Who Are You (IV)

(Cont'd)

To Merton, since the Fall, there is no cure to man's spiritual anguish but mysticism. He shares St. Augustine's view that man's Fall led to a double movement of introversion and extraversion: he first withdrew spiritually from God into his own soul, as if he could live in his spirit privately and alone , referring everything to himself instead of to God but then, unable to remain centered in himself, he fell beneath himself into the multiplicity and confusion of external things ( De Trinitate Bk. 12 cap 8-10).Adam lived as if there were no common good in the world and re-oriented his whole being upon his own private good which had to be restricted and entrenched first within itself and then defended against every rival and "the fort" within which he entrenched himself was his own body. "No longer spiritual, the body dominated his spirit.". Henceforth, he could only get access to reality through the openings in that fort: his five senses which can directly reach only material things. His spirit thus became subject to and dependent upon matter, which like everything else made by God, including his body and its passions, is essentially good. However "it is evil for the spirit to be completely subjected to matter, for reason to be swayed and dominated by passion and for the flesh to rule the whole man" because the flesh and the passions,by their nature, are always at the mercy of anarchic sensual stimulation as there are sensory stimulation at each and every moment.To Merton, a spirit that is immersed in matter which it cannot fully control is worse than a captain of a rudderless ship carried away by the waves of storm because the captain can at least see that the ship is in danger whereas our spirit, left to itself, "is only dimly aware that it has been the victim of a disaster. It feels to some extent at home in its own little universe--the body. It sets about its task of governing this universe with its own laws." Only gradually does it come to find out how little control it has and how much it is governed by the blind needs, compulsion and demands of passion. Psychoanalysis has made it abundantly clear how the tyranny that our unconscious instinctual passions and  compulsions exercise over our fallen spirit.

Although dimly aware of the dangers, we rationalize and excuse the lusts and ambitions of our selfish and fleshy ego, camouflage our own defects but magnify the sins of the others, evade our countless fears, force ourselves to believe in our own lies and struggle in a thousand ways to silence that secret voice of anxiety. Through the sin of pride and concupiscence, we barter away the peace of innocent self-realization for the agony of a guilt-ridden awareness: "instead of being perfectly actualized in spirit, integrated and unified in the selfless ecstasy of a contemplation that goes out entirely to the 'other', man is literally 'dis-tracted'--pulled apart-- by an almost infinite number of awarenesses. He is conscious of everything trivial, remembers everything except what is necessary, feels everything that she should not feel, yields to demands that he should never even hear, looks everywhere, pays attention to every creaking board and rattling shutter in his haunted house.". It is useless to exorcise the accusing silence by turning his haunted house into a dens of thieves because "no amount of business prosperity and luxury can hide the abomination of desolation within us."

After withdrawing from God, man has to mentally reconstruct his entire universe in his own image and likeness: he was forced to turn to natural science, "the mental toil that pieces together fragments that never manage to coalesce in one completely integrated whole: the labor of action without contemplation, that never ends in peace or satisfaction, since no tasks is finished without opening the way to ten more tasks that have to be done." Merton quotes Ecclesiastes 2: 17, 18: "Therefore I loathed life, since for me the work that is done under the sun is evil: for all is vanity and a chase after wind. And I detested all the fruits of my labor under the sun." to describe what we secretly feel but try desperately to suppress. We try to bury our secret fears by ceaseless activity. Isn't that not a true description of our lives of constant hustle and bustle: full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Merton says, "in fallen man, action is the desperate anodyne, assuaging the pain of a soul that instinctively knows that it was made for contemplation--a soul that knows that action, which is itself necessary, is only a means to an end."

The solution? To reverse Adam's journey and go back by the way we came through the center of our soul. Merton says, "We must withdraw ourselves (in the right Christian sense) from exterior things and pass through the center of our souls to find God...recover possession of our true selves by liberation from anxiety and fear and inordinate desire. And when we have gained possession of our souls, we must to "go out" of ourselves to God and to others by supernatural charity." But we can't do that without first taking stock of our situation and realize who we really are: "we must become conscious of the fact that the person we think we are, here and now, is at best an impostor and a stranger. We must constantly question his motives and penetrate his disguises." With this emphasis on self-awareness,  Merton sounds almost like a Buddhist now. It is most important to contemplate and reflect in silence because otherwise, "our attempts at self-knowledge are bound to fail, or if we fully and complacently acquiesce in our own illusion of who we are, our 'self-knowledge' will only strive to reinforce our identification of ourselves with this impostor," says Merton. To him, it is a "spiritual disaster" for a man to rest content with his exterior identity or his social self or in his words, his "passport picture of himself". He asks; "Does he really exist because his name has been inscribed in Who's Who? Is his name in the Sunday paper any safe indication that he is not a zombie?" If so, "he is only pushing the responsibility of his existence on to society": "instead of facing the question of who he is, he assumes he is a person because there appear to be other persons who recognize him when he walks down the street."

