Chickens often look thoughtful, but believe me,  they are not. They are just looking for food.

July 14, 2008 – Thomas Merton had some of the same problems I do about adjusting my behavior to norms of conduct and belief that that would allow me to play an approved, predetermined role in the society beyond my own life, and in which I seek and want to live. His life, he believed, had to be authentic, genuinely lived, to him, not to a church, dogma or sacred text. Yet he had enormous faith, and it drove him to find himself.
  Sitting in church yesterday (I take a lot of stuff for writing about this stuff), I saw the spirit shining in Steve McLean, my friend and pastor, as he urged me and the other people in the pews to remember what is beautiful and good, and lift ourselves up.
  That was a good message, and I took the text from the Bible (Phillippians, 4) that he read and I will read it every morning before I head out into my life. It reminds us what is important in life.
  Merton believed that it is by meditation, and meditation only,  that he could penetrate the imost grounds of his life, and live it. But this penetration, he wrote, must be authentic. It must be something genuinely lived, no someone else’s idea of what a spiritual life ought to be.
   Merton’s point was that as long as he was trying to adjust his life to the belief’s of others, then his life would be artificial, inauthentic. Our society is justly cynical, many of us wary of people who claim to talk to God and speak for him, and who have a patent on the only way to do it. I’ve been reading the Bible lately, something I’ve wanted to do for years, as the Bible sells a lot better than I do, and there are all sorts of messages in the Bible, some of them beautiful, some of the hateful and disturbing.
  God talk is a big business in America, even ahead of pet snacks.
  But I want to live in the space somewhere between cynical and rigid and meaningful, and that is always a struggle. I don’t really know of a Church for that.
  So I like Merton’s idea about his life. I think his life was genuinely lived, and that is what I seek in my own. To know myself, face myself, and live a life that is authentic.
  I have a friend who told me that he needs to be dependent on therapy right now, not on God. Is it a choice? I asked him.
  It is, he said. Because if you don’t know who you are, you can’t really know anybody or anything else.
  I think that’s exactly what Merton was saying, and it rings true to me.