurrection and in his redemption of the world. For that very reason the dimensions of prayer in solitude are those of man’s ordinary anguish, his self-searching, his moments of nausea at his own vanity, falsity and capacity for betrayal. Far from establishing one in unassailable narcissistic security, the way of prayer brings us face to face with the sham and indignity of the false self that seeks to live for itself alone and to enjoy the “consolation of prayer” for its own sake. This “self” is pure illusion, and ultimately he who lives for and by such an illusion must end either in disgust or in madness.

On the other hand, we must admit that social life, so-called “worldly life,” in its own way promotes this illusory and narcissistic existence to the very limit. The curious state of alienation and confusion of man in modern society is perhaps more “bearable” because it is lived in common, with a multitude of distractions and escapes – and also with opportunities for fruitful action and genuine Christian self-forgetfulness. But underlying all life is the ground of doubt and self-questioning which sooner or later must bring us face to face with the ultimate meaning of our life. This self-questioning can never be without a certain existential “dread” – a sense of insecurity, of “lostness,” of exile, of sin. A sense that one has somehow been untrue not so much to abstract moral or social norms but to one’s own inmost truth. “Dread” in this sense is not simply a childish fear of retribution, or a naive guilt, a fear of violating taboos. It is the profound awareness that one is capable of ultimate bad faith with himself and with others: that one is living a lie.

…The monk who is truly a man of prayer and who seriously faces the challenge of his vocation in all its depth is by that very fact exposed to existential dread. He experiences in himself the emptiness, the lack of authenticity, the quest for fidelity, the “lostness” of modern man, but he experiences all this in an altogether different and deeper way than does man in the modern world, to whom this disconcerting awareness of himself and of his world comes rather as an experience of boredom and of spiritual disorientation. The monk confronts his own humanity and that of his world at the deepest and most central point where the void seems to open out into black despair. The monk confronts this serious possibility, and rejects it, as Camusian man confronts “the absurd” and transcends it by his freedom. The option of absolute despair is turned into perfect hope by the pure and humble supplication of monastic prayer. The monk faces the worst, and discovers in it the hope of the best. From the darkness comes light. From death, life. From the abyss there comes, unaccountably, the mysterious gift of the Spirit sent by God to make all things new, to transform the created and redeemed world, and to re-establish all things in Christ.

I believe that we succeed not by what we achieve, but by what we come to admit. When we discover and acknowledge that we stand not upon the depths of our reality, but upon the scaffolds of our denial – and then begin to make room for the dismantling of the scaffolds.

As we do this – as we encounter the dread of our existence, the contingency of our being, the fact that our meaning is a derived meaning granted us by a God who loves us because He thought is would be a blast to have someone just like you or me around (not because of any particular adequacy, but because of something woven into who we are) – a different sort of self emerges.

Life on the scaffold is like the new leather sofa that’s comfortable but you have to be so careful not to scratch or mark. Climbing down from the scaffold, encountering the God we meet in our dread, shows life to be much more like saddle leather – tough, strong, unconcerned with scratches, scars or blemishes. And a different sort of self, one that cares less and less about hard truths, scratches or scars, emerges.

And this self has less to prove. This self fears less, because this self has grown familiar with the darkness beneath the scaffolding – deeper into the dread – and this self has experienced light from that darkness. Life from that death. Self from that confusion. The fleeting, gentle, merely scaffolded understanding of self that has no reason to fear new confusion.

This is where the cries turn to sobs, to moaning, to growling, to groaning, to blues, and the song of soul is born. This is where voice comes from. It is the fuel for love (what meets us in the darkness is love). It is what gives us strength, regardless of the authority others may grant in response. It is our experience of truth. Our testimony. How we learn the legitimacy of our prayers.

The work is frightening. But the reward is life.