The book of this title is by Thomas Merton and the chapter entitled Renunciation has taught me the difference between detachment and the really hard stuff of renunciation and why spiritual JOY depends on both!
Once upon a time I went on a semi-directed spiritual retreat entitled "Back to Basics" directed by Fr. Bernard Albers OMI. He had remarked at my seeming inability to stay still! We maintain silence for eight days so I knew he meant that I was unable to maintain an interior silence of some sort. I have struggled to understand this, thinking at the time that being wrapped up in my "feelings" for someone in close proximity, that I could not fully grasp any real meaning. I certainly had no inkling as to how I should proceed. From time to time, since then, I have thought that I have a better understanding.
It has now become much clearer since reading about Renunciation. In reading the book, now at Chapter 35, with four to go, I have several times felt uncomfortable, thinking that Merton is being quite harsh in his estimation of himself and others, of human nature as a whole. As with most books of this genre, one needs to take it in, so to speak, in small doses. There are only 297 pages, medium print, so the chapters are thankfully not lengthy. They are still sometimes tough, 'hard going' for those not willing to make the interior journey.
Several times I put this impact of Merton's philosophy on me down to being a result of his "immature" or early days in a monastery. But his introduction to this, the 2nd edition published more than ten years after completion of the first manuscript explains this away. It is not intended as a "How to become a contemplative" manual {an impossibility for one person to try to teach another}, nor, according to Merton, is it meant for religious people.
We know that the Christ's Way is not the easy way! Merton says "The way to contemplation is an obscurity..." and he goes on to paint a picture of those chosen by Jesus being conspicuous "only by their disregard for the ...network of devotions and ceremonial practices and moral gymnastics of the professional holy."
If I take Merton's statement "It is not filth and hunger that makes saints, nor even poverty itself, but love of poverty and love of the poor" to be a great truth then I realise that Jesus' vision of being a contemplative was to teach common workmen [and all at the bottom of the social pile, including women] how to love poverty and love the poor in spirit. This personal picture helps my understanding of not only the famous Sermon on the Mount but of what "Church" should be in reality.
Merton goes on to give various examples of the difference between what is mere outward showings of piety and the truly contemplative mind/holy person.
Then he states "The issue on which all sanctity depends is renunciation, detachment, self-denial." This is where clarity on Fr. Bernard's direction starts to emerge. I paraphrase my understanding: One can give up all one's deliberate/conscious faults and actions by a planned strategy of resolutions and penances – not easy, but possible! Merton: "But the crucial problem of perfection and interior purity is in the renunciation and uprooting of all our unconscious attachments to created things and to our own will and desires. …When it comes to fighting the deep and unconscious habits of attachment which we can hardly …recognise… {all our resolutions and plans may be ineffective…]
"In getting the best of our secret attachments – [that] we cannot see because they are principles of spiritual blindness – our own initiative is almost always useless. This is the time to enter the darkness in which we are naked and helpless and alone."
Who wants to go there? No, Fr Bernard, that is why I would rather read three books simultaneously, certainly never be in any place without one, be busy at something, mostly on my computer, never able to just sit alone and "contemplate" unless it is my set aside time each day for such activity. I do all this despite the fact my Soul calls me to Contemplate, feel the pain, live with it and through it…
But Merton tells me: "This is the night which empties us and makes us pure". And: "So keep still and let [God] do some work."
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