Merton & Hafiz: Into Darkness to Light, to Love

Sometimes it's hard to separate one's love of God from love of life, love of creation, love of people, and love of truth, whether spiritual, scientific or historical. Sometimes it all seems to merge into one gestalt, one encompassing perception that defies description. Sometimes we may even start to lose some of our sense of identity in that broader, deeper sense of creation, existence and reality. Further, we may have to acknowledge a different sense of purpose, a growing sense of shared relationship and identity--and it seems to transcend that which changes and passes, and finds more identity with that which endures, perhaps even a timeless shared identity in the infinite and eternal.

But, at some point in that process necessarily comes many challenges to orthodox thinking and understandings in faith practice and life. The doors get blown off some protected safe havens and refuges from personal change and growth, places too often created by cultural and faith organizations, and even the faithful themselves, because they cannot fully risk following God and truth into the unknown, the unsettling places that cause us to question who we are, what we believe, and what that means for our lives and our speculations about the real and eternal. This is an unnerving, identity-questioning and changing place that most would rather avoid, or escape if they find themselves led there.

I've often talked of the 20th-century Cistercian (Trappist) monk, Thomas Merton, and shared from his writings. I will share more here, along with some poetry by the 14th-century Sufi master, Hafiz.


Thomas Merton wrote principally for "the religious," monks living a monastic life. But he is clear that there are others outside the cloister, in their parish vocations or lay settings that are called to this same life to one extent or another. These quotes are excerpted from Merton's book on contemplative prayer. Thomas Merton:

It is natural for one in [certain circumstances] to dread the loss of his faith, indeed of his own integrity and religious identity, and to cling desperately to whatever will seem to preserve the last shreds of belief. So he struggles, sometimes frantically, to recover a sense of comfort and conviction in formulated truths or familiar religious practices. His meditation becomes the scene of his agonia, this wrestling with nothingness and doubt. But the more he struggles the less comfort and assurance he has, and the more powerless he sees himself to be. Finally he loses even the power to struggle. He feels himself ready to sink and drown in doubt and despair. 

This is not the moment for arrogance or proud thrusts of will. The arrogant man will break in the agony of darkness. His meditation will be intolerable, and he will either revolt or despair. We must also recognize that one of the causes of mental or emotional breakdown of novices or young monks is...a lack of identity and spiritual maturity.  

The man of today is more and more vulnerable in this respect. His efforts to seek peace and light are carried on not in a realm of relative security, in a geography of certitude, but over the face of a thinly-veiled abyss of disorienting nothingness, into which he quickly falls when he finds himself without the total support of reassuring and familiar ideas of himself and of his world. Nevertheless, it is precisely this support that we must learn to sacrifice. 

This is the genuine climate of serious meditation, in which, without light and apparently without strength, even seemingly without hope...we drop our arrogance, we submit to the incomprehensible reality of our situation and we are content with it because, senseless though it may seem, it makes more sense than anything else... Here then, we make not the confident and conspicuously generous resolutions of our moment of light, but we abandon ourselves in submission, colorlessness, hiddenness, humility and distress to the will of God. We see there is no hope but in Him, and we leave everything, finally, in His hands. "Take heed, said Jakob Biehme, "of putting on the Christ's purple mantle without a resigned will." 

Dread is an expression of our insecurity in this earthly life, a realization that we are never and can never be completely "sure" in the sense of possessing a definitive and established spiritual status. It means that we cannot any longer hope in ourselves, in our wisdom, our virtues, our fidelity. We see too clearly that all that is "ours" is nothing, and can completely fail us. In other words, we no longer rely on what we "have," what has been given by our past, what has been required. We are open to God and to His mercy in the inscrutable future and our trust is entirely in His grace, which will support our liberty in the emptiness where we confront unforeseen decisions. Only when we have descended in dread to the center of of our own nothingness...can we be led by Him, in His own time, to find Him in losing ourselves. 

[...] The whole mystery of simple contemplative prayer is a mystery of divine love... 

[...] But true [contemplation] is that which transcends all things, and yet is immanent in all...The character of [this Christian contemplation] is pure love, pure freedom. Love that is free of everything, not determined my anything, or held down by any special relationship. It is love for love's sake. It is a sharing, through the Holy Spirit, in the infinite charity [and love] of God. And so when Jesus told his disciples to love, he told them to love as universally as the Father who sends his rain alike on the just and unjust. 

---From Contemplative Prayer, Chs. 15 & 16, by Thomas Merton (1996, 1966)

That so-called "dark-night" experience is a daunting abyss to stand at the edge of and look into, never mind casting yourself faithfully, trustingly, headlong into it. But, in their faith and contemplative walk, that is just what some few are called to do, if they would find shared identity in the light and love of God. We are advised that a few do it with greater faith and trust than all others, and some cannot do it at all. Some keep taking two steps forward and one step back, but it only takes them on a limited journey. Regardless, most go just so far and stop, living as their situation provides for them in the new light and understandings of their spiritual way station.

The Sufi poet Hafiz offers this poem that affirms shared experiences and understandings of the contemplatives of different faith traditions. Hafiz:

Love is the Funeral Pyre* 

Love is

The funeral pyre

Where I have laid my living body. 

All the false notions of myself

That once caused fear, pain,

Have turned to ash

As I neared God. 

What has risen

From the tangled web of thought and sinew 

Now shines with jubilation

Through the eyes of angels 

And screams from the guts of

Infinite existence itself. 

Love is the funeral pyre

Where the heart must lay

It's body.

So then, to what place or what end this most challenging and difficult of divine dances, this spiritual totentanz. Hafiz offers us perspective, if not understanding, in more of his poetry, perspectives and understandings embraced by Merton and spiritual contemplatives of other stripes as well. Again, Hafiz:

In Need of The Breath* 

My heart

Is an unset jewel

Upon the tender night

Yearning for it's dear old friend

The Moon. 

When the Nameless One debuts again

Ten thousand facets of my being unfurl wings

And reveal such a radiance inside

I enter a realm divine--

I too begin to so sweetly cast light,

Like a lamp,

Through the streets of this

World. 

My heart is an unset jewel

Upon existence

Waiting for the Friend's touch. 

Tonight

My heart is an unset ruby

Offered bowed and weeping to the Sky.

I am dying in these cold hours
For the resplendent glance of God.

I am dying

Because of a divine remembrance

Of who I really am. 

Hafiz, tonight,

Your soul

is a brilliant reed instrument 

In need of the breath of the

Christ.

*From The Gift: Poems by Hafiz, the Great Sufi Master (1999), as rendered in English by Daniel Ladinsky.

First written: January 2012