Category: Contemplation

For much of my life – and now also sometimes – I live with some root of despair. Inside of me, there was (and is?) a pride that simmers and vegetates and grows weeds and rank flowers whenever I fail, or my own resources fail to get something I want or need.

Because my resources, and the resources of almost anyone I know, fail again and again, I often fell into despair.

Thomas Merton writes that despair is the ultimate and inevitable pride, so entrenched and stiff-necked in obsession that it selects absolute misery rather than accept happiness from life or the hands of my idea of God.

I often wondered why failure or life relied on one thought: “Why is this only happening to me?”

My perspective on the world would shrink in anger and disappointment; I saw myself as a helpless victim of painful circumstances beyond my control. How could these awful things happen to me if there was a God or if anyone or anything was watching out for me?

Looking back, self-pity was addictive: a place to hide behind, a distraction, and a surrender to life’s possibilities. It is always easier to just suffer than to change.

Feeling sorry for myself was cancerous; it removed responsibility. If life was unfair and rigged against me, I was relieved of the pressure to try, risk failure, get help, or know the real me.

During my search for a spiritual life, I learned it was impossible to overestimate the value of true humility and its place in the spiritual life. As I took the time to look deeply at myself, I didn’t like what I saw. I dislike self-pity in others, which is perhaps why I came to hate it in myself.

Meditating and mulling over this new reality, I came to see that humility was the answer for me, a difficult thing to acknowledge and even more difficult to change. All I could do was try.

A truly humble human cannot despair or indulge himself in self-pity. I had it no worse than anyone; I decided that was a way to look at the world, to stop pitying myself, and to go into the world with meaning, not whining.

When I look at the news, I see self-pity as a raging American disease; almost everyone  I see is blaming someone else for their troubles and hating everyone different. In the truly humble man, there is no longer any such thing as self-pity. That’s what Thomas Merton wrote.

“For the consummation of humility,” wrote Merton, is the beginning of what he called blessedness and of the idea of joy, not complaint or bitterness. I still believe I  am entitled to the bitterness and suffering in my life, but I am learning bit by bit to see the world differently.

But I am also just beginning to understand the meaning of responsibility. I am responsible for my own life, now, then, and in the future.

We all feel pain; we all suffer; it is an elemental part of being human. My new motto was this: everyone has it worse than I do.

I was not made to be perfectly happy; I doubt I will ever be wholly humble and self-effacing. But I can be better, and I can do better, and I can feel better. I’m on the way even if I never get there, and that is the point of spirituality for me.

Humility, as the great philosophers say, can be the answer to all the great problems of the soul. Loving others is the way to humility; it is selfish to give only to myself. It pushes me towards a higher level of joy and meaning. I am not there yet, but thinking about it has already changed me.

Getting older is a gift when it comes to humility: get there or disappear.

“It is here,” wrote Merton, “that everyone who humbles himself is exalted,” and then liberated, a fascinating idea for me. When I was incapable of humility, I was also incapable of joy, because humility alone has already liberated me from the self-pity that blocks the self-centeredness that makes joy and happiness impossible.

To be loved I decided, I had to love. To be strong, I had to turn away from fear and towards my own kind of faith. To be happy, I had to understand that I had to make other people happy first. To find the joy of love, I had first to love others more than I loved myself.

Once I knew that there were people more important than me, the doors opened.

Bit by bit, my Self-pity went away (it does pop up from time to time; perfection is not the point); intention matters.

The Christian prophets believed, as Jesus did, that the true waters of life are given to those who have no money. I see this in my own life.

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As I watch the war against the Billionnaires, I see the point. It is not the rich who will bring us back to a better place; it’s the poor. They are always the ones who bring humanity back. They are the ones the spirits love.

I understand the importance of money, but I also came to see the importance of valuing other things more than money. Money, like hatred and self-pity, cannot define my life. It’s not the point.

Humility has opened my eyes to other things – love, the joy of helping others, the joy of love, the joy of nature, the joy of courage, the sickness of self-pity, the idea of making the world a bit better.

The truth I found was that, in many ways, I was enslaved to the idea of the successful, other, popular and “successful” self, stuck on the vain hopes, lies, and cruelty I see all around me and the illusory desires we are all taught to want.

I’m not there yet; no one, I think, is ever there.

I’m learning more about faith, and what it means. Self-confidence is not the same as faith. Faith is much deeper, and for me to get where I want to go, I understand that faith has to be deep enough and only functions when I am otherwise in trouble, stricken by fear or anger.

Truth faith means I get up and go on, not that I never suffer. The humble man I would like to be has to go on evenly, even when age and everything else is taken away. A humble man doesn’t mind praise. It nourishes the soul.

