meditatio at the water's edge

"Without dread, without the disquieting capacity to see and to repudiate the idolatry of devout ideas and imaginings, man would remain content with himself and with his 'inner life' in meditiation, in liturgy or in both. Without dread, the Christian cannot be delivered from the smug self-assurance of the devout ones who know all the answers in advance, who possess all the cliches of the inner life and can defend themselves with the infallible ritual forms against every risk and every demand of dialogue with human need and human desperation." --Thomas Merton, "Contemplative Prayer"

Just when I intend to get started on doing something important, I am plunged into the desert. I become restless and anxious; always seeking some form of activity or stimulation. I am suddenly unable to practice solitude. The desert I am plunged into is a desert of the soul; a dryness and sense of being asleep to the presence of God.

This causes some problems for me because I happen to be paid to 'do religious things.' I teach about the life of following Jesus, and so when I enter this desert I tend to lean too heavily on words that come easily and without contemplation. The cliched and memorized language that give the impression of a green and vibrant life in God is a condemnation to me.

How did I end up here in this desert? Was I led here or did I set out on this alternate path? Most often it is the case that I have gone and gotten myself lost. Busyness, fear, pride; these are the things that happen to lead me into the desert. I fall back into old patterns of thinking and acting--patterns so ingrained that they resemble the patterns of addiction.

So I find myself empty; nothing to say that can be said with integrity and confidence. I am helpless to save myself except to cry out for the world to stop and God to rescue me.

What I realize now is that I have been holding my breath from grace. Dallas Willard wrote that saints are those who consume the most grace. What I need is to stop holding my breath through my busyness, fear, and pride, and start breathing in grace. I need to face the realities of my life and what all my activity, fear, and pride have produced.

I am undisciplined. I act on impulse and my desire of the moment. These patterns of undisciplined living have led me into this desert where I feel empty of the Spirit. The only hope I have is that even though I sense God's distance it is in that awareness that I know that God is very present. The very fact that I am aware of this absence and impulsiveness is a testament to me that God is with me and exposing these things to me.

That is a hope to me, but even now I caution myself against the complacency that so easily sets in on me. Complacency leads me to pride and further impulsiveness (not wanting to become a slave to discipline). How am I to press on beyond that kind of self-centered approach to the spiritual life? It is to do the things I can do that will, with God's work in my life, help me to be the kind of person who does not get caught up in busyness (nor laziness), fear (but love), or pride (but humility expressed in concern for others).

Even as I write these words, I sense that I am falling back on cliched and learned phrases; so that I can be satisfied that I'm thinking along the right lines again. Yet I know it must be more than just ideals and words. As Thomas Merton has instructed me this morning, "One aspect of this convenient spiritual disease is its total insistence on ideals and intentions, in complete divorce from reality, from act, and from social commitment." "Pretty thoughts" are not enough.

And so I dread the possibility that I am more concerned with ideals than acting on those ideals. I dread the possibility that I possess all the cliches of the inner life, but not much of the realities of those ideals. I have tasted "the awful dereliction of the soul closed in upon itself," and it has struck me with dread.

Yet, again, it is this dread that holds the promise of freedom and of love. As St. John of the Cross puts it, "when you see your desire obscured, your affections arid and constrained, and your faculties bereft of their capacity for any interior exercise, be not afflicted by this, but rather consider it a great happines, since God is freeing you from yourself and taking the work from your hands. For with those hands, howsoever well thay may serve you, you would never labor so effectively, so perfectly and so securely...as now, when God takes your hand and guides you in the darkness, as though you were blind, to an end, and by a way which you know not nor could you ever hope to travel with the aid of your own eyes and feet, howsoever good you may be as a walker."