The Soul of Merton 5-17-09

Inspired by my readings of "Contemplative Prayer" and "Contemplation In A World Of Action" by Thomas Merton

As we continue our discussion from Contemplation In A World Of Action, and the final article "Is The Contemplative Life Finished?", Thomas Merton expounds on yet another essential element to the restoration of the spiritual internal life: imagination. He writes:

"The imagination is a discovering faculty, a faculty for seeing relationships, for seeing meanings that are special and even quite new. The imagination is something which enables us to discover unique present meaning in a given moment of our life. Without imagination the contemplative life can be extremely dull and fruitless."

Indeed, without the use of our potent imagination, without dovetailing its intimate connections to the internal source of our being into our service, our lives as devotees become dry and parched in the desert of the material world.

A great devotee I know says we need more artists in our society. He is saying we need more devotees, more committed, sincere spiritualists who know how to express their journey along the divine path in a way that inspires others.

We need devotees, happy in their heart and wise in their tracks, to show the many dynamic, subtle, and beautiful angles of light and vision that the diamond-like spirit soul reflects outward for all to see, all who choose to see.

Merton advises on another vital aspect of spiritualizing our imagination, which is to liberate it from the clogged and soot-filled vibrations of the ethers that surround us. He writes:

"There is a kind of contagion that affects the imagination unconsciously much more than we realize. It emanates from things like advertisements and from all the spurious fantasies that are thrown at us by commercial society...They are directed right at our instincts and appetites, and there is no question but that they exercise a real transforming power on our whole psychic structure. The contemplative life should liberate us from that kind of pressure, which is really a form of tyranny."

Free your mind...the ascending efforts of the great spiritualist-artists, from the brush strokes of Michelangelo to the celestial scales of Bach to the mountain-top rhetoric of MLK pushes the rivers of history forwards towards something more.

It's what sticks in people's hearts. Some of our best outreach yet to come should flow through the potency of our imagination drenched in the nectar of the attributes and pastimes of Govinda.

A healthy use of our imagination can also help us stay grounded on the path, connected in a more natural way to ourselves, to our friends, and to our environment. Merton writes:

"I think we should be able to take these natural pleasures and realize they're not opposed to the supernatural at all. They are a means of entering into contact with the real spiritual values which are given to us. We should not be afraid to make use of them. Then we might better face this situation of frustrating alienation in the religious life, this feeling that we're constantly exposed to an immense truth which is not coming through and is not getting to us."

In other words, get your head out of your computer! (Speaking at myself of course), or in more realized words, from St. Francis of Assisi:

Be praised, my Lord, through all your creatures, especially through my lord Brother Sun, who brings the day; and you give light through him. And he is beautiful and radiant in all his splendor! Of you, Most High, he bears the likeness.

Be praised, my Lord, through Sister Moon and the stars; in the heavens you have made them, precious and beautiful.

Be praised, my Lord, through Brothers Wind and Air, and clouds and storms, and all the weather, through which you give your creatures sustenance.

Be praised, My Lord, through Sister Water; she is very useful, and humble, and precious, and pure.

Be praised, my Lord, through Brother Fire, through whom you brighten the night. He is beautiful and cheerful, and powerful and strong.

Be praised, my Lord, through our sister Earth, who feeds us and rules us, and produces various fruits with colored flowers and herbs.

This gift of understanding the gifts of our natural environment, drinking deeply in their reflections of the sublime aspects of Krsna Himself, makes for the healthiest kind of spiritual understanding, which feeds and sustains renewal.

Prabhupada, the most sincere "environmentalist" before it was even hip to say so, understood this need for a lively, natural spirit to keep us from floating away into the jet stream of our own speculations and so-called "devotional" fantasies.

I can speak from my own personal experience that little else keeps you happy and humble in front of the deities and devotees than some dirty fingernails from a day well done in planting, tending, and harvesting your own offerings.

