"Those who love their own noise are impatient of everything else. They constantly defile the silence of the forests and the mountains and the sea. They bore through silent nature in every direction with their machines, for fear that the calm world might accuse them of their own emptiness. The urgency of their swift movement seems to ignore the tranquility of nature by pretending to have a purpose. The loud plane seems for a moment to deny the reality of the clouds and of the sky, by its direction, its noise, and its pretended strength. But the silence of the sky remains when the plane has gone. The tranquility of the clouds will remain when the plane has fallen apart. It is the silence of the world that is real. Our noise, our business, our purposes, and all our fatuous statements about our purposes, our business, and our noise: these are the illusion." Thomas Merton Photo: Avalanche-damaged Subalpine Fir, with the spires above Emerald Lake looming in the distance, Rocky Mountain National Park, CO, December 11, 2015. "Fatuous" means "silly and pointless." Please visit: http://www.resourcesforspiritualgrowth.com/
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"Perhaps peace is not, after all, something you work for, or 'fight for.' It is indeed 'fighting for peace' that starts all the wars. What, after all, are the pretexts of all these present crises, but 'fighting for peace'? Peace is something you have or you do not have. If you yourself are at peace, then there is at least *some* peace in the world. Then you share your peace with everyone, and everyone will be at peace." Thomas Merton Photo: Exquisite ice patterns on Dream Lake, Rocky Mountain National Park, CO Please visit: http://www.resourcesforspiritualgrowth.com/ “For language to have meaning, there must be intervals of silence somewhere, to divide word from word and utterance from utterance. The one who retires into silence does not necessarily hate language. Perhaps it is love and respect for language which imposes silence upon him or her. For the mercy of God is not heard in words unless it is heard, both before and after the words are spoken, in silence.” Thomas Merton Photo: Dendritic ice patterns on Sprague Lake, Rocky Mountain National Park, CO. Here, I see the dendritic patterns as symbolic of words, and the lake surface as silence :) Please visit: http://www.resourcesforspiritualgrowth.com/ If water – the divine wisdom – were to flow continuously, it would totally submerge and obliterate, not allowing space for any other existence. So water flows in various measures to allow for the transmission to be internalized. Sometimes water flows as rain and sometimes it freezes to different degrees producing snow, hail or sleet, which are all metaphors for the Divine monitoring and transforming the flow into forms that the student can contain and assimilate. Rain is a transmission that is more on Divine terms. Admittedly it falls in drops which symbolizes some level of contraction, but it flows continuously like a stream of information retaining its fluidity and it is absorbed quickly into the earth. Ice on the other hand, is a transmission that is more on the recipient’s terms. The information has solidified into a compact state so that the student can internalize it. The flow has ceased and turned into a solid form, so the student is not overwhelmed by the continuous flow of new ideas. Meaningful Life Center Photo: Bubbles in lake ice, Mills Lake, Rocky Mountain National Park, CO Please visit: http://www.resourcesforspiritualgrowth.com/ "To be one with One Whom one cannot see is to be hidden, to be nowhere, to be no one: it is to be unknown as He is unknown, forgotten as He is forgotten, lost as He is lost to the world which nevertheless exists in Him." Thomas Merton Photos: Canyonlands National Park, UT, November 28, 2015 “What we are asked to do is to love; and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbor worthy if anything can. Indeed, that is one of the most significant things about the power of love. There is no way under the sun to make a person worthy of love except by loving them. As soon as they realize they are loved – if they are not so weak that they can no longer bear to be loved – they will feel themselves instantly becoming worthy of love. They will respond by drawing a mysterious spiritual value out of their own depths, a new identity called into being by the love that is addressed to them.” Thomas Merton Photo: Wind-carved ice on The Loch in Rocky Mountain National Park, CO, December 14, 2015 Please visit: http://www.resourcesforspiritualgrowth.com/ Facing Our Inner and Societal Ills in Preparation for the Coming of the Light at Winter Solstice12/14/2015 You've probably noticed that many of the quotes I've been posting lately have to do with social critique, the problems associated with modern society, and afflictive emotions like grief, anxiety, desolation and doubt. As you