Saturday, January 21, 2012

Week Six, Exercise One: The Strategy of Jesus, A Meditation With Thomas Merton

This exercise should be experienced between January 21 and January 25.

Thomas Merton is a well known American Catholic writer. A good deal of his writing deals with the distinction between the false self and the true self. The false self is created by us so that we can fit in to society, imbibing whatever aberations may exist in society. The true self is our self as we are known by God. This is similar to Ignatius' understanding of the two standards: the Dark Lord attempts to encourage us to labor with him by enticing us with riches, honor and pride, objects which all societies over value in various ways. That is, the Dark Lord encourages us to think that our false self is the only self that exists. Jesus invites us to labor with him by encouraging us to develop our true selves through meditation, prayer and acts of charity and justice. Recall how he does this--by motivating us to accept a spiritual poverty that leads to humility.

The following quotation was originally written by Merton in a book called New Seeds of Contemplation (New York: New Directions, 1972). I am grateful to have found it in Robert Inchausti's Seeds: Thomas Merton, page 3.

"All sin starts from the assumption that my false self, the self that exists only in my own egocentric desires, is the fundamental reality of life to which everything else in the universe is ordered. Thus 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."

Why are we afraid to just be our true selves, the mysterious reality we are before our mysterious God?

Why do we feel the need to construct a false self?

What are my most powerful egocentric desires? Can I feel the presence of the Dark Lord in those desires?

What would it take for me to live from my true self?

Now, what do I want to ask from Jesus?

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