Thomas Merton – New Seeds of Contemplation

“Contemplation is the highest expression of a person’s intellectual and spiritual life. It is that life itself fully awake, fully active, fully aware that it is alive. It is spiritual wonder. It is spontaneous awe at the sacredness of life of being.” ~ Thomas Merton.

Thomas Merton  (1915-1968) was an American Trappist monk, writer, theologian, mystic, poet, social activist and scholar of comparative religion. He brought these diverse skills and experience into his insight on contemplative living in a world filled with continual change, chaos, and endless distraction. During his last years, he became deeply interested in Asian religions and contemplative practice, particularly Zen Buddhism, and in promoting East-West dialogue. During his Asian journey to Bangkok, India and Sri Lanka in 1968, the Dalai Lama praised him as having a more profound understanding of Buddhism than any other Christian he had known. In his lecture, “Monastic Experience and East-West Dialogue”, delivered in Calcutta shortly before he died, Merton said: ” I come as a pilgrim who is anxious to obtain not just information, not just ‘ facts’ about other monastic traditions but to drink from ancient sources of monastic vision and experience. I seek not to just learn more quantitatively about religion and monastic life but to become a better and more enlightened monk (qualitatively) myself.” Again in Zen and the Birds of Appetite Merton argues: “Both Christianity and Buddhism show that suffering remains inexplicable, most of all for the man who attempts to explain it in order to evade it, or who thinks explanation itself is an escape. Suffering is not a ‘ problem’ as if it were something we could stand outside of and control. Suffering, as both Christianity and Buddhism see, each in its own way, is part of our very ego-identity and empirical existence, and the only thing to do about it is to plunge right into the middle of contradiction and confusion in order to be transformed by what Zen calls ‘ the great death’ and Christianity calls ‘ dying and rising with Christ’. ” Merton told Brrother David Steinal-Rast, shortly before Merton died: ” I do not believe that I could understand our Christian faith the way I understand it if it were not for the light of Buddhism.” Merton offers a potent tool for those seeking a more contemplative way of living, in the form of meditation. He wrote, “To meditate is to exercise the mind in serious reflection… one who meditates does not merely think, one also loves.” The readings selected for this morning’s contemplation come from Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation. In print for more than forty years, New Seeds of Contemplation has served as a guide to the contemplative life for several generations of spiritual seekers. In it, Merton reveals contemplation to be nothing other than “life itself, fully awake, fully active, fully aware that it is alive.”