Contemplative Prayer (Image Classic) - Softcover

Merton, Thomas

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0385092199 ISBN 13: 9780385092197

Verlag: PRH Christian Publishing, 1971

Inhaltsangabe

In this classic text, Thomas Merton offers valuable guidance for prayer. He brings together a wealth of meditative and mystical influences–from John of the Cross to Eastern desert monasticism–to create a spiritual path for today. Most important, he shows how the peace contacted through meditation should not be sought in order to evade the problems of contemporary life, but can instead be directed back out into the world to affect positive change.

Contemplative Prayer is one of the most well-known works of spirituality of the last one hundred years, and it is a must-read for all seeking to live a life of purpose in today’s world.

In a moving and profound introduction, Thich Nhat Hanh offers his personal recollections of Merton and compares the contemplative traditions of East and West.

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THOMAS MERTON (1915-1968), Trappist monk, author, and peace activist, came to international prominence at a young age with his classic autobiography, The Seven Story Mountain. Over the rest of his life he wrote prolifically on a vast range of topics, including prayer, interior growth, social responsibility, violence, and war. Toward the end of his life he played a significant role in introducing Eastern religions to the West. He is today regarded as a spiritual master, a brilliant religious writer, and a man who embodied the quest for God and human solidarity in the modern world.

THICH NHAT HANH is an internationally respected Zen poet and teacher. He is the author of numerous bestselling books, including Zen Keys and Living Buddha Living Christ.

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as Merton at his contemplative best, applying ancient wisdom to the longings of our age through his thoughtful commentary on Scripture and important writers of the Western spiritual tradition.

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Contemplative Prayer

I

The climate in which monastic prayer flowers is that of the desert,9 where the comfort of man is absent, where the secure routines of man’s city offer no support, and where prayer must be sustained by God in the purity of faith. Even though he may live in a community, the monk is bound to explore the inner waste of his own being as a solitary. The Word of God which is his comfort is also his distress. The liturgy, which is his joy and which reveals to him the glory of God, cannot fill a heart that has not previously been humbled and emptied by dread. Alleluia is the song of the desert. 

The Christian (even though he be a monk or a hermit) is never merely an isolated individual. He is a member of the praising com­munity, the People of God. Alleluia is the victorious acclamation of the Risen Savior. Yet the People of God itself, while celebrating the praise of the Lord in a tabernacle of beauty overshadowed by the Bright Cloud of his presence, is still on pilgrimage. We acclaim God as members of a community that has been blessed and saved and is traveling to meet him as he comes in his promised Advent. Yet as individuals we know ourselves to be sinners. The prayer of the monk is dictated by this twofold consciousness of sin and redemp­tion, wrath and mercy—as is the prayer of every Christian. But the monk is called to explore these two dimensions more thoroughly, and at greater cost, than his brothers who are devoted to works of mercy, or of creativity in the world.
 
In this study we are going to concern ourselves particularly with personal prayer, especially in its meditative and contempla­tive aspects. It is understood that the personal prayer of the monk is embedded in a life of psalmody, liturgical celebration and the meditative reading of Scripture (lectio divina). All this has both a personal and a communal dimension. We are concerned here most of all with the monk’s own deepening existential grasp of his call to life in Christ, as it progressively reveals itself to him in the solitude where he is alone with God—whether or not his brothers may be physically present around him.
 
Dostoievski, in The Brothers Karamazov, shows us what Rozanov has called an “eternal conflict” in monasticism—and doubtless in Christianity itself. Th e conflict between the rigid, authoritarian, self-righteous, ascetic Therapont, who delivers himself from the world by sheer effort, and then feels qualified to call down curses upon it; and the Staretz, Zossima, the kind, compassionate man of prayer who identifies himself with the sinful and suffering world in order to call down God’s blessing upon it.
 