Aging has helped me see this. It has helped me do this.

I’m not there yet, and I doubt I will ever be. But it’s a beautiful thing to want and think about.

I am not the most important person in the world, not even close. But trying has been good for me and my idea of aging.

I can’t tell you how good it feels to understand that fully.

Contemplation is one of the most engaging experiences I’ve encountered on my wobbly but still changing path to consciousness, my never-ending search for a spiritual. I know I will never get where I want to go – no one does – but my Contemplations, alone and in silence, have brought me closer than anything so far.

Contemplation is a mystery, to me and others. Nobody really can say what it is. The dictionary explanations are shallow and unsatisfying:

Contemplation means looking at something steadily, thinking deeply and calmly, or having quiet religious meditation.” Another definition said, “Long and serious focus on an idea, choice, or life problem.”

To me, these definitions are too high-level and not sufficient. It sounds like sitting on any pew for a while while somebody else chants.

Thomas Merton is more honest, I think, and more direct.

For a writer, there is a challenge here. Merton summed it up:

“The only way to get rid of misconception is to experience it. One who does not actually know, in his own life, the nature of this breakthrough and this awakening to a new level of reality cannot help being misled by most of the things that have been said. Contemplation cannot be taught. It cannot even be clearly explained. It can only be hinted at, suggested, pointed to, symbolized…this experience is beyond the reach of verbalization and of rationalization.”

That’s a tough way for a writer to try to write about it, but Merton is correct. I can’t explain. I can’t teach it. I can only do it, which I have begun doing Sunday mornings, a sort of half-day Spiritual Sabbath alone and in complete silence.

When I hear someone say something I’m doing can never be explained, that’s the buzzing going on in my head. I have to try. It’s what I do. I’m going to share the experience as I move along.

I can say this: I never come out of Contemplation the same way I went in. I see myself with a depth and understanding at times that no other kind of reflection has done.

It asks a certain faith and discipline, but  Contemplation, I’m told,  is not and cannot be a function of the external self, the exterior one, the one people can see. According to Merton, Contemplation has no place for my ego: “This consciousness is precisely part of the external self which ‘dies and is cast aside like a soiled garment in the genuine awakening of the contemplative.”

Heavy stuff.

That’s quite a challenge in the spiritual sense. Sometimes it takes me on for hours and leads me to parts of me I never knew were there. It takes me deeper than I have ever gone in my very soul; it’s not better than meditation, it’s just nothing like it.

The self, Merton hints, is doomed to disappear as completely as smoke from a chimney when he takes on Contemplation. It is, he says, frail. A kind of sacred humility, I guess. I am not a priority. My troubles and wishes are not relevant.

Contemplation, at least for me, is awareness that the “I” is really not “I,” and this awakening of the unknown other me is simply beyond observation, or discussion, or explanation. It’s just another place that takes me to another world.

The curious truth, Merton taught me, is that the  Contemplation is to be hidden, invisible, unnamed, unidentified in the outer, in the talking of others in the outer world.

Wow. But I will write about it.

I guess that’s the fascination for me. I can’t say what it does, if anything, only what I feel when I’m doing it. I plan on Contemplation every Sunday for whatever time I have and for whatever I can see and use. It has a new and powerful feel for me.

Last Sunday, I worshipped, if that’s the word, at a Contemplation Day, all alone, mostly in the dark, in absolute silence. I didn’t dictate to it or set goals or subjects. I allowed myself to sink into a space I’d never been before, and I had one of the deepest spiritual experiences of my life. I wish I could describe it without saying it gave me a new level of reality.

I never expected to write regularly about getting older, never mind about death. And it never crossed my mind to take on complex issues like meditation,  spirituality, mysticism, or Contemplation. Aging really is liberating, if you let it be. When I talk about the freedom of old age,  or tossing out much of the weight of living, I’m really talking about having the time and the motivation to explore these issues in my own life.

I find, to my surprise, that there are an awful lot of people out there eager to read about these subjects or join the conversation.

You won’t see CEO’s or most working people considering their spiritual lives because they are too busy making money or buying enough food for their children to eat. But these are some of the most fascinating subjects on Earth because they affect our lives, our deaths, and the planet’s future. They define what it means to me to be a human being. It removes the cutter and chaos of modern America from my mind.

Sunday, I took the day for what I called a Contemplation, a day of silence and reflection. I want to admit at the outset that I can’t clearly even define Contemplation or find the line between it and similar explorations – Yoga, Meditation, Spiritual Exploration, Mysticism (a close friend of Contemplation), or just the old-fashioned sitting in the living room and thinking about life.

