Wild Encounter with a Cooper's Hawk

The wildest encounter I have ever had with an animal in the outdoors occurred during a canoe trip down the Delaware River in the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area back in the summer of 1983. My co-leader Margaret and I were guiding adolescent summer campers on a combined canoe/backpacking that was taking us down the Delaware River and then north on the Appalachian Trail in New Jersey.

One day Margaret and I were in the same canoe. I do not recall who was in the bow and who was in the stern.  As we paddled downstream, one of us noticed what appeared to be a bird flapping its wings midair several feet over the water and a few yards from shore but going nowhere. Paddling closer, we realized the bird, a  Cooper's Hawk, had become entangled on a fishing hook suspended from a fishing line hanging from a tree branch out over the river.

Margaret steadied the canoe as I stood up in it. I reached up as high as I could and grabbed the line. I then pulled it down as low as I could, passing over the tangled bird until I could reach the line above it.  Using my Swiss Army knife, I cut the line about a foot above the hawk and sat back down in the canoe while I was holding the fowl by the line. Margaret paddled over to shore where we both climbed out onto the New Jersey bank with me still holding the hawk, suspended by its wing, the fishing line still in my hand.

Hawk after we removed the hook

While I held the hawk by the line, Margaret emptied a small nylon stuff sack and put the sack over the hawk's head, covering the beak. She then cradled the creature in her hands while softly singing to it.  I used my knife to carefully cut the three barbed hook, line attached, from out of the crook of the animal’s wing.

After I removed the hook, Margaret sat the hawk down on the bank and removed the stuff sack. The Hawk stood up straight, puffed out its chest, and pulled back its wings as if enjoying its freedom, and stared straight at us. I grabbed my  camera and snapped the attached photo. I don't recall how long all this took, but it seemed like a half hour or so.

Margaret and I had no idea how long the hawk had been suspended mid-air over the river by its wing, nor do we know what eventually happened to this beautiful creature, but we both felt intense satisfaction for having freed it from its predicament. The experience was the highlight of a very memorable trip. Thirty-seven years later, I still recall it as one of the most intense, transcendental wilderness encounters with an animal I have ever experienced.

Vibrations

Pulsating

            Reverberating

                        Tibetan prayer bowls

Mystical

            Inviting

                        Primitive throat singing

The shaman invokes sacred journey

To the outer edges of the ever-expanding universe

And to the innermost depths of the human soul

I hear the voice of the cosmos

The voice of God

Om

+ + +

I began working on this at the West Virginia Writer’s Fall 208 Conference as I responded to a prompt in a Poetry Workshop presented by Sarah Elkins. The prompt was a chant recorded by Tom Kenyon. https://tomkenyon.com/

Musings on Merton: Techniques Associated with Contemplation

            In chapter 29 of New Seeds of Contemplation, Merton discusses “Mental Prayer,” but I have struggled to understand what he means by that. He seems to talk about the same subject using apparent synonyms such as active forms of prayer, meditation, and systematic meditation, without ever defining his terms. By searching the internet I learned that “Mental prayer is a form of prayer recommended in the Catholic Church whereby one loves God through dialogue, meditating on God's words, and contemplation of Christ's face.”[1]

Praying in the garden!

            Merton distinguishes active forms of prayer from “infused contemplation” which he says “begins when the direct intervention of God raises this whole process of development above the level of our nature ; … But before this begins, we ordinarily have to labor to prepare ourselves … by deepening our knowledge and love of God in meditation and active forms of prayer.”[2]

            While not offering a definition of infused meditation, Merton at least notes that “meditation is a twofold discipline that has a twofold function. First it is supposed to give you sufficient control over your mind and memory and will to enable you to recollect yourself and withdrawal from exterior things and business activities and thoughts and concerns of temporal existence.”[3] This sounds to me very much like my understanding and experience of mindfulness meditation.

            Secondly, “this is the real end of meditation – it teaches you how to become aware of the presence of God.” Based on my experience and understanding, this is exactly where Christian meditation or contemplative prayer departs and goes a step beyond mindfulness mediation. It moves beyond withdrawal from exterior things to find union with God in the inner being.

