I am reading Merton again this weekend. New Seeds of Contemplation. It has been a while since I’ve read New
Seeds. I can’t point to exactly why the
Spirit led me to this little book again just now, but I have a distinct sense
that God is telling me something profound, something that I need. Not something I need to know as much as
something I need to experience, no something I need to pursue. I’m afraid that I can’t put it into
words. You will seek me, and you will find me, when you seek me with your
whole heart.
Yesterday I read and re-read “Things in Their Identity”, a
reflection on the nature of created things and on who we are in light of Who
God is. Much of the chapter is quite
abstract and would be difficult to explain here, but the words prepared my
heart somehow for a pre-dawn encounter this morning with a remarkable biblical
truth I had not seen before.
“His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain
to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own
glory and excellence, by which he has granted to us his precious and very great
promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature.”
II Peter 1:3-4.
We are called to the glory and excellence of God, granted His
precious and very great promises, so that we may partake of the divine nature. We are meant to be drawn to God, to commune
with God, to partake of His divine nature – an eternal, indestructible,
immutable, unblemished nature. We are
not who we are meant to be. In Christ we
are becoming who we were meant to be, by His divine power, becoming partakers
of the divine nature.
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From New Seeds of
Contemplation, Things in Their Identity. Thomas Merton
“This particular tree will give glory to God by spreading
out its roots in the earth and raising its branches into the air and the light
in a way that no other tree before or after it ever did or ever will do… each
particular being, in its individuality, its concrete nature and entity, with
all its own characteristics and its private qualities and its own inviolable
identity, gives glory to God by being precisely what He wants it to be here and
now, in the circumstances ordained for it by His Love and His infinite Art.
The special clumsy beauty of this particular colt on this
April day in this field under these clouds is a holiness consecrated to God by
His own creative wisdom and it declares the glory of God… The little yellow
flowers that nobody notices on the edge of that road are saints looking up into
the face of God… The lakes hidden among the hills are saints, and the sea too
is a saint who praises God without interruption in her majestic dance.
The great, gashed, half-naked mountain is another of God’s
saints. There is no other like him. He is alone in his own character; nothing
else in the world ever did or ever will imitate God in quite the same way. That is his sanctity.
But what about you? What about me?
For us, holiness is more than humanity. If we are never anything more than people, we
will not be able to offer to God the worship of our imitation… God leaves us
free to be whatever we like. We can be
ourselves or not, as we please. We are
at liberty to be real, or to be unreal.
We are free beings and children of God. This means to say that we should not
passively exist, but actively participate in His creative freedom, in our own
lives, and the lives of others, by choosing the truth. To put it better, we are even called to share
with God the work of creating the truth of our identity. We can evade this responsibility by playing
with masks, and this pleases us because it can appear at times to be a free and
creative way of living. It is quite
easy, it seems to please everyone. But
in the long run the cost and the sorrow come very high. To work out our own identity in God, which
the Bible calls ‘working out our salvation,’ is a labor that requires sacrifice
and anguish, risk and many tears. It
demands close attention to reality at every moment, and great fidelity to God
as He reveals Himself, obscurely, in the mystery of each new situation. The secret of my full identity is hidden in
Him. He alone can make me who I am, or
rather who I will be… But unless I desire this identity and work to find it
with Him and in Him, the work will never be done.
My false and private self is the one who wants to exist
outside the reach of God’s will and God’s love – outside of reality and outside
of life. And such a self cannot help but
be an illusion.
I use up my life in the desire for pleasures and the thirst
for experiences, for power, honor, knowledge and love, to clothe this false self
and construct its nothingness into something objectively real. And I wind experiences around myself and
cover myself with pleasures and glory like bandages in order to make myself
perceptible to myself and to the world, as if I were an invisible body that
could only become visible when something visible covered its surface.
The secret of my identity is hidden in the love and mercy of
God.
Ultimately the only way that I can be myself is to become
identified with Him in Whom is hidden the reason and fulfillment of my
existence… if I find Him, I will find myself…
But though this looks simple, it is in reality immensely
difficult. In fact, if I am left to
myself it will be utterly impossible… there is no human and rational way in
which I can arrive at that contact, that possession of Him, which will be the
discovery of Who He really is and of Who I am in Him.
That is something that no man can ever do alone.
The only One Who can teach me to find God is God, Himself,
Alone.
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His divine power has granted to us all things pertaining to
life and godliness…