***

Merton speaks of the contemplative thus:

"We who have this particular call recognize that when we are agitated by all kinds of external concerns which do not touch us deeply at all we are less authentic, less real, less ourselves, less what we are supposed to be. We feel less faithful to the will of God than when we remain simply in an attitude of freedom and attentiveness to the world, His love and His will."
He continues:

"Together with this is another implied assumption: that this preference goes against the ideas of the majority of our fellow human beings at any given moment and especially today in the twentieth century. Our act of preference for 'quiet' is at the same time an implicit protest and defiance, a protest against and a defiance of the counter-opinion of those who are absolutely convinced that our life is useless and who reproach us for it."

The interior life of a devotee, of a sincere spiritualist, reflected in their outward acts of compassion and activism, is real revolution. We don't want anything to do with the modes of nature, no matter how much everyone else wants to swim in their various temporary flavors, delights, and distresses.

It is the wisdom, the vision of the acaryas, that gives us a real weapon against the arsenal of the material energy and her handlers. It is the cleansing of the heart which makes us impervious to arrows of Cupid which bind us to flesh and blood.

The call of "free at last, free at last, thank God almighty we are free at last" finds its ultimate fulfillment on the platform of the spirit soul, in the mission from the merciful hands and lotus feet of Srila Prabhupada.

***
Underlying it all lies the bonds of community to keep us packed up together. Merton writes:

"This brings us to the important point that the essential of our life...produces a community in which the Spirit can speak to us all in different ways. The longing for a real evangelical community life is certainly as strong today, above all in the young people who are coming to religious life."

Speaking forty years ago as Merton was, the climate today is different in the interest and urgency of young people to seek this kind of life. Still, as we persevere to represent and express here in the Bhaktivedanta Ashram here in NYC a this kind of life,a kind of community, that fulfills the eternal needs of the heart with a depth not to be found in temporary aesthetic concerns.

The need for this depth never changes: it is the yearning of the soul, but the conditioning of society obscure the awareness of this need in differing ways and differing times. But a sincere, strong, dynamic example of the spiritualist can always break through this malaise.

By serving the mission of Prabhupada, by imbibing his actions and his boldness of mood in giving out Krsna Consciousness to the tired, hungry, huddled masses, we can break through with the timeless message of divine love.

Merton concludes, in the spirit of his great heart, with essential messages of hope for the interior spiritual life.

"What is called the contemplative life is really a life arranged in such a way that a person can more easily and more simply and more naturally live in an awareness of direct dependence on God...with the sense of realizing consciously, at every moment, how much we depend on Him; and recieve from Him directly everything that comes to us as a pure gift; and experience, taste in our hearts, the love of God in this gift."

He adds:

"But the root of it all of us is prayer in faith. We must pray to the Lord at every moment to increase our faith because the root of renewal is faith. In proportion as we grow in faith, we keep closer and closer to Him who has called us. By our faith we will come...to a deeper dependence on Him so that He will be able to guide us through the difficulties, the obstacles, the confusions and the errors that we are likely to meet in this way of renewal."

The blessings of Thomas Merton's sincere, honest (sometimes brutally so), and very heart-felt wisdom, realized from deep, personal, hands-on practice, is such a boon to any spiritualist, any devotee interested in personal or communal renewal.

We pray, from the words of this great book and from his other writings, to be able to live out the purports of his call to us: to be real, to be natural, to be brave and searching, to not compromise, to love and to be loved, to know God and to let Him know us, and most importantly, to give our realizations to the spiritually less fortunate.

It is here where Merton and Prabhupada meet in the best of ways, in the call to arms to share the sublime in these times of great impiety. We charge ahead knowing the grace of the Lord is behind us and with us always in the teachings of those who know the path and how to traverse it best.

God-Bathed

From Theology For Beginners by Frank Sheed, and shared with us by Caitanya Mangala Prabhu from a great class he just gave.

If we omit God, we do not see anything as it is but everything as it is not - which is the very definition of insanity.

God is the explanation of everything. Leave out God, then, and you leave out the explanation of everything, you leave everything unexplainable. Science studies the constitution of matter - what things are made of. But no science can study the two far more vital questions - by whom were they made, for what were they made.