            “The real purpose of meditation is this:’ writes Merton, “to teach a man how to make himself free of created things and temporal concerns, in which he finds only confusion and sorrow, and enter into a conscious and loving contact with God in which he is disposed to receive from God the help he knows he needs so badly, and to pay to God the praise and honor and thanksgiving and love which it has now become his joy to give.”[4]

            Like many other Christian writers who have written about Christian meditation, contemplation, and centering prayer, Merton has more to say about its theological foundation and benefits than he has to say about the practical “how to” nuts and bolts of actually practicing it. I have found that many secular and Buddhist authors writing about meditation offer more practical advice than Merton and other Christian writers have offered.

            About the only practical advice I found in New Seeds of Contemplation was in chapter 33, where Merton writes about the “Journey through the Wilderness.” There is in that chapter an off handed remark referring to “your half-hour of meditation”[5] and what appears to me to be a paragraph about what I consider a form of Lectio Divina.[6]

            While Merton offers little practical guidance here, (and I wished he offered much more), he does provide in this chapter what I consider the clearest and most succinct definition of Contemplative prayer. It “is a deep and simplified activity in which the mind and will rest in a unified and simple concentration upon God, turned to Him, intent upon Him and absorbed in His own light, with a simple gaze which is perfect adoration because it silently tells God that we have left everything else and desire even to leave our own selves for His sake, and that He alone

is important to us, He alone is our desire and our life, and nothing else can give us any Joy.”[7] I say “Amen” to that.

            Even if you resonate with the above definition of contemplative prayer, as I do, you may still be seeking some practical “how to” advice from Merton. For that, I send you to Jim Forest’s fine Merton biography, Living With Wisdom: A Life of Thomas Merton. There you will find brief description of Merton’s daily rhythm of life in his hermitage, including a description of Merton’s “method of meditation” and reference to Merton’s writing about “the Jesus Prayer.” [8] I found in those few pages some of the most practical and down to earth descriptions of monastic life, prayer, meditation, and contemplation I have ever read, whether by Merton or anyone else.

              Here is the link to the introductory post in the series.

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_prayer.

[2] New Seeds of Contemplation, 214.

[3] Ibid., 217.

[4] Ibid., 218.

[5] Ibid., 242.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid., 243.

[8] Jium Forest, Living With Wisdom: A Life of Thomas Merton (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1991, 2008) , 190-192.

Musings on Merton: Faith and Wisdom

            One of my favorite passages from John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion is where he defines faith as a “a firm and certain knowledge of God’s benevolence toward us, founded upon the truth of the freely given promise in Christ, both revealed to our minds and sealed upon our hearts through the Holy Spirit.”[1] While I resonate with Calvin’s definition, I think the Reformed Tradition has too often emphasized its aspect of the mind while more or less neglecting its characteristic of the heart.

From new seeds, a new garden grows and spreads.

            Merton, while asserting that “The beginning of contemplation is faith,”[2] qualifies his comment by stating that  “faith is not an emotion, not a feeling. [It] is first of all an intellectual assent. … It gives us certitude concerning God.”[3] I think Calvin and many Reformed Christians would agree with Merton in this regard.

            For Merton, however, knowledge or intellectual assent, was not the end all and be all of faith. Faith also “has to be something more than an assent of the mind.”[4] Faith is also “an opening of an inward eye, the eye of the heart, to be filled with the presence of Divine light.”

            I understand Merton to be arguing that while an intellectual assent may be the beginning of contemplation, contemplation leads to a deeper, more profound, more intimate, more mystical faith, perhaps more mystical than Calvin or his theological children, sometimes referred to as the “frozen chosen,” may have been and sometimes still are comfortable with.

            While Merton says that faith is both an intellectual assent and a heart filled with Divine light, he also asserts that God is “not a philosopher’s abstraction” and “lies infinitely beyond the reach of anything our eyes can see or our minds can understand.”[5] It is here that Merton embraces the via negativa or apophatic spiritual tradition that teaches any knowledge of God is obtained through negation, which I mentioned in my last post about the true self and false self. Thus “to find God we must pass beyond everything that can be seen and enter into darkness. Since nothing that can be heard is God, to find [God] we must enter into silence.”[6] This is what I understand to be the essence of contemplative faith.

