The path of unshackled happiness

In wordless prayer, my mind began to carry me away, searching for things that would make me happy.   All things I don't have. All the "shoulds" and "oughts" that hound me with the persistence of a pack of dogs. Then suddenly all this cleared and I saw (or rather, felt) the great hilarity of it all. Happiness broke upon me despite what I don't have. Hilarity, precisely because in not having them---those circumstantial comforts, the conditional supports to happiness, the "good life"---my ego was detached momentarily from needing them.

Just as I began to lament this most recent challenge to all my "scripts" (a personal experience of loss), I became aware of the grace in it all---the charismatic, supernatural action of the Holy Spirit to strip me of anything natural, even good things, that might bring me happiness.

When the ego is stripped of all superficial things that usually bring it happiness or comfort, it's natural to lament the loss and become anxious or despondent. The ego is used to being propped up.

But crisis, loss, and trouble come into our lives and can be experienced or received as grace.  They have the power to strip us of the shackles of our lesser attachments.  Then ours souls can soar free into unrestrained happiness.  We are those who can no longer be separated from God by any-thing.

This is true freedom.

Leadership models from the 4th century

From my journals.  Monday, May 21, 2007 St. Macarius Monastery, Wadi Natrun, Egypt

Merton writes that we won't find the likes of the desert fathers and mothers today---not even in Skete. What the fathers did had not been done before. With them "you have the characteristic of a clean break with a conventional, accepted social context in order to swim for one's life into an apparently irrational void."

The examples and sayings of the Desert Fathers have become themselves conventional stereotypes, models for the accepted social context of monasticism which is no longer shocking.

"We are no longer able to notice their fabulous originality," writes Merton. "We cannot do exactly what they did. But we must be as thorough and as ruthless in our determination to break all spiritual chains, and cast off the domination of alien compulsions, to find our true selves, to discover and develop our inalienable spiritual liberty and use it to build, on earth, the Kingdom of God. We need to learn from these men of the fourth century how to ignore prejudice, defy compulsion, and strike out fearlessly into the unknown."

How to become wise

From my journals.  Sunday, May 20, 2007 St. Macarius Monastery.  Wadi Natrun, Egypt

Father Zeno and I spoke for quite a while tonight. I asked him about the path to wisdom.

"Remember that you are nothing," he said. "And remember that you are everything---bought as precious by Christ. And if you're everything, so are others; you are to love them, embrace them. You will find yourself in them, and you will find them in you. Love is the path to wisdom. When you are nothing, you have nothing and need nothing and you are free to live in love."

Holiness is . . .

Holiness is living unruffled in the midst of humiliation.  It embraces humiliation as God's school.  It looks up to God from down in the dirt . . . then finds God there.

A great enemy of good living

I wonder how differently we'd tread this sacred earth today if our praying taught us to do this:

"Not to run from one thought to the next, says Theophane the Recluse, but to give each one time to settle in the heart."

From Thomas Merton's journals

How would you treat the clerk at the grocery store?  Your child at the dinner table?  Your spouse?  Balancing the check book, paying bills online? Driving?  Talking with a friend?  Arguing with a foe?

Our distraction, the scatter of our thoughts, our inability to concentrate, our hurry and worry . . . all this is a great enemy of good living, of spiritual awareness, of holiness.