Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation. New York: New Directions, 1961, pp. 80-81.
We do not go into the desert to escape people but to learn how to find them; we do not leave them in order to have nothing more to do with them, but to find out the way to do them the most good. But this is only a secondary end.
The one end that includes all others is the love of God.
. . . the truest solitude is not something outside you, not an absence of men or of sound around you; it is an abyss opening up in the center of your own soul.
And this abyss of interior solitude is a hunger that will never be satisfied with any created thing.
The only way to find solitude is by hunger and thirst and sorrow and poverty and desire, and the man who has found solitude is empty, as if he had been emptied by death.
He has advanced beyond all horizons. There are no directions left in which he can travel. This is a country whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. You do not find it by traveling but by standing still.
Yet it is in this loneliness that the deepest activities begin. It is here that you discover act without motion, labor that is profound repose, vision in obscurity, and, beyond all desire, a fulfillment whose limits extend to infinity.
2 comments:
Loving God, lead me into the desert where you are ever more present. Help me to discover the interior solitude and emptiness in which all unnecessary things are stripped away, leaving the deepest activities, the mysterious act without motion.
Oh, this desert description frightens me, sounds ever so lonely. Yet the solitude there is portrayed as a way, THE way? to connect to Infinite, so far beyond aloneness into one-ness. I pray for courage to enter this desert, faithful to the knowledge and promise that I am not alone, and brave enough to dwell with God/ess, loving me, loving others together...the only way possible for me to love at all -- as a partner with my Divine Creator, Lover of my soul, being and essence.
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