            Merton writes “The function of faith is not to reduce mystery to rational clarity, but to integrate the unknown and the known together in a living whole, in which we are more and more able to transcend the limitations of our external self.”[7]  It is here that I think many theologically conservative Reformed Christians would cry heresy, for Merton next claims “Faith is what opens to us this higher realm of unity, of strength, of light, of sophianic love where there is no longer the limited and fragmentary light provided by rational principles, but where the Truth is One and Undivided and takes all to itself in the wholeness of Sapentia, or Sophia.”[8]

            Some Presbyterians will never forget the 1993 controversy generated by the “Re-Imagining God” women’s conference where “Sophia” was identified, lifted up, and celebrated as a feminine aspect or expression of God and as a corrective to the over-use of masculine images of God and masculine language about God.  I think Merton would have had no problem with that and would have, in fact, celebrated it.

            In a church that has long suffered from patriarchy, exclusively governed by Apollonian men from Mars while excluding leadership from Dionysian women from Venus, Merton’s emphasis of a contemplative spirituality that embraces and celebrates head and heart, Christ as well as Sophia, can serve as a healthy corrective. Merton calls for a healthy balance between the poles of a “purely emotional worship” and a “merely rational life,” neither of which are a spiritual life, but rather calls for a life of wisdom that through contemplation founded on the intellect leads one to an affectional experience of God. I could not agree more.

              Here is the link to the introductory post in the series.

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[1] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 3.2.7

[2] New Seeds of Contemplation, 126.

[3] Ibid., 126-127.

[4] Ibid., 128.

[5] Ibid., 131.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid., 136.

[8] Ibid., 141.

Musings on Merton: The True Self and False Self

            I have occasionally read and heard contemplatives writing and talking about the true self and the false self but until recently did not have a clue to what they were referring. That started to change after I participated in a Pittsburgh Theological Seminary Spiritual Formation Course about “Thomas Merton and the Journey to True Self.”

From new seeds, new life will find a way.

            I think the best book to read for insight into Merton’s understanding of the false self and true self is his The New Man. It can be dense and a real struggle to get through, however. It is also more theoretical, philosophical, theological, and offers even less practical advice about contemplation than New Seeds of Contemplation. Nevertheless, Merton does discuss the true self and the false self in this latter work and therefore offers some insight.

            Unfortunately there is no index to New Seeds of Contemplation, so I cannot go back to read everything Merton wrote about the true and the false self.  I recall him first mentioning the false self in the chapter entitled “Everything That is, Is Holy,” in comments he made as he discussed detachment. I first became aware of the concept of detachment through my study and practice of mindfulness meditation, but thanks to Merton, I have learned more about detachment as a Christian spiritual discipline that is both essential to and flows from contemplation and leads to detachment from the false self and the discovery of the true self.

            Merton writes “We do not detach ourselves from things in order to attach ourselves to God, but rather we become detached from ourselves in order to see and use all things in and for God. … There is no evil in anything created by God, nor can anything of His become an obstacle to our union with Him. The obstacle is in our ‘self,’ that is to say in the tenacious need to maintain our separate, external, egotistic will.”[1] According to Merton, “All sin starts from the assumption that my false self, the self that exists only in my own egocentric desires, is the fundamental reality of life to which everything else in the universe is ordered.” [2] In other words, to “To say I was born in sin is to say I came into the world with a false self.”[3] “Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self.” [4] “My false self and private self is the one who wants to exist outside the reach of God’s will and God’s love — outside of reality and outside of life. And such a self cannot help but be an illusion.”[5]

            “Until we love God perfectly,” writes Merton, “everything in the world will be able to hurt us,” everything including our separate, external, egotistic will that manifests itself in our false self. “Instead of worshipping God through His creation we are always trying to worship ourselves by means of creatures. … But to worship our false selves is to worship nothing. And the worship of nothing is hell.”[6]

