The Contemplative Balance

I am growing tired of extremes.
I've been asking myself when I will reach a point where I realize that contemplation is a necessity. I tend to treat it like a bad habit that needs to be repressed. But when I ignore contemplation, I notice characteristic consequences pop up. First, my utilization of mind numbing entertainment sky rockets. After that, it's social binges. And after those, after realizing how unfulfilling both of those are, it's sitting in my room eating spoonfuls of chocolate and feeling sorry for myself.
That sounds dramatic, but it's true. When I choose to not nurture the spirituality that I tend towards, I spiral downward faster than an crashing jet. Not to mention, when weeks or even months go by of ignoring it, I notice key aspects of my personality getting dumbed down as well--my intellect, my sense of humor, my social skills. Because by rejecting contemplation, I'm rejecting the way God created me and therefore rejecting myself. How can I thrive when I'm repressing the very thing that gives me life?

But then there's the other extreme. The contemplative life is a fairly new concept for me, I've only known about it less than a year. But as I've been exploring it, I began noticing that, just like everything else, contemplation has the ability to get distorted and skewed, very slowly and subtly, with us hardly noticing. In The Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton talks about how great heights can be reached by 'metaphysical speculation', and that it can introduce someone into great and pure pleasures, that only get deeper as you speculate more on things you're learning. But sometimes, even if someone is learning great things about the Christian faith, those speculations won't transcend the 'natural realm' (the tangible world, visible to the eye) into the 'spiritual realm' (the world invisible to the eye, or, union with God, which is the purpose of contemplation).

He goes on to say, "In such an event, you get, not contemplation, but a kind of intellectual and esthetic gluttony--a high and refined and even virtuous form of selfishness. And when it leads to no movement of the will towards God, no efficacious love of Him, it is sterile and dead, this meditation, and could even accidentally become, under certain circumstances, a kind of a sin--at least an imperfection."
At first, that was hard for me to read. It made my stomach turn thinking that this new spiritual discipline I had discovered had the potential to turn really ugly. But on the other hand, I was slightly comforted because I figured out why I would sometimes come out of time spent in reflection and solitude (times that were supposed to be rich with inner peace and satisfaction of communion with a Being completely outside of myself) feeling weighted by selfishness, my sight darkened by self indulgence.
And I'm still working on finding the balance. Judging by my track record with life, you can probably guess that it will take me a long time to figure it out. Although I'm finding that all things concerning God are never about arriving at the end, but being patient in the upwards spiral of growth and learning. I do still pray, though, that the times of bobbing back and forth between ignoring contemplation all together and diving in so much that I'm drowning in my own pride and pleasure at having 'arrived' at such spiritual heights, will grow fewer and farther between, and I can dwell in God's presence, not dependent on emotion or feeling, but with a still and quiet soul as Psalm 131:2 states. "Surely I have composed and quieted my soul; Like a weaned child rests against his mother, My soul is like a weaned child within me."

Seven Storey Mountain

     "On the last day of January 1915, under the sign of the Water Bearer, in a year of a great war, and down in the shadow of some French mountains on the borders of Spain, I came into the world. Free by nature, in the image of God, I was nevertheless the prisoner of my own violence and my own selfishness, in the image of the world into which I was born. That world was the picture of Hell, full of men like myself, loving God and yet hating Him; born to love Him, living instead in fear and hopeless self-contradictory hungers.
     Not many hundreds of miles away from the house where I was born, they were picking up the men who rotted in the rainy ditches among the dead horses and the ruined seventy-fives, in a forest of trees without branches along the river Marne.
     My father and mother were captives in that world, knowing they did not belong with it or in it, and yet unable to get away from it. They were in the world and not of it--not because they were saints, but in a different way: because they were artists. The integrity of an artist lifts a man above the level of the world without delivering him from it.
     My father painted like Cezanne and understood the southern French landscape the way Cezanne did. His vision of the world was sane, full of balance, full of veneration for structure, for the relations of the masses and for all the circumstances that impres an individual identity on each created thing. His vision was religious and clean, and therefore his paintings were without decorations or superfluous comment, since a religious man respects the power of God's creation to bear witness for itself. My father was a very good artist.
     Neither of my parents suffered from the little spooky prejudices that devour the people who know nothing but automobiles and movies and what's in the ice-box and what's in the papers and which neighbors are getting a divorce.
     I inherited from my father his way of looking at things and some of his integrity and from my other some of her dissatisfaction with the mess the world is in, and some of her versatility. From both I got capacities for work and vision and enjoyment and expression that ought to have made me some kind of a King, if the standards the world lives by were the real ones. Not that we ever had any money: but any fool knows that you don't need money to get enjoyment out of life.
     If what most people take for granted were really true--if all you needed to be happy was to grab everything and see everything and investigate every experience and then talk about, I should have been a very happy person, a spiritual millionaire, from the cradle even until now.
     If happiness were merely a matter of natural gifts, I would have never entered a Trappist monastery when I came to the age of a man."

--Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain, pg. 1



Page one, guys. Page ONE. I just got this book in the mail today. There are 400 pages left. YES. Praise God for brilliant minds that choose to write honest things on paper that make the rest of us feel sane.