A Friendship, a Love, a Rescue
by Parker J. Palmer, from We Are Already One: Thomas Merton’s Message of Hope, a new collection of essays to celebrate the Centenary of Thomas Merton’s birth, January 31, 1915.
http://www.couragerenewal.org/parker/writings/friendship-love-rescue/
I stand among you as one who offers a small message of hope, that first, there are always people who dare to seek on the margin of society,
who are not dependent on
- social acceptance, not dependent on
- social routine, and
- prefer a kind of free-floating existence under a state of risk. And among these people, if they are
- faithful to their own
- calling, to their own
- vocation, and
- to their own message from God, communication on the deepest level is possible.
And the deepest level of communication is not communication, but communion.
the sharing or exchanging
of intimate thoughts &
feelings, especially when
the exchange is on a
mental or spiritual level.
It is wordless. It is beyond words, and it is beyond speech, and it is beyond concept.
—Thomas Merton
“Your vocation
is in the community,
not the classroom.”
I knew
I had met
a kindred spirit
a fellow traveler who could accompany me on the strange path I had chosen/or had it chosen me?
Massignon felt
his relation
to al-Hallaj was not so much that of a scholar to his subject as “a friendship, a love, a rescue.”that the Muslim mystic had reached out across time to rescue him.
still finding
friendship, love,
rescue/essential elements
serving as a “messenger of hope"
It has everything to do with relationships that
- honor the soul,
- encourage the heart,
- inspire the mind,
- quicken the step, &
- heal the wounds we suffer along the way.
where I've been where I am
where I’m headed.
The Quest/
🌹True Self
Merton makes
a distinction
“true self”/
“false self"
a life-long effort to be responsive to the imperatives of true self, the source of that inner voice that kept saying “You can’t not do this.”
Quakerism/conviction
"That of God in every person.”
The quest for true self and the quest for God: it’s a distinction without a difference, one that not only salvaged my spiritual life but took me deeper into it.
“Most of us live lives of self-impersonation.”
~Thomas Merton
I cannot
imagine a
sadder way
to die than
w/ the sense that I never showed up here on earth as my God-given self.
If Merton had offered me nothing else, the encouragement to live from true self would be more than enough to call his relation to me “a friendship, a love, a rescue.”
The Promise of Paradox/
not merely as a philosophical concept but as a lived reality
“…I find myself traveling toward my destiny in the belly of a paradox.”
Merton look at
life inclusive
of either/or also both/and
Paradoxical thinking of this sort is key to creativity
Paradoxical thinking:
the capacity to hold
contradictory ideas
that opens the
mind & heart to
new things
Paradox is also a way of being that’s key to wholeness,
which does not mean
perfection:it means
embracing brokenness
as an integral part
of life.
it helped me alloy
3 experiences of depression which
were dark for me as
it must have been
for Jonas inside the belly of that whale.
"My God, my God,
why have you forsaken me?”
was the question that came time and again as my quest for light plunged me into darkness.
I was able to see that the closer I move to the light the deeper my shadow becomes.
To be whole I
have to see I
am shadow & light.
Paradoxical thinking can also save us from the
cramped versions of
faith that bedevil Christianity and are, at bottom, idolatries that elevate our theological formulae above the living God
"But the magicians keep turning the cross to their own purposes.
for them it's
a sign of contradiction:
the awful blasphemy of
the Fundamentalist religious magician who makes the cross contradict mercy! This is of the peak temptation of Christianity!
To rule Jesus;
has locked all the doors,has given 1 answer,
Permanently, externally,
affixed everything & departed,
leaving all life enclosed in the frightful consistency of a system outside of which there is
seriousness and damnation, inside of which there is the
intolerable
flippancy of the saved—while nowhere is there any place left for the mystery of the freedom of divine mercy
which alone is truly serious, & worthy of being taken seriously."
The need to find another way
to do “life together” in
a spiritual community.
🌿daily worship
🌱study,
🍃 work,
💚social
outreach
☘️communal
meals
“community of solitudes,”
“being alone together,” a way of life in which a group could live more fully into Rilke’s definition of love: “that
2[or more] solitudes
border
protect/
honor each other.”...
“rejoin soul and role.”
Merton advised the monks, “From now on, Brother, everybody stands on his own feet.”
Growing up
at a time in
history when
institutions—
religious, economic, and political are dysfunctional, Merton goes on to
on being supported by structures that may be
destroyed any moment by a political power or
force. Structures may be taken. If everything is taken away
what do you do next?
He writes about the
“hidden wholeness”
the spiritual eye
can discern beneath
the broken surface of
things—even if it's a
broken system,
relationship, or a
broken heart.
fecundity 🌿a dimmed light,
🍃a meek namelessness, 💚a hidden
wholeness. Wisdom is this
mysterious unity/integrity:
Once one has eyes
can always be seen /discovered,hidden beneath the broken surface of things.
This is more than a soothing notion. It’s
insight can shape what
Buddhists call
Here’s an example of what I mean:
I began to understand that my job
was not to try to compel people to do things they did not want
to do, such as protesting
against unscrupulous
real estate
practices like
blockbusting/ redlining.
Instead I need
to give them excuses/permis-sions to do things they really
wanted to do—things related to the justice agenda—but were too shy or fearful to do under their
own steam. At their core they had come to understand that there is no place left to run, no place to escape the diversity of the
human community. Embracing it might bring them peace, enrich their lives, give the old-timers and the newcomers chances to meet face-to-face so they could learn
My colleagues & I began making excuses/permissions
for natural interactions:
door-to-door surveys, block parties,
fairs, & living room conversations about shared interests, (the similarities)
we helped people act on their desire to live in the “hidden wholeness” that lies beneath the broken surface of our lives.
Because of our efforts and those of many others, a community that might have ended up shattered became diverse and whole.
Merton has a word of hope for us, a typically paradoxical word:
…"do not depend on the hope of results. …you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of
the work itself"
As long as we are wedded to “effectiveness” we will take on smaller and smaller tasks, for they are the only ones with which we can get results.If we want to see important but impossible
values like love, truth & justice,faithfulness.
At the end of the road, I will not be asking about outcomes. I’ll be asking if I was faithful to my gifts, to the needs I saw around me, to the ways in which my gifts might meet those needs, to the truth of the workitself.”
