The writer and Trappist Thomas Merton wrote that the highest vocation in the spiritual world is the sharing of one’s contemplation with others and bringing other men and women to the experimental knowledge of spirituality, Mother Earth and the ethereal ideas of love and compassion.
The contemplative is a person who expresses or is involved with prolonged thought. Someone who can be thoughtful, pensive, reflective, meditative, introspective, brooding, lost in thought and enchanted by the spiritual elements of consciousness and the interior world. That is not the same thing as being an introvert, it is very different.
At times, and increasingly in my life, I am contemplative, as I imagine are most of the people reading these words.
I am always wary of being preachy, having been preached to for much of my early life, even though our culture celebrates preaching more than listening. The contemplative who tries to preach contemplation before he really knows what it is, or who he or she really is, will prevent himself and others from finding inner peace and a lasting path to spirituality, says Merton.
It is important, he cautions, not to assume that everybody else will want to see things from your own point of view when, as a matter of truth, they will most often not. People will raise objections to almost everything you say, and your reflections can lead to argument as easily as contemplation.
“Often,” Merton wrote, “we will do much more to make people contemplatives by leaving them alone and minding our own business – a contemplation itself – than by breaking in on them with what we think we know about the world and about the interior life. When we are known to ourselves in silence and darkness and when our own sensitivities and faculties are raised above the level of their own normal activity, we get close to the cloud and the aura that surrounds the presence of what some call God and others call inner peace.
We can, he says, do do immense and meaningful things for the souls of other men simply by keeping oneself quietly attentive to the spiritual side of the world. But be careful about imposing our own ideas about spirituality onto others.
Merton’s passage is meaningful to me, as it is pathway to inner peace. Every day, someone writes or messages me and says they read my work despite the fact that they sometimes disagree with it. Often, people will cancel their payments to me because, they say, they disagreed with something I wrote.
This goes to the core, I think, of what Merton writes about, this idea that the purpose of thought or contemplation is to be agreed with, or to win someone over to my point of view. A reader was deeply disturbed by my writing about my concerns about the welfare of the elephants being driven from the circuses by animal rights protesters. “Jon,” she wrote, “with all due respect, I don’t agree with you.”
But she said nothing about what I wrote. She didn’t need to go any further.
I answered her back, and said, also respectfully, that I didn’t need her agreement and wasn’t seeking it in my writing. What I need is to be able to express myself freely and thoughtfully. The rest is up to others.
I think this idea of writing and thinking for oneself is not about agreement, but the very process of thought, has done more to advance my own sense of spirituality and inner peace. Because I am not thinking in order to change anyone’s mind or to fit into a label like left or right, then I am free to think for myself. I am certainly interested in the opinions and reactions of others, but not whether or not they agree with me, but what they think about what I said. Good writing, I think, is always selfish, a gift to others when it is good, but something we do for ourselves.
In our culture, it seems that all thought and expression is about agreement or disagreement. Every opinion is an argument, thought stops, contemplation is not possible, only the need to defend oneself, to be upset by your own thoughts. Not is it thoughtful, but is it right?
The left or the right, the people who want elephants to stay in the circus, those who want them to go. It as if we can no longer have or express our own thoughts without them being seen only in terms of whether they are agreed with or not, not whether they are honestly and thoughtfully expressed and considered.
Some years ago, I resolved never to respond to other people’s thoughts in that way. I never tell anyone I read them because I agree with them, and I have never understood why anyone would want to read anybody they always agree with. Why bother?
As I told my very distressed reader, she was free to consider my ideas or not consider them, she didn’t need to see the ideas only in terms of whether she felt the same way. That is not contemplation, that is argument, and there is nothing less conducive to a contemplative’s life than continuous argument and conflict. It is the very antithesis of evolving thought in so many ways.
It is often necessary, and sometimes healthy to argue and defend one’s thoughts, I do it often. It is poisonous as a way or life, as as the main dialogue in a political system, as we see every day on the news.
I long ago subscribed to Merton’s idea that it is enough sometimes to think, and to stand in our truth and share our thoughts. I remind me of this often, it has brought me great clarity and helped my writing greatly. I do not see my ideas as arguments, or ideas seeking agreement, they are just my thoughts, ideas, musings, contemplations. They are no better or worse than yours.
They live or die on their own merit.
In our world, that brings me peace and draws me ever closer to my own idea of contemplation and the presence of God.