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General Hidden Contemplatives/HJ Lee
2020.06.06 01:50
Hidden Contemplatives / 이한중
As I immersed myself in reading the latest book on Thomas Merton
by a Korean Catholic monastic, Jaechan Anselmo Park, titled
"Thomas Merton's Encounter with Buddhism And Beyond, 2019,"
I came to the realization through Merton's observation that I have led
a life many years, perhaps my entire adult life, that is defined by
Merton as " hidden contemplative."
Perhaps this coronavirus Pandemic has contributed to a degree to
this awakening by forcing me to live a life that literally imitates that of a monk.
According to Merton, every human being has a monastic dimension that
everyone must realize in different ways. ..... He believed that the seeds of
contemplation are present in people of every culture, but they are hidden.
He described the hidden contemplative as one who practices a type of
"masked contemplation" in daily life. These lay contemplatives are not monks per se but can be true contemplatives. ....
because of the great purity of heart
maintained in them by ......abandonment to God's will in all they do and suffer.
They are much closer to God than they realize. They enjoy a kind of a "masked contemplation."
For Merton, contemplation was essential for the attainment of self-transformation, and the capacity for contemplative experience
is opened to everyone. He saw that the search for interior life, a longing for solitude, and
contemplative experience could awaken a hidden contemplative.
As I am looking around and looking back on my life journey,
I find a good number of people or many that fit the description of hidden contemplatives who never told anyone
as far as I know what's in their interior lives, yet demonstrated clearly by their actions what they were
doing in their inner worlds that were founded and built up between themselves and their God or transcendents.
This Pandemic has made me enjoy a plentiful solitude and a good chance
for me to work on my own kingdom, prayerfully on more firm ground,
where I continue my conversation with and pray to Almighty and All-Loving,
day and night, night and day, all by ourselves.
June 6, 2020
Comment 3
-
“In the end the contemplative suffers the anguish of realizing that he no longer knows what God is. He may or may not mercifully realize that, after all, this is a great gain, because “God is not a what,” not a “thing.” That is precisely one of the essential characteristics of contemplative experience. It sees that there is no “what” that can be called God. There is “no such thing” as God because God is neither a “what” nor a “thing” but a pure “Who.”* He is the “Thou” before whom our inmost “I” springs into awareness. He is the I Am before whom with our own most personal and inalienable voice we echo “I am.”
― Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation -
Thomas Merton's spiritual journey began with a question:
"What is contemplation?"
His longing to find the true self through contemplative awareness
led him to a new question:
"What is a truly human life?"
Without contemplative awareness, he noted, human life "has lost
the spiritual orientation upon which everything else -- order, peace, happiness, sanity--
must depend."
He saw that a human person was an unachieved being on the journey toward the attainment
of the real human person through self-transformation or enlightenment.
He realized that the contemplative life was a profoundly human life and a way to become
one's true self.
He believed that God planted seeds of contemplation in the deep inner self of all human persons,
and that through a contemplative life the seeds could grow, blossom and be fruitful. .......
Jaechan Anselmo Park( from his book mentioned in the text)
“Everyone of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self..We are not very good at recognizing illusions, least of all the ones we cherish about ourselves. (34) Contemplation is not and cannot be a function of this external self. There is an irreducible opposition between the deep transcendent self that awakens only in contemplation, and the superficial, external self which we commonly identify with the first person singular.(7) Our reality, our true self, is hidden in what appears to us to be nothingness....We can rise above this unreality and recover our hidden reality....(281) God Himself begins to live in me not only as my Creator but as my other and true self. (41)”
― Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation