Sunday, November 06, 2005
Trigger
“Trust your legs, Mattie”. This is what Barbara said to me the other day. It somehow struck an emotional cord. It feels like everything I have done, all that has occurred, the injuries I’ve sustained, are all as a result of this lack of trust in my legs. It’s something to really work on.
Having Chris in rehearsal is very instructive to me, since he’s a professional ballet dancer. Barbara and Deanna (one of the other dancers – probably the strongest technically in the group) use lots of ballet language for what we’re doing, so in addition to my process is this new language that is probably useful for me to have (if I ever teach movement….)
Here are some more Merton quotation (a really good batch):
“I think we owe it to ourselves and to God and thepeople we love to keep ourselves in the fight and not get knocked clean out of it.”
“I can understand how you feel about wanting to get out and be in some other country that can never own a bomb, never afford genocide, and lacks the joys of American know-how in alienating the rest of the universe. But wherever we might go we would take our America with us.”
“In my private opinion the contemplatives are a bunch of dolts and squares – at least the Catholic ones, and they have nothing to say to the modern world at least until such time as they wake up and come alive.”
“…we must not be so obsessed with details of policy that we block the deeper development in other people and in ourselves.”
“The violent man is, by our standards, weak and sick. Though to us at times he is powerful and menacing in an extreme degree. In our acceptance of vulnerability, however, we play on his guilt. There is no finer torment. This is one of the enormous problems of the time, and the place. It is the overwhelming problem of America: all this guilt and nothing to do about it except finally to explode and blow it all out in hatreds, race hatreds, political hatreds, war hatreds. We, the righteous, are dangerous people in such a situation. (Of course we are not righteous, we are conscious of our guilt above all, we are sinners: but nevertheless we are bound to take courses of action that are professionally righteous and we have committed ourselves to that course.) This is not for you so much as myself. We have got to be aware of the awful sharpness of truth when it is used as a weapon, and since it can be the deadliest weapon, we must take care that we don’t kill more than falsehood with it. In fact, we must be careful how we ‘use’ truth, for we are ideally the instruments of truth, and not the other way round.”
“Nevertheless, you will probably, if you continue as you do, begin the laborious job of changing the national mind and opening up the national conscience. How far will you get? God alone knows. All that you and I can ever hope for in terms of visible results is that we will have perhaps contributed something to a clarification of Christian truth in this society, and as a result a few people may have got straight about some things and opened up to the grace of God and made some sense out of their lives, helping a few more to do the same. As for the big results, these are not in your hands or mine, but they can suddenly happen, and we can share in them: but there is no point in building our lives on this personal satisfaction, which may be denied us and which after all is not that important.”
“So the next step in the process is for you to see that your own thinking about what you are doing is crucially important. You are probably striving to build yourself an identity in your work and your witness. You are using it so to speak to protect yourself against nothingness, annihilation. That is not the right use of your work. All the good that you will do will come not from you but from the fact that you have allowed yourself, in the obedience of faith, to be used by God’s love. Think of this more and gradually you will be free from the need to prove yourself, and you can be more open to the power that will work through you without your knowing it.”
“It was a rather errie experience a few weeks ago to receive a Vietnamese translation of Seeds of Contemplation and a request to write a preface for the Viet translation of No Man is an Island. The whole thing brings home the futility of so-called spiritual literature in this day and age. Who is going to have time for pious medidations with the whole place getting showered in napalm? Maybe someone in a plush apartment in Saigon … I tried to say something, and to say it non-politically. Don’t know if it makes any sense. I was too embarrassed. I guess being embarrassed is a luxury too. Everything is. Life is.”
“I am sending you a photograph of a supernatural event [a picture of Merton himself] such as (of course) occurs around here at every moment and even more frequently than that. In between the moments. You have to duck all the time to keep from being brained by a supernatural event. I also have a picture of Meher Baba which says ‘Meher Baba loves you’ but I can’t find it. Probably swiped by some desperate soul who needs to be loved by Meher Baba.”
Having Chris in rehearsal is very instructive to me, since he’s a professional ballet dancer. Barbara and Deanna (one of the other dancers – probably the strongest technically in the group) use lots of ballet language for what we’re doing, so in addition to my process is this new language that is probably useful for me to have (if I ever teach movement….)
Here are some more Merton quotation (a really good batch):
“I think we owe it to ourselves and to God and thepeople we love to keep ourselves in the fight and not get knocked clean out of it.”
“I can understand how you feel about wanting to get out and be in some other country that can never own a bomb, never afford genocide, and lacks the joys of American know-how in alienating the rest of the universe. But wherever we might go we would take our America with us.”
“In my private opinion the contemplatives are a bunch of dolts and squares – at least the Catholic ones, and they have nothing to say to the modern world at least until such time as they wake up and come alive.”
“…we must not be so obsessed with details of policy that we block the deeper development in other people and in ourselves.”
“The violent man is, by our standards, weak and sick. Though to us at times he is powerful and menacing in an extreme degree. In our acceptance of vulnerability, however, we play on his guilt. There is no finer torment. This is one of the enormous problems of the time, and the place. It is the overwhelming problem of America: all this guilt and nothing to do about it except finally to explode and blow it all out in hatreds, race hatreds, political hatreds, war hatreds. We, the righteous, are dangerous people in such a situation. (Of course we are not righteous, we are conscious of our guilt above all, we are sinners: but nevertheless we are bound to take courses of action that are professionally righteous and we have committed ourselves to that course.) This is not for you so much as myself. We have got to be aware of the awful sharpness of truth when it is used as a weapon, and since it can be the deadliest weapon, we must take care that we don’t kill more than falsehood with it. In fact, we must be careful how we ‘use’ truth, for we are ideally the instruments of truth, and not the other way round.”
“Nevertheless, you will probably, if you continue as you do, begin the laborious job of changing the national mind and opening up the national conscience. How far will you get? God alone knows. All that you and I can ever hope for in terms of visible results is that we will have perhaps contributed something to a clarification of Christian truth in this society, and as a result a few people may have got straight about some things and opened up to the grace of God and made some sense out of their lives, helping a few more to do the same. As for the big results, these are not in your hands or mine, but they can suddenly happen, and we can share in them: but there is no point in building our lives on this personal satisfaction, which may be denied us and which after all is not that important.”
“So the next step in the process is for you to see that your own thinking about what you are doing is crucially important. You are probably striving to build yourself an identity in your work and your witness. You are using it so to speak to protect yourself against nothingness, annihilation. That is not the right use of your work. All the good that you will do will come not from you but from the fact that you have allowed yourself, in the obedience of faith, to be used by God’s love. Think of this more and gradually you will be free from the need to prove yourself, and you can be more open to the power that will work through you without your knowing it.”
“It was a rather errie experience a few weeks ago to receive a Vietnamese translation of Seeds of Contemplation and a request to write a preface for the Viet translation of No Man is an Island. The whole thing brings home the futility of so-called spiritual literature in this day and age. Who is going to have time for pious medidations with the whole place getting showered in napalm? Maybe someone in a plush apartment in Saigon … I tried to say something, and to say it non-politically. Don’t know if it makes any sense. I was too embarrassed. I guess being embarrassed is a luxury too. Everything is. Life is.”
“I am sending you a photograph of a supernatural event [a picture of Merton himself] such as (of course) occurs around here at every moment and even more frequently than that. In between the moments. You have to duck all the time to keep from being brained by a supernatural event. I also have a picture of Meher Baba which says ‘Meher Baba loves you’ but I can’t find it. Probably swiped by some desperate soul who needs to be loved by Meher Baba.”
// posted by MSR @ 8:45 AM 