To Merton, we find our true self only in that image of God within our own soul, which is made in the image of God. That image can be known by rational inference. However, according to Merton, "that is not enough to give us a real experience of our own identity. It is hardly any better than inferring that we exist because other people act as if we existed.". He thinks that just as some people have to struggle to recover a natural spontaneous realization of their own capacity for life and movement and physical enjoyment, so all men have to struggle to regain the spontaneous and vital awareness of their spirituality, of the fact that we have a soul that is capable of coming to life and experiencing profound and hidden values which the flesh and its senses can never discover alone. And this spirituality in man is identified with the divine image of our soul". Thus for Merton, our authentic "self"  is that image of ourselves as a creature made in the likeness of God! However, that image is not just a static "representation" of something in the divine essence. It is " a dynamic tendency that carries us towards union with God: as he says, "a kind of gravitational sensitivity to the things of God" or as St. Thomas has said, "The image of God is seen in the soul in so far as the soul is carried, or is able to be carried, towards God." (Summa Theologica I Q 93 a8). To Merton, it is not sufficient for us to merely realize that the spirituality of our nature makes us potentially god-like. We must actualize that potentiality through knowledge and love or "more precisely, by a knowledge of God that is inseparable from an experience of love or as St. Thomas says, "The image of God is in the soul according to the knowledge it conceives of God and according to the love that flows from that knowledge." In other words, we must realize our image of ourselves as a creature of God by loving others. Merton explains: "Self-realization in this true religious sense is then less an awareness of ourselves than an awareness of the God to whom we are drawn in the depths of our own being. We become real, and experience our actuality, not when we pause to reflect upon our own self as an isolated individual entity, but rather when, transcending ourselves and passing beyond reflection. we center our whole soul upon God Who is our Life. That is to say, we fully "realize" ourselves when we cease to be conscious of ourselves in separateness and know nothing but the one God Who is above all knowledge." This is what Jesus meant when he says, "he that would save his life would lose it." (Lk 9:24). We realize ourselves only when we identify ourselves and lose ourselves( in thought, words and deeds) in that image of God which is within our soul, whenever we lose ourselves in "a total consciousness of Him Who is Holy."

Merton offers us some advice on how we may realize our true self: "fidelity and attentiveness to the words of God". "He that is of God hears the words of God." But "to be 'aware' of God is to enter into contact with One, Who, infinitely hidden and transcendent, cannot be known as He is in Himself unless He reveals Himself to us. But God speaks to us, in his Scriptures, and has given Himself to us in his son--our whole life of faith is a life of attentiveness, of 'listening' in order to receive the word of God into our hearts, Fides ex auditu. And we listen to God in Liturgy, in His Scriptures, in meditation, in every expression of His Will for us." To Merton, "it is this listening and obedience to the word of God that restores the Divine likeness in our souls, and brings us the truth that makes us free." When we do that, we become a new man in Christ. When we know God this way, God is no longer known as an "object" since he cannot be contained in a concept. It is a mystical knowing.The knowledge of God's image in our soul "mysteriously coincides with His knowledge of us" according to Merton: "we apprehend Him by the love which identifies itself, within us, with His love for us. What will be fully realized in the beatific vision is realized inchoactively in contemplation even in this present life." We realize that we are known and loved by God, that we are seen and called by God and that our destiny is to be carried towards Him. To him "The sense of being 'carried' and "drawn' by love into the infinite space of a sublime and unthinkable freedom is the expression of our spiritual union with the Father, in the Son, and by the Holy Ghost, which constitutes in us our true identity as sons of God". With this new awareness, our soul or spirit undergoes a conversion, a metanoia, which re-orients and changes our whole being, raising it to a new level. We shall find ourselves most truly human when we are raised to the level of the divine: we transcend ourselves, we see ourselves in a new light, by losing sight of ourselves and no longer see ourselves but God. But this work cannot be done by ourselves alone: it is a divine gift; it must be done by the work of God, by his grace. If it is rare, that may be because we often refuse to allow God to do that work on account of our fear, our blindness, our ignorance and our hatred of risk. Merton says that to make this leap out of ourselves, "we have to be willing to let go of everything that is our own--all our plans, all our hesitations, all our own judgments." But he continues, "that does not mean that we give u thinking and acting: but that we are ready for any change that God's action may make in our lives."

Merton does not think the return journey back to God is easy, even amongst or especially in the religious because "there are few who are able to renounce their own methods of self-support in the spiritual journey towards God....there is too little faith...For when a man comes close to God and begins to find out that the Lord is hidden in the clouds of an infinite and inexorable transcendency, he begins to be afraid of One Who is so completely Other." Another difficulty, according to Merton is that, "God will not reduce the distance between ourselves and Him by any compromise with our own weakness and imperfection. The mercy, which is a total giving of His love to us, is anything but compromise, since it demands, in return, the total gift of ourselves to Him and this gift of ourselves is obstructed, within ourselves, by our own self-alienation."

To overcome the difficulties of our return to God and to achieve the recovery of our true identity, Merton advises us that we must stop saying, like Adam after the fall when he heard the voice of God in the afternoon garden;" I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked. And I hid." (Genesis 2: 10) . He urges us: "We must cast away the 'aprons of leaves' and the 'garments of skins' which the Fathers of the Church variously interpret as passions and attachments to earthly things, and fixation in our own rigid determination to be someone other than our true selves."

Whatever the word "self" or "identity" may mean to other people, to Merton, they can refer only to the image of God within our soul: that ideal "self" which we are capable of becoming and which consists in loving others and merging ourselves in the great love that is partially embodied in the concept of the Christian God and which curiously involves  forgetting all about what we normally consider to be our "self"! The old Adam in us must die. Only then can we become a new man, our true "self", one which is at one with God. Paradoxically, we are most our "self" when that "self" has become "dead" and gone and become merged with all the other selves and with God, which is our final resting place, through the practice of the fullest love. As Merton says, it is not easy and quite rare, not because God does not love us, but more because we do not love God or Love enough or which amounts to the same thing, because we do not have sufficient faith in Love, the principle underlying and sustaining all Life. Whether or not one agrees with Merton's theology, one must agree with his diagnosis of the ills in the soul of the modern man: it's exclusively material concerns, its egoism, its blind and totally unrestrained pursuit of sensory stimulation and "economic development" and its ruthlessly silencing of any voice attempting to advocate any form of rational control, whether on the personal or collective level., of our desires.