I have called these more vital, and so they are. Consider one thing only. You cannot use anything intelligently until you know what it is made for. Science cannot tell you what the universe was made for; only it Maker can do that - because he knows what he had in mind when he made it.

And it is not only the whole universe that we see wrong if we leave out God. We do not see any single thing right. God is at the center of the being of each individual thing, giving it the existence it has, keeping it in existence. To see anything - yourself, for instance - without in the same act seeing God holding it in existence is to be living in a world of fantasy, not the real world.

You see a coat hanging on a wall; with the eyes of your body you do not see the hook, because the hook is under the coat; but with the eyes of your mind you see the hook, all right. Supposing you did not; it would mean that you thought the coat was hanging on the wall by its own power. You would be wrong about the nature of coats, the nature of walls, the law of gravity. You would be living in wonderland. If the failure to see so small a thing as a hook means a deranged universe, how much more the failure to see God - on whom everything depends, including the hook.

God is not just a sublime extra. It is not that we see the same things as other people, plus God. Even the things we and they both see do not look the same, and in fact are not the same. Think of a physical landscape at sunrise; it is not that you see the same hills and trees and houses as before, and now you see the sun as well. The sun is not just one more item; you see everything sun-bathed. God is not just one more item; we must see everything God-bathed. Only then are we seeing everything as it is.

Of course it is not only a question of seeing; this truth affects our actions too. Sin, for instance, is an effort to gain something against the will of God; but the will of God is all that holds us in existence; when we sin, we are hacking away at our only support. What could be more idiotic? The realization may not prevent us from sinning; but it ensures that we shall feel fools while doing it. God's will is the only law for sane people.

.................

We have here something like the difference between an artist painting a picture - of a landscape, say, or a friend - and painting a self-portrait. The material universe is God's work of art, but spiritual beings are his self-portraiture. Our own soul is a spirit, so every man bears a portrait of God, for every soul is a new creation, made by God in his image; but in most of us the likeness of God is sadly defaced by sin.

Man's soul, of course, as we have already seen, is not the highest of created spirits; it is the lowest. Over it tower the angels. They are pure spirits - that is, they have no bodily element at all - simply minds and wills, minds knowing, wills loving, both at an intensity of power beyond our conception because no part of it has to be devoted to the animating of a body.

Frank Sheed

The Soul of Merton 5-10-09

Inspired by my readings of "Contemplative Prayer" and "Contemplation In A World Of Action" by Thomas Merton

In the final piece of Contemplation In A World Of Action, Thomas Merton, never one to shy away from the provocative, from the push, asks "Is The Contemplative Life Finished?"

We can easily infer, having absorbed Merton's own strongly positive views, and from his own personal example, that a life of spiritual absorption is indeed more important than ever. But what are the essentials to take in, to meditate upon, and to put into practice, in our own personal and communal lives, to insure a continuous renewal of devotional absorption and action?

Merton, from the core of his heart and realization, begins with the root and foundation of freedom. The very same freedom millions strive, suffer, and die for, which has stained the pages of history with the blood of the sincere and righteous, and which also binds those pages into a narrative of the eternal nature of the soul seeping through into the hills and valleys of human aspiration.

Merton is clear enough that those of us in the monastic order have a duty to reach deep into ourselves to find this freedom in its purest form, to cultivate it and to share it. He writes:

"We monks should be able to reassure modern man that God is the source and the guarantee of our freedom and not simply a force standing over us to limit our freedom. Our encounter with God should be, at the same time, the discovery of our own deepest freedom. If we never encounter Him, our freedom never fully develops...Every man at some point in his life encounters God, and many who are not Christians have responded to God better than Christians. Our encounter with Him, our response to His Word, is the drawing forth and calling out of our deepest freedom, our true identity."

It has been said in these pages before, and it will be said again, that the best thing we can offer to the progressive countercultures striving to better serve the human situation on this Mama Earth is knowledge of the very source and fountain of the most invincible freedom, the sweet loving shakti of Govinda.

