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Devotion
The following story is told by Emmet Fox about an experience his friend had in Italy (Around the Year with Emmet Fox, September 25):
A man visited a great cathedral in Italy. Just inside the door was a majestic mosaic the width of the building, but it was not yet complete. The mosaic represented the Last Judgment and entailed an immense number of tiny pieces of different colored marble. A man was on his knees and working on the mosaic. A man who had entered the cathedral whispered to him, "What a stupendous task you have! I could not even dream of undertaking so much work." The man retorted softly, "Oh, I know about how much I can do, and I don't bother my head thinking outside of that space. Before I know where I am, the job will be complete."
Huston Smith gives a true and saddening assessment of the consequences of our buying into the promise of technology to provide us more leisure. Rather, as Smith notes, in The Soul of Christianity, following observations on the apparently more destructive aspects of technology:
Even the less destructive applications of technology aren't much more satisfactory, for what do they result in? The multitude of possessable objects; the invention of new instruments of stimulation; the dissemination of new wants through propaganda aimed at equating possession with well-being and incessant stimulation with happiness. But incessant stimulation from without is a source of bondage, and so is preoccupation with possessions. Labor-saving devices have made us busier than ever, and we find ourselves trapped in a culture of haste that makes us a tired nation.
Those words "a culture of haste" and "a tired nation" are words worth our considering. They lead us to the inquiry, "How does the haste and waste of our culture pertain to the values of the Gospel of Christ?" And, "How do we address this tyranny of busyness, wherein we procure and produce, apparently to prove the value of the ego and institutions built on the worldview of collective ego selves?" And, "Is the church guilty of captivity to the culture of productivity, rather than being a culture of spiritual nurture, of Eternal Life?"
I recommend that the captivity to haste and inability to experience the bloom of the moment pertains to our fear of emptiness, of death. Thomas Merton, in Contemplative Prayer, writes, "Contemplative prayer is, in a way, the preference for desert, for emptiness, for poverty. One has begun to know the meaning of contemplation when he intuitively and spontaneously seeks the dark and unknown path of aridity in preference to every other way." In other words, contemplation is the opposite of the tyranny of modernity described by Huston Smith.
Does this emptiness, this kenosis, leave us empty in the way that the tyranny of modernity, with its muchness and manyness and busyness, leaves us lacking substantial and lasting meaning? No. Again, Merton: "Only when we are able to 'let go' of everything within us, all desire to see, to know, to taste and to experience the presence of God, do we truly become able to experience the presence with overwhelming conviction and reality that revolutionize our entire life." And, this applies to our entire life, not just "seeking God," for contemplation is a way of life, a life prayerful, not just another technology among the other many "spiritual" and "religious" methods that just add another object among the objects of modernity. Contemplation is the path beyond the possessable.
Like the man in the cathedral, we can learn to live in the space given us daily, even each moment. I know of no finer and more effective training than the life of contemplation. Without contemplation, I do not see how the church will escape its own entrapment in the futility of modernity.
God waits at the point we are ready to be emptied of even our spiritual aspirations and good works, beyond the possessables: including the claim to possess God or the one right image of God. Possibly, what seems foolish is the way of Wisdom, a way many have forgotten in egocentric religious ways, as much of the church still attempts to build a Christian empire, while many other persons try to renew the church apart from the Wisdom of the Desert.
Scripture for Meditation
5Trust in the Living One with all your heart,
and do not rely on your own understanding.
6In all your ways know the Spirit,
and the Spirit will make straight and smooth your paths.
(Proverbs 3.5-6, Author's Translation)
Reflection
How does the opening story pertain to the remainder of the devotional writing?
When you think of "desert," what thoughts or images come to mind?
What might be meant by "Wisdom of the Desert"?
What do you think of Merton claiming that we can know God most truly by surrendering our pursuit to know God?
How might our trying to know God contradict the call for us to surrender to God?
How might "religion," "spirituality," or "Christianity,"--even "contemplation--", become another pursuit of the ego self, or False Self, separating us from enjoyment of Life?
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