The word hovered in my mind the way a single note will sometimes lift up from the rest of a musical score and float for a while on its own. Usually it is when the entire symphony pulls back and allows one of the more subtler instruments to extend that delicate note or melody into an almost eternal realm. It has a haunting sensation to it. It is often more memorable than the grand crescendo of the entire symphony. That is how the word hung in my head. Nothing fancy or verbose about it. And it came from one of my modern contemplative heroes, Thomas Merton. Talk about someone who is able to create a symphony of words, when it comes to articulating the contemplative life — he is the Mozart of contemplative musings. And so knowing the fullness of his repertoire, I was almost surprised by the simplicity of one of his moves, which is probably why it lingered in my head as long as it did.
Here is what he had to say at the beginning of his book Life and Holiness:
Nothing is here said of such subjects as ‘contemplation’ or even ‘mental prayer.’ And yet the book emphasizes what is at once the most common and the most mysterious aspect in the Christian life: grace, the power and light of God in us, purifying our hearts, transforming us in Christ, making us true sons of God, enabling us to act in the world as his instruments for the good of all men and for his glory.
What we have here is Merton doing what he does so well and that is capturing massive amounts of meaning within phrases that seem almost casual. He often does it in a way someone might leisurely grab a lightening bolt out of mid air and hold it between his two fingers and say to you look at it this way. But as I reread his words about “the most mysterious aspect in the Christian life” I could not help but to think that one of his descriptions was overly simplified. This stream of high-powered phrases is preceded by one simple word — grace. That was the single note that seem to linger in my mind. So many people use that word in so many contexts that it has almost lost its meaning. It has been so generalized to simply mean to get something you do not deserve or that you did not earn. But given Merton’s power to compact so much thought into a few words, I wondered why he didn’t just do the same here. Why didn’t he simply summarize what he meant by grace. Surly he does not mean the same thing as the street preacher I heard spouting off on the downtown street corner? But there it was, in all its naked simplicity – grace.
And just as the memory of that note began to fade, he brings it up again just a few paragraphs later. “Is it strange that in this book on the active life the emphasis is not on energy and will-power and action so much as on grace, and interiority? No, for these are the true principles of supernatural activity. An activity that is based on the frenzies and impulsions of human ambition is a delusion and an obstacle to grace. It gets in the way of God’s will, and it creates more problems that it solves.”
Part of my issue is that I have often understood grace as a description of God’s response to my sinfulness. Or, even more simply, it is God not doing something in response to my sinfulness – I mess up and God dose not give me what I deserve. But Merton is using it to describe the actual activity of God working within us. God is at work within us, not as a response to our sinfulness but as an eternal act of love. Even if we were sinless, God would still act in our lives in a way in that could only be described as grace. Grace is the activity of God within our lives enabling us to be fully human and fully alive. In short, this is God’s will.
It just so happens that we are extremely receptive to God’s will in our lives when we are in a place of intense remorse or guilt. It is here that many of us become acutely aware of our need for God’s grace, as well as our openness to receive God’s grace. There is a place for remorse and guilt within the Christian life, but are we denying God’s grace in our lives when we only allow it to be at work in these times? Could people’s bipolar spiritual life be because the only way they know how to let God work in their life (i.e., grace) is when they are deeply sorry or depressed about themselves? People become dejected and shortly after become open to the grace of God in their life. Then when God’s grace does its work in their lives, they no longer sense that feeling of absolute depravity. The reason we do not feel that sense of depravity is because we are sensing God’s presence within their very own souls. The problem is that we often mistake God’s life-giving presence and activity as our own self-sufficient presence and activity. And this is often when we begin to get in the way of God’s will and create create more problems than we solve. Our actions once again become actions that are self-motivated instead of actions that are moved in response to the grace of God in our own being.
In order for the power and light of God to grow within us we must cultivate desire God’s grace out of love, rather than desiring it out of guilt and self-hatred. God desires us out of love, and gives God’s very presence to us out of love. We too come to dwell in the fullness of that love when we desire God in the very same way that God desires us. Our primary activity is stillness, and it is within this silence and stillness where we are best situated for God’s primary activity to be at work within us.
God plays our heart like a subtle instrument, masterfully crafting a delicate melody from the eternal realm of God’s own being into the created order of the cosmos. And this melody can only be heard when the symphony of our being pulls back and allows this song to seep into our consciousness where it can linger long enough to inspire us to surround that melody with the music of our everyday lives. It is only in the silent stillness of our own heart where we are able to hear this subtle melody of God, and it is also in this silent stillness that we come to know that it is not us that is playing, creating, acting, and working, but the very Spirit of the living God.