Of course, for Merton and for us, the key to this freedom is our own fervent, constant prayer. He writes:

"Prayer is the flowering of our inmost freedom, in response to the Word of God. Prayer is not only dialogue with God: it is the communion of our freedom with his ultimate freedom, his infinite spirit. It is the elevation of our limited freedom into the infinite freedom of the divine spirit, and of the divine love. Prayer is the encounter of our freedom with the all-embracing charity which knows no limit and knows no obstacle."

As spiritual aspirants and potential guides for others, it is absolutely essential to live a life of prayer. I cannot stress this enough, and I am trying to re-focus my own sadhana around strong, serious, feeling, daily prayer, and even in the earliest of stages, I can sense some positive changes and effects.

All personal and communal renewal revolves this hob of the wheel: real prayer. Not the prayer of favor-asker. Not the prayer of the order-giver. Prayer of the heart, humble as a blade of grass, asking to serve and to know how to really serve. Merton writes:

"We have to try to say to modern man something about the fact that authentic prayer enables us to emerge from our servility into freedom in God because it no longer strives to manipulate Him by superstitious deals."

Our prayer, leading to the fountain of freedom that is Krsna's spiritual energy, should lift us out of our mundane need for security, our "comfort zone" as we like to say here in the Bhaktivedanta Ashram.

To go beyond our comforts which keep us bound to the vines and weeds of our lower self, we need to avoid criticizing others for their own mostly unavoidable shortcomings and begin with our own. Again, this has been said before again and again, but it can't be said enough. Merton writes of himself:

"My work for renewal takes place strictly in my own situation here, not as a struggle with the institution but in an effort to renew my life of prayer in a whole new context, with a whole new understanding of what the contemplative life means and demands."

As I wrote recently, Prabhupada can be considered the "supreme activist." We understand how much he stepped out of his own possible zones of comfort and security to do something so radical and revolutionary: bring Krsna Consciousness to the streets of the West.

In the multitude of ways that we can serve Prabhupada's mission, we must always keep at the core this mood of his, which is to respect the necessary boundaries to go well beyond the unnecessary ones. To create the Golden Age by actually getting out of our sleeping bags and connecting with the dynamic progressive peoples of this planet. Merton writes:

"What each one of us has to do, what I have to do, is to buckle down and really start investigating new possibilities in our own life; and if the new possibilities mean radical changes, all right. Maybe we need radical changes for which we may have to struggle and sweat some blood. Above all we must be more attentive to God's way and God's time, and give everything when it is really demanded."

***

Here in the Bhaktivedanta Ashram, we are now trying to serve and understand the words of HH Radhanath Maharaja, as he said that the result of last weekend's sweet success with the Radha-Muralidhara Reunion Festival was the "blooming of the lotus flower of the spiritual renaissance of New York City."

In this moment of great transition and possibility, the reality of renewal is our everyday meditation, and our chance to bring forth fully the best of our contemplative and active natures. Merton relates in this regard:

"Our new life will emerge from authenticity now. This is not merely an empty moment of transition...Transition is also fullness. We can have a certain personal fullness even when the changing institution is provisional, and we have to learn to be able to be contemplatives in the midst of the dynamic, in the midst of movement."

To move and shake, but to still do so with depth of heart, is one of the great opportunities we have here in New York City. But as Maharaja carefully warns, with success will come greater attempts by maya, who knows how to turn off the gas when something is cooking nicely, to thwart any attempt at renewal.

To combat this, we need as well as sense of toughness, so that we can refine ourselves to be and do our best. Merton says:

"I think we should aim for...the most and the best in ourselves. Here I think we need a great deal of subtlety and flexibility in recognizing the real vital possibilities of each individual in the contemplative life.

Contemplative discipline is both hard and flexible...There has to be a real challenge. It's got to be a rough life...But the contemplative life has to be tough in such a way that it's also flexible. The toughness of the contemplative life should not be that restricting toughness which arbitrarily rules out good possibilities. It should be a toughness that tones us up to meet new possibilities, the unexpected, that for which we have not been previously capable, for which we have not been previously ready."