might have guessed, there is a good reason for this. For me, the season immediately preceding the winter solstice - or the Advent season in the Christian calendar - is characterized by a personal and societal sense of inner poverty, stripping, and ego-death. This is also a time when certain bodily ailments surface that generally dissipate during the rest of the year. Viewed from a more cosmic perspective, all of this makes sense, since the light of the solstice that will arrive next week is born out of winter destruction and death. It also correlates to the Christ-child being born out of the darkness, self-emptying and No-thingness of "the Father" - i.e., the transcendent source. In Buddhist terms, this represents the process through which Form arises spontaneously out of Emptiness. In the cycle of the natural world, autumn's seeds have fallen into the soil, are embraced by the intimate darkness of the ground or by a blanket of snow, and enter their long winter "sleep" or dormancy. As Jesus points out in a parable, we might even say that a seed "dies" in its present form in order to be reborn as a seedling. This is also the time of hibernation for animals such as bees, snakes, skunks, groundhogs and bears. In my case, this season of stripping begins with my annual four-day solitary desert retreat, which always occurs right around the beginning of Advent. For me, the season ends on January 1st, which I always experience as a fresh beginning. In any case, it feels quite cathartic during this time to face both my own personal ills and those of society in preparation for the rebirth of the Light! Photos: Arches National Park, UT, December 29, 2015 "We are living through the greatest crisis in the history of humanity; and this crisis is centered precisely in the country that has made a fetish out of action and has lost (or perhaps never had) the sense of contemplation. Far from being irrelevant, prayer, meditation and contemplation are of utmost importance in America today. The contemplative way requires first of all and above all the renunciation of an obsession with the triumph of the individual or collective will to power. For this aggressive and self-assertive drive to possess and to exert power implies a totally different view of reality than that which is seen when one travels the contemplative way. We have an instinctive need for harmony and peace, for tranquility, order and meaning. None of these seem to be the most salient characteristics of modern society. We would like to be quiet, but our restlessness will not allow it. Hence we believe that for us there can be no peace except in a life filled with movement and activity, with speech, news, communication, distraction. We seek the meaning of our life in activity for its own sake, the service of the machine as an end in itself. The reason for this inner confusion and conflict is that our technological society has no longer any place in it for wisdom that seeks truth for its own sake, that seeks the fullness of being, that seeks to rest in an intuition of the very Ground of Being." Thomas Merton Photos: Canyonlands National Park, UT, November 28-30, 2015 “Let no one hope to find in contemplation an escape from conflict, from anguish or from doubt. On the contrary, the deep, inexpressible certitude of the contemplative experience awakens a tragic anguish and opens many questions in the depths of the heart like wounds that cannot stop bleeding. For every gain in deep certitude there is a corresponding growth of superficial ‘doubt.’ This doubt is by no means opposed to genuine faith, but it mercilessly examines and questions the spurious ‘faith’ of everyday life, the human faith which is nothing but the passive acceptance of conventional opinion.“ Thomas Merton Photos: Canyonlands National Park, UT, November 28-30, 2015 “Only when we see ourselves in our true human context, as members of a race which is intended to be one organism and ‘one body,’ will we begin to understand the positive importance not only of the successes but of the failures and accidents in our lives. My successes are not my own. The way to them was prepared by others. The fruit of my labors is not my own: for I am preparing the way for the achievements of another. Nor are my failures my own. They may spring from failure of another, but they are also compensated for by another’s achievement. Therefore the meaning of my life is not to be looked for merely in the sum total of my own achievements. It is seen only in the complete integration of my achievements and failures with the achievements and failures of my own generation, and society, and time. “ Thomas Merton Photo: Canyonlands National Park, UT, November 28-30, 2015 |
AuthorStephen Hatch, M.A. is a spiritual teacher and photographer from Fort Collins, Colorado. His approach is contemplative, inter-spiritual, and Earth-based. Archives
June 2016
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