            The “ourselves” and “self” that contemplation seeks to help us detach from is what Merton calls the “false self,” the illusory person we normally and usually think we are. This “false self” can get in our way of experiencing union with the divine. “The only true joy on earth,” writes Merton, “is to escape from the prison of our own false self, and enter by love into union with the Life Who dwells and sings within the essence of every creature and in the core of our very own souls.”[7]

            By detaching ourselves from the falsity of illusion and instead choosing the truth of our identity as created in the image of God, we “share with God the work of creating the truth of our identity.” According to Merton, “to work out our own identity in God, which the Bible calls ‘working out our salvation,’ is a labor that requires sacrifice and anguish, risk and many tears.” [8]

            If I understand Merton at all, it seems that the false self is the fallen self, the self that is tarnished by original sin, not the self we were created to be. The true self is the self of original blessing, the self that was created in the image of God. In contemplation, we open ourselves to the power of God to help us detach ourselves from the illusion that our sinful self is who we were meant to be and through the grace, mercy, and love of God rediscover our true self as a child of God created in God’s image.

                Here is the link to the introductory post in the series.

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[1] New Seeds of Contemplation, 21.

[2] Ibid., 34-35.

[3] Ibid., 33.

[4] Ibid., 34.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., 26.

[7] Ibid., 25.

[8] Ibid., 32.

Musings on Merton: What is Contemplation?

            Perhaps you have heard about or even practice some form of meditation such as Mindfulness Meditation, or a type of contemplative prayer like Centering Prayer, but you struggle, as I do, to articulate, either to others or for your own understanding,  just what contemplation is and isn’t. Well, I recently participated in a Pittsburgh Theological Seminary Spiritual Formation Class about “Thomas Merton and the Journey to True Self” that required I read Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation. Its first chapter is entitled “What Is Contemplation?” “What Contemplation Is Not” is the title of the second chapter. Merton has therefore offered me some guidance to better express what contemplation is and isn’t.

From new seeds, growth begins and spreads.

            In the first sentence of the first chapter of New Seeds of Contemplation, Merton writes “Contemplation is the highest expression of [humanity’s] intellectual and spiritual life” and “reaches out to the knowledge and even to the experience of the transcendent and inexpressible God.”[1] I like that Merton defined contemplation in broader terms than just an intellectual knowledge of God or only a spiritual experience of the Divine. Merton did not divorce his heart from his head, something my own beloved Reformed Tradition has sometimes been prone to do.

            Having been raised and educated in the Reformed Tradition, my head was often more engaged than my heart. My faith frequently seemed to be measured by what I thought about God rather than if, or how, I experienced God’s grace, mercy, and love.  Therefore I have found Merton’s writings about spirituality in general and contemplation in particular offering me a much needed corrective to a spirituality of the head because I not only want to know about God intellectually but to actually know God experientially. Contemplation, or contemplative prayer, such as Merton describes it, is the primary way I have experienced the Divine in an affectional, intuitive, and personal way that transcends a mere intellectual assent.

            Just as it is often difficult to describe God because God is so far beyond our ability to formulate our thoughts and feelings into words, it might also be equally difficult to describe contemplation for similar reasons. God can be so difficult to describe that sometimes we resort to saying what God is not. After we remove everything that is not God, all we should be left with is the Divine. Likewise, it might make more sense to say what contemplation is not, and whatever remains is contemplation. Merton follows this “negative” approach in the second chapter of New Seeds of Contemplation, where, in the first paragraph of the second chapter, he writes that contemplation “cannot even be explained. It can only be hinted at, suggested, pointed to, [and] symbolized.”[2]

            Pointing to contemplation by describing what it is not, Merton notes that “nothing could be more alien to contemplation than the cogito ergo sum of Descartes.”[3] As a child of the Enlightenment who has been educated by both a culture and a church that has tended to separate the head not only from the body but also from the heart, I find Merton’s assertion both troubling and liberating. It troubles me because I have been raised to value education and an intellectual faith that emphasizes orthodoxy. I find it liberating because I have come to believe that we can never think our way to divine union or experience union with God simply by theological reflection or believing the right things.