All these essentials, and more we'll discuss next week, give us all hope that the renewal we need as spiritual and as a human community is close at hand, if we want it.

Srimad-Bhagavatam Meditation: 3:9:10

It is once again time for a guided meditation on the ripened fruit of the tree of Vedic knowledge, the Srimad-Bhagavatam

I humbly ask you to read first the translation and Bhaktivedanta purport to today's verse, the 10th verse from Ninth Chapter of the Third Canto of the Srimad-Bhagavatam.

ahny āpṛtārta-karaṇā niśi niḥśayānā

nānā-manoratha-dhiyā kṣaṇa-bhagna-nidrāḥ

daivāhatārtha-racanā ṛṣayo 'pi deva

yuṣmat-prasańga-vimukhā iha saḿsaranti

Such nondevotees engage their senses in very troublesome and extensive work, and they suffer insomnia at night because their intelligence constantly breaks their sleep with various mental speculations. They are frustrated in all their various plans by supernatural power. Even great sages, if they are against Your transcendental topics, must rotate in this material world.

I just wanted to appreciate and offer some meditations on a recent class done by our esteemed guest HG Damodar Gopal Prabhu of Montreal and Chowpatty on this verse. I hope I may add something to his already wonderful and profound observations.

I must admit I'm always tickled with these kinds of verses, in which the minute fallacies of our contemporary civlization of vice and conceit are placed in the proper light of the parampara.

After all, what is more revolutionary that "you are not your body, you're spirit soul!" Every activist group of progressive minds is actually aiming at this ideal, this liberation, this freedom against the clearly perceived injustices of our material existence.

The complete vision that Prabhupada has given us actually makes him the supreme activist, the one who can give us what we really lack and want: our selves, in real, eternal freedom, and what's more, he can give us our loving relationship with Krsna once again, if we sincerely desire it.

Our contemporary post-modern hodge-podge of gadgets, guns, and gonzo living is a veritable monster, on the loose, devouring our forests, hedge funds, idealistic politicans, and so many senses of decency and piety. It is a monster of lust, a capitalistic, industrialized, over-technological creature of comfort.

We are its victims as well as its confidants, its bridegroom and its divorcee. Prabhupada could clearly see this from the core of his vision, and his strong and crystal-clear writings on the precarious situation we have put ourselves in as a collective people stand with and above all such revolutionary expressions.

In the purport to this verse, Prabhupada writes:

"As described in the previous verse, people who have no taste for the devotional service of the Lord are occupied in material engagements. Most of them engage during the daytime in hard physical labor; their senses are engaged very extensively in troublesome duties in the gigantic plants of heavy industrial enterprise.

"Factory" is another name for hell. At night, hellishly engaged persons take advantage of wine and women to satisfy their tired senses, but they are not even able to have sound sleep because their various mental speculative plans constantly interrupt their sleep. Because they suffer from insomnia sometimes they feel sleepy in the morning for lack of sufficient rest. By the arrangement of supernatural power, even the great scientists and thinkers of the world suffer frustration of their various plans and thus rot in the material world birth after birth."

We think this is normal. We rotate our entire lives around the expectations of some such temporary pleasure to be derived from this vicious cycle. And Prabhupada clearly states that even the so-called "great minds" are not immune. Indeed they are often the ones, consciously or unconsciously, creating the social and economic spheres for the monster to stomp around on us.

It boils down to hankering and lamenting. This is the essence of the material nature. We are trying to enjoy seperately from Krsna, and we are in a world filled with so many different varieties of sensual delights.