It must be emphasized that in the present era of monastic re­newal we are more and more concerned with the Zossima type. And this kind of monastic spirit is charismatic rather than institutional. It has much less need of rigid structures and is totally abandoned to one need alone: that of obedience to the word and spirit of God, tested by fruits of humility and compassionate love. Thus the Zos­sima type of monasticism can well flourish in off beat situations, even in the midst of the world. Perhaps such “monks” may have no overt monastic connections whatever.
 
On the other hand, it must be admitted that communal struc­tures have a value that must not be underestimated. The order, the quiet, the fraternal communication and love provided by a work­ing and praying community are the obvious and ordinary place in which the life of prayer develops. Needless to say, such communi­ties do not have to reproduce only the regular and observant pat­terns of Trappist, Carthusian or Carmelite convent life as we have known them hitherto.

II

In the way of prayer, as described by the early monastic writers, meditatio must be seen in its close relation to psalmodia, lectio, oratio and contemplatio. It is part of a continuous whole, the entire unified life of the monk, conversatio monastica, his turning from the world to God. To separate meditation from prayer, read­ing and contemplation is to falsify our picture of the monastic way of prayer. In proportion as meditation takes on a more contempla­tive character, we see that it is not only a means to an end, but also has something of the nature of an end. Hence monastic prayer, es­pecially meditation and contemplative prayer, is not so much a way to fi nd God as a way of resting in him whom we have found, who loves us, who is near to us, who comes to us to draw us to himself. Dominus enim prope est. Prayer, reading, meditation and contem­plation fill the apparent “void” of monastic solitude and silence with the reality of God’s presence, and thus we learn the true value of silence, and come to experience the emptiness and futility of  those forms of distraction and useless communication which con­tribute nothing to the seriousness and simplicity of a life of prayer.
 
Whatever one may think of the value of communal celebra­tion with all kinds of song and self-expression—and these certainly have their place—the kind of prayer we here speak of as properly “monastic” (though it may also fit into the life of any lay person who is attracted to it) is a prayer of silence, simplicity, contemplative and meditative unity, a deep personal integration in an attentive, watchful listening of “the heart.” The response such prayer calls forth is not usually one of jubilation or audible witness: it is a word­less and total surrender of the heart in silence. The inseparable unity of silence and monastic prayer was well described by a Syrian monk, Isaac of Niniveh:
 
Many are avidly seeking but they alone find who remain in con­
tinual silence. . . . Every man who delights in a multitude of words,
even though he says admirable things, is empty within. If you love
truth, be a lover of silence. Silence like the sunlight will illuminate
you in God and will deliver you from the phantoms of ignorance.
Silence will unite you to God himself. . . .
 
More than all things love silence: it brings you a fruit that tongue cannot describe. In the beginning we have to force our­selves to be silent. But then there is born something that draws us to silence. May God give you an experience of this “something” that is born of silence. If only you practice this, untold light will dawn on you in consequence . . . after a while a certain sweetness is born in the heart of this exercise and the body is drawn almost by force to remain in silence.

It must be observed that the term mental prayer is totally misleading in the monastic context. We rarely pray with the “mind” alone. Monastic meditation, prayer, oratio, contempla­tion and reading involve the whole man, and proceed from the “center” of man’s being, his “heart” renewed in the Holy Spirit, totally submissive to the grace of Christ. Monastic prayer begins not so much with “considerations” as with a “return to the heart,” finding one’s deepest center, awakening the profound depths of our being in the presence of God, who is the source of our being and our life.
 
In these pages, then, meditation will be used as more or less equivalent to what mystics of the Eastern Church have called “prayer of the heart”—at least in the general sense of a prayer that seeks its roots in the very ground of our being, not merely in our mind or our affections. By “prayer of the heart” we seek God him­self present in the depths of our...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: PRH Christian Publishing
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1971
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0385092199
• ISBN 13: 9780385092197
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 144
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: CMN Printpool Inh. Mathis Neumann; https://www.also.com/ec/cms5/en_6000/6000; ; Friedrich-Karl-Str. 9; Hamburg; 22391; Deutschland