The closest I ever came to this burst of feeling was when I sat on a sand mound on the ocean off of Cape Cod.

I’m sticking my nose into all of these things as I get older and closer to the end. They are all helping me greatly decide how to live in a meaningful and very exciting way. I have rarely felt happier or more fulfilled.

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I have a new companion in my research – it’s my Google Gemini AI software, the best research tool I’ve ever found. It’s shaping up as a great help to me.

I read books and study essays, but today I asked Gemini to find a single, simple definition of “Contemplation,” which I have been thinking about and practicing for years. These are the definitions Gemini came up with. Take your pick.

• Deep Thinking: Mulling over a big question or idea (e.g., “What does happiness mean to me?”).

• Quiet Observance: Looking at something in nature or art with total, uninterrupted attention.

• Spiritual Reflection: In many traditions, it means quietly opening your mind to connect with the divine, the universe, or your innermost self.

In short,  Contemplation is turning off the mental rush, slowing down, and just being present with a single thought or sight.

The irony is that all of these are true and none of them are true. The one most familiar does with nature. The surprise is that I know what it all means.

Sunday, I did turn off the mental trash, set out to talk to my divine, and ask some big questions about my life, especially important and essential as I get older – two weeks away from 79. This means closer to death.

I got some critical answers to some of the most important questions and issues in my life. Turning off the mental rush and think in silence was the key for me to think on a new and different level. It’s not fully explanabile, just like mysticism, which also fascinates me and reflects the way my mind works.

I don’t have the time or space to write about the difference between meditation, increasingly popular among the middle class, and Contemplation, a very different kind of mystical exploration.

Thomas Merton, my longtime and late spiritual guide, has written that poetry, music and art have something in common with th contemplative experience. I see that.

But, he warns, contemplation is beyond our intuition, becond speculative theology.

“It resumes, transcends and fullfills them all,” he says to add to my confusion, “and yet at the same time it seems to supersede and deny all of them.” Having just spent a day in Contemplation, I know just what he means.

Merton says to really enter the realm of contemplation, one must die in a certain sense, to clear out our minds, and then enter a higher life. It’s death, he says, for the sake of life, so we can get to the know the entrence as life, as thought, as experience, as joy, at the wonder of simply being, accepting us as we have evolved and exist.

When I stopped my contemplation Sunday, I felt like I have been to a different place, and seen my life in a different, safe and liberating way. I was in no way dead, I was refreshed and to some degree, reborn.

For me, comtemplation superseded and pushed aside every other form of intuition and experience in my life – in art, writing,  books,  photography, in philosophy or theology. Contemplation took me deeper and in a different way than meditation, beyond ordinary levels of love and belief.

When  you contemplate in a serious way, insists Merton, you “die” in the soul to be born again on a higher level of life and understanding.

The great challenge of writing about contemplation is that there is really no way to clearly explain it on a personal level. Everyone’s experience will be different. It simply cannot be clearly explained, any more than mysticism can. The fact that that is beyond me deepends the experience.

It can only be hinted at, suggested, pointed, symbolized. The more I might try to explain it, the more its emptied of its content.

“For this experience,” writes Merton, “is beyond the reach of verbelization and of rationalization.”

In the superful consciousness that defines contemplation, there are just not words, only feelings. Next weekend, I’m going to take another contemplation write. I can’t wait.

I still haven’t figured out the first. I need to accept that, not describe it.

But I will continue to share my contemplation day to the best of my ability.

My spiritual guide Thomas Merton says that contemplation is the highest expression of man’s (or woman’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. It is gratitude for life, for awareness, and for being. It is a vivid realization of the fact that life and being in us proceed from an invisible, transcendent and infinitely abundant Source,” wrote Merton.

Merton’s writing also inspired me to meditate some years ago; it greatly affected my life and thought. I need a Contemplation Day to solidify my understanding of myself and the changes in my age, life, and country. There is chaos in my head and all around us. I need to do this regularly to get my head straight and keep it there. I’m taking Sunday off, no blog, no devices, no Food Pantry requests.

I’ll be back in business on Monday.

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Saturday, tomorrow, Maria and I are taking the wool to a wood mill a couple of hours down the road, on the same road we live on, oddly. Can’t get lost. I hope to do some blogging and flower work when I get back if it isn’t too late and we aren’t too exhausted. I’ll post the Pantry’s requests for the day either in the morning or afternoon when we get back.

I’m excited to take a Day of Contemplation. Merton says contemplation is a kind of spiritual vision to which both reason and faith aspire and collide, because without it I will always be incomplete.