We desire, we obsess, we think, we feel, and we act. In Calcutta on 1-27-73, speaking on verse 7:1 from the Gita, Prabhupada spoke the plain truth about this:

"Because in the karmi stage we have got two diseases: hankering and lamenting. Whatever you have got, if it is lost, then I lament. "Oh, I got this and that and it is now lost." And whatever we do not possess, we hanker after. So for possessing, we hanker, we work so hard. And when it is lost, we again lament and cry. This is karmi stage. So brahma-bhutah stage... Jnäna stage means he has no more lamenting or hankering. Prasannätmä. "Oh, I am, aham brahmasmi. What I have got to do with this body? My business is to cultivate transcendental knowledge, brahma-jnäna. So in that stage, brahma-bhütah prasannätmä na socati na känksati samah sarvesu bhütesu [Bg. 18.54]. That is the test. He has no lamenting. He has no hankering. And he's equal to everyone. Panditah sama-darsinah."

Again, what is more revolutionary than this? This is the summit of all progressive human aspiration, and beyond.

Another point that Damodar Gopal Prabhu made was that our contemporary system of education is the feeder into this ideology of impersonal and demonic exploitation. As I can relate from my own experience, your normal everyday, idealistic young college student is fed into a spiral of credit and debt, consumption and need...a veritable slaughterhouse.

Prabhupada writes from "The Art of Dying" from The Science of Self-Realization:

"The modern setup of human civilization is a risky one because it offers no education about relevant inquiries into the essential principles of life. Like animals, people do not know that they are going to be slaughtered by the laws of nature. They are satisfied with a bunch of green grass, or a so-called jolly life, like the waiting goat in a slaughterhouse. Considering such a condition of human life, we are just trying to make a humble attempt to save the human being by the message of Back to Godhead. This method is not fictitious. If there is at all to be an era of reality, this message of Back to Godhead is the beginning of that era."

It is our spiritual foundation, the house that Prabhupada built, that is our gift to all progressive-minded living entities. To dovetail our aspirations for a more just, humane, and equitable world into the vision that Prabhupada has given insures that our efforts will rise above the modes of nature.

Without a God-centered core, the modes of nature, the monster, will gradually and with great steadiness eat away at all of our energies and sincerity.

Prabhupada's vision is a mix of the urban and the rural. The lynchpins are book distribution (and all the dynamic city preaching and shelter that comes along with it) and self-sufficient, spiritually centered farm communities. This could save the world...at least temporarily, in a Golden Age kinda way.

It could save many souls, giving them back exactly what they are looking for in their protests, occupations, petitions, hunger strikes, martyrdoms, etc.

Satsvarupa Maharaja states this excellently here in an excerpt from his book Living With The Scriptures:

When the devotees regularly produce excellent books and magazine articles, and as they continue to distribute Prabhupäda’s books more and more, and when they establish successful farm communities, and when they solve their own problems of education, marriage, and community cooperation, and when they demonstrate the perfect Vaisnava etiquette of ladies and gentlemen–not just with a handful of members, but with thousands–then eventually the dull brains of the suffering population of Kali-yuga will come to realize Prabhupäda’s message, and we can be satisfied by fulfilling his request.

If there is truth in the homely proverb “Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door,” then it should not be very long before the practical ability of devotees to solve their problems and the problems of other people in the world begins to manifest more clearly to everyone, and the world’s citizens begin a mass movement of beating their path to the Krsna consciousness movement and back to Godhead.

My heart always remains connected to the progressive vibe, to the movement of the people. I pray very humbly, knowing I have little ability on my own, to Guru and Gauranga, for the guidance and ability to serve these striving humans and spirit souls by allowing them to understand the sublime message of Krsna Consciousness.

The Soul of Merton 4-26-09

Inspired by my readings of "Contemplative Prayer" and "Contemplation In A World Of Action" by Thomas Merton

In Contemplation In A World of Action, Merton once again examines the sticky issue of openness verses cloister, of engagement versus withdrawal from the secular world. He writes:

"Openness to the world means involvement in the affairs of people outside the cloister, identification with them in their desires, problems, struggles, dangers; it means vital concern about a world of total war, genocide, race riots, social injustice, misery, poverty, violence, lust, every kind of disorder. All this is wicked and ungodly. Far from divine, it is diabolical. How can one think of such things and maintain the inner peace, the purity of recollection, the serenity of spirit in which one will hear the sweet ineffable call to the divine?"