            Merton also states in the second chapter that “contemplation is not prayerfulness, or a tendency to find peace and satisfaction in liturgical rites. These, too, are a great good, and they are almost necessary preparations for contemplative experience. They can never, of themselves, constitute that experience.”[4]

            I value liturgical, ordered, public worship. I affirm, along with the new Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) Book of Common Worship that “over time, an order of worship helps to shape our faith and faithfulness as the people of God, becoming a pattern for how we live as Christians in the world.”[5] Yet Sunday Worship has rarely satisfied my thirst and hunger for an experience of the living God in the same way that the spiritual discipline of daily contemplative prayer has fed my soul.

             Here is the link to the introductory post in the series.

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[1] Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (New York: New Directions, 2007), 1-2.

[2] Ibid., 6.

[3] Ibid., 8.

[4] Ibid., 9.

[5] Book of Common Worship, PC(USA), 4.

Musings on Merton: The True Self Encounters New Seeds of Contemplation

            I first heard of Thomas Merton (1911-1968) when I was in seminary. That was over thirty five years ago. I did not hear the name uttered by a seminary professor in a classroom lecture but by a fellow student during a casual conversation. It took me thirty years before I started reading Merton and learned firsthand why Merton’s writings have meant so much to so many.

From new seeds, new gardens grow.

            I was already versed in contemplative prayer and considered myself somewhat of a mystic before I started reading Merton. When I learned that a Bridges to Contemplative Living with Thomas Merton group was meeting at the nearby St. Joseph Retreat Center, I signed up. I read Merton’s spiritual autobiography, The Seven Story Mountain, to prepare myself for participating in that group. Published in 1948 when Merton was thirty-seven years, The Seven Story Mountain is probably Merton’s best known work and the entry point for many who are drawn to Merton’s writings.

            Little did I know when I signed up to participate in that Bridges that a little over four years later I would be enrolled in Pittsburgh Theological Seminary’s Spiritual Formation Certificate Program and attending an intensive Sunday evening through Wednesday noon  Spiritual Formation Certificate Program course entitled “Thomas Merton and the Journey to True Self.”

            I was thrilled to learn, near the conclusion of the course, that one of the two options for the final assignment was to write a series of four 600-700 word blog posts introducing readers to four themes from Merton’s New Seeds ofContemplation, one of the two books by Merton we were required to read prior to attending the class. The other book we were required to read for class, and spent the most time discussion in class, was Merton’s The New Man.

            This post serves as an introduction to the four posts I wrote for my final assignment. I will post one a day the following four days. I hope you enjoy the four posts that follow and find them spiritually enlightening and meaningful.
               Here are the links to the four posts in the series, in order:
               Musings on Merton: What is Contemplation? 
              Musings on Merton: The True Self and False Self 
              Musings on Merton: Faith and Wisdom
              Musings on Merton: Techniques Associated with Contemplation 

Cycling In The Zone

           While one form of contemplative prayer or another has been part of my spiritual life for almost as long as I can remember, a few years before I started cycling I more intentionally explored and started to practice a contemplative form of prayer that I consider a mishmash of Centering Prayer and Mindfulness Meditation informed in part by the writings of Thomas Keating, Basil Pennington, and Thomas Merton. Now that I have been cycling for a few years I have discovered that contemplative prayer’s focus on the breath and clearing the mind as a gateway to solitude is akin to some of my cycling experiences.

            For example, one day I was riding along a rather wild section of a rail trail when all of a sudden I realized there was a thick branch sticking out onto the trail just a foot or two in front of my face. I did not have time to steer around it or stop. I simply ducked my head and let nature take its course. I ended up on my side in the bushes with a cracked helmet, a healthy head, and no damage to my bike.

            Reflecting on what had happened, I realized that for the first time while cycling I must have entered a meditative state. I had become so mindful of my repetitive peddling and steady, deep, rhythmic breathing that I become one with the bike and the trail and unaware of what was around me. I was “in the zone,” an “expression used to describe a state of consciousness where actual skills match the perceived performance requirements perfectly” and implying an “increased focus and attention which allow for higher levels of performance. Athletes, musicians, and anybody that totally owns a challenge of physical and mental performance can be in the zone.”[1]

            “In positive psychology, flow, also known as the zone, is the mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity. In essence, flow is characterized by complete absorption in what one does, and a resulting loss in one's sense of space and time.”[2] For me, this experience of being “In the Zone” while cycling was as a mystical experience, a loss of the ego in which I was more mindful of the flow of the internal momentary here and now rather than the external of what was coming or what has passed.

