The photo was taken this morning on Cairn O' Mount. Low cloud drifting across mountain moor, sunlit cloud and the line of the far horizon inviting into the unknown. This prayer by Thomas Merton likewise acknowledges mystery, trust and the mixture of obscurity and insight that is the essential tension of spirituality, the cloud of unknowing and sunlight epiphany.
MY LORD GOD, I have no idea where I am going.
I do not see the road ahead of me.
I cannot know for certain where it will end.
Nor do I really know myself,
and the fact that I think that I am following your will
does not mean that I am actually doing so.
But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you.
And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing.
I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.
And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road
though I may know nothing about it.
Therefore will I trust you always
though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death.
I will not fear, for you are ever with me,
and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.
Thomas Merton.
…………….
The integrity, honesty with self and radical trustfulness of this prayer have always moved me. The Seven Storey Mountain, Merton's naively brilliant autobiography, is a remarkable conversion story, written with an intensity of devotion which left the immature monk struggling for humility that wasn't put on. That humility and self-deprecation is all the more attractive and authentic for its tone of uncompromising naivete which would later mature into a knowing humility; and an honest self-knowing in which Merton recognised humility and self assertion as the two poles of a powerful personality, given over to grace yet true to itself in its longing for self-transcendence.
Merton has been a companion all my Christian life – often quirky, sometimes annoying, wisely critical, funny without malice, passionate about justice and peace, compassionately humane, a lover of solitude and silence and one who found written communication irresistible. His Thoughts in Solitude, New Seeds of Contemplation, Contemplative Prayer, volumes of letters, essays and journals, are a repository of monastic reflection in which the early Merton is undiscerningly positive, and the later Merton is lovingly critical. With all its faults The Seven Storey Mountain remains a remarkable story of a soul being saved, and then going on being saved, by a grace tougher than his own will. The prayer above comes from a heart that knows its limits, and trusts a love that has no limits.
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