The deep wisdom that Merton holds in his heart, expressed through his writings, is a clarion call to all spiritual seekers and doers to connect, to plug in, to the world-at-large, to avoid the selfish trap of "blissing out" and becoming disconnected, whether out of fear or plain ignorance, from the real suffering of the peoples of our times, places, and circumstances.

The real revolution, the real heart of Merton's mood expressed through his writings is the urgency and the courage he shares and implores us to have in deepening our contemplation in dynamic engagement. He writes:

"Is the cloistered life merely to escape from the troubles and conflicts of the world to a condition of security and peace in which we find rest and taste the consolations of intimacy with God? Or does it mean sharing the anguish and hope of a world in crisis in which millions struggle for the barest essentials of human existence? Should not the contemplative life be seen in terms of event and encounter rather than simply as a viewing and tasting of essential love? Is love an object or is it a happening? Is God present to us in idea or act?"

From the very core of Prabhupada's mood, we know that to reach out to others, to sacrifice our own nonessential comforts, indeed to sacrifice a traditional life of cloister (this is most relevant for young monks like ourselves in the Bhaktivedanta Ashram in the middle of Manhattan), is the essential way to actually go deep into ourselves, to see that Krsna is there.

We must learn, refine, and perfect the art of communication, of the loving exchange. Merton writes in this regard:

"We have to be open in the sense that we are ready and available in all possible situations, including those of human encounter and exchange. Christian love, including contemplative love, starts from the basic realization that those who are unable to relate to others in a valid human encounter are also handicapped in their relations to the encounter with God."

Our challenge is finding the fine line in our own personal and collective disciplines as spiritual communities, a discipline that will not only prevent us from falling into the mundane, but will sharpen us into becoming dynamic, bold, and deeply caring in our outreach.

We have to consider both sides of the coin: our need for detachment to insure our own spiritual growth, and the the need for engagement to apply and give the lessons of our growth in a mood of compassion and of creating real change in the world. The mature devotee is able to find and perfect this balance, to be strong in and to give by the example of his own character. Merton writes:

"The contemplative life will therefore need to be understood...in terms of living experience and witness...What is important now is not so much to preserve order and regularity in observance but to produce real contemplatives, disciples who have found and have known him whom the Father has sent into the world and who are able to bear witness to his reality by their characters, by their lives and by the transformation of their consciousness."

He also says:

"Hence openness is necessary for contemplatives. It is by no means a mere concession, something permitted to modern people who would otherwise become too tense through too much concentration and withdrawal. In one word; openness is now seen to be not only opposed to cloistered contempation but even as necessary for its deepening and renewal."

Our maturity shines through our eagerness to engage with, and the urgency we feel to connect with progressive communities of thought and action who are fighting to shape a better planet, to take the right fork in the road.

We have so much to offer to our thoughtful and wise brothers and sisters, and they also have so much to offer us, which we should never forget. Merton writes:

"We are literally at the crossroads of our destiny. Most people either ignore the spiritual dimensions of the crisis or else they are incapable of apprehending the real issues in any whatever. The contemplative, by selective information and well-chosen exposure to sound commentary, should be able to identify intelligently and compassionately with modern man in crisis. Simple aloofness, withdrawal, and refusal of concern would make the contemplative a scandal to his brother in the world."

He adds:

"Much discipline and humility are necessary for one who tries in all honesty to share with others an undistorted view of the truth. The task of conveying to others clearly and sincerely what one knows of the problems of Christian life, without saying more than one knows and without resorting merely to catch phrases borrowed from books, is a great help for one's own life in Christ."

So, in the unique occupation of a monk in Manhattan, the mood must be one of relish in our opportunities, of careful consideration of our chances and the risks involved, and of deep faith in the potency of the parampara to carry to us what we lack and to enhance what we have. Merton clearly states:

"We are living through the greatest crisis in the history of man, and this crisis is centered precisely in the country that has made a fetish out of action and has lost (or perhaps never had) the sense of contemplation. Far from being irrelevant, prayer, meditation, and contemplation are of the utmost importance in America today."