            The concept of “flow” or being “in the zone” has existed for thousands of years under other guises, notably in some Eastern religions.  “For millennia, practitioners of Eastern religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism and later in Sufism have honed the discipline of overcoming the duality of self and object as a central feature of spiritual development. Eastern spiritual practitioners have developed a very thorough and holistic set of theories around overcoming duality of self and object, tested and refined through spiritual practice instead of the systematic rigor and controls of modern science.”[3] I think this is what Merton, Pennington, and Keating were talking about when they wrote about contemplative prayer.

            I have discovered that the attentiveness to breathing that I have cultivated through contemplative prayer aids my breathing while cycling. I have also discovered the deep breathing that comes with riding for a good pace for over an hour or more has contributed to my practice of contemplative prayer. As Esther De Waal has observed, “breath is life itself. To be aware of my breathing is to be aware of life.  . . .  Then, as I stay consciously with my breath, I may begin to see this gentle rhythm of breathing in and out again as a microcosm of my whole life:”[4] After riding a few miles at a fast pace, my breathing deep and rhythmic but not labored, I feel particularly alive and mindful of the life within and around me.

            I do not find myself “in the zone” every time I cycle. There have been instances since that first time, however, that I have experienced a flow but am aware of it only after the fact, never during. As soon as I become aware that I was experiencing the flow I am no longer “in the zone.” Similarly, I do not experience a truly meditative state every time I engage in contemplative prayer. I feel blessed when I enter a “the sacrament of the present moment” even if only for a brief time, but once I am aware that I have entered it, I am no longer experiencing it. De Wall writes ‘Living in the present with total attention is gift given to the artist and the poet, but it can equally well belong to any of us,”[5] including, I would argue, the cyclist.

            After a long ride, which for me now is thirty five to fifty miles, I will come home physically tired and sometimes sore but mentally and spiritually refreshed, even if I have not been in the zone. The repetitive motion of peddling, the rhythmic breathing, feeling the air blow across my face, arms and legs, and occasionally being surprised by a deer running out in front of me, wildflowers along the trail, or a particularly stunning view of a pastoral scene feeds my spirit and soul, renewing my awareness of being a creature in the midst of God’s awesome cosmos.


You might also be interested in a more recent post, Riding Solo Or With A Group.

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[1] http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=in%20the%20zone

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)

[3] Ibid.

[4] Esther De Wall, Lost in Wonder; Rediscovering the Spiritual Art of Attentiveness (Collegeville, Minnesota: Liturgical press, 2003), Esther De Wall, p. 39.

[5] Ibid., 61.

Calligraphy Caim

A good friend gave me a Sheaffer Maxi Calligraphy Kit and a fifty sheet Calligraphy Paper Pad for Christmas. The Sheaffer Kit included a small instruction book. I have been learning and practicing calligraphy ever since.

This above is a scanned copy of my latest creation after several failed attempts. The words to the Celtic Caim are not original and slightly different from the traditional. The lettering, my attempt to employ "The Uncial Hand," which according to the instruction book "is often called an 'early Christian' alphabet, as it was used during the 4th and 5th centuries for scriptural texts and sacred writings," and coloring was all done by hand with the exception of the Celtic Cross. I used a rubber stamp and ink pad for the cross and then shaded it with a green colored pencil. The finished piece is 8 x 10.

My renewed interest in calligraphy and illuminated manuscripts has been in part piqued by recently reading about and studying the calligraphy and illuminations of The Saint John's Bible, especially the Gospels and Acts volume. My studying and reading is in preparation for a four day continuing education event called "Illuminating the Text," which will focus, in part, on the Gospels and Acts volume of The Saint John's Bible.

The above illuminated calligraphy also betrays my interest in Celtic Christianity and Celtic Christian illuminated manuscripts, especially The Book of Kells and The Lindisfarne Gospels, both of which I have had the opportunity to see with my own eyes.