Why can’t I hear God’s voice? Can I linger a little longer in my daily prayers? I fall short of my desire to access something deeper than my own wants and needs. I have been to that deeper place and have felt the oneness and heard the whispers meant for only me. I ask God, How can I heed your will if I cannot hear your voice? What does it take to rekindle my desire to desire you and to open the channel between you and me?
In answer, God calls me to a pilgrimage with 11 others from the Center for Spiritual Wisdom to the Abbey of Gethsemani, where the 20th-century Trappist monk, mystic, and author Thomas Merton lived, prayed, and wrote more than 60 books. Merton’s autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, is considered one of the top spiritual books of the last century. Spiritual thinkers and writers still look to his books for insight into the false self and true self, contemplation practices, and surrender.
Merton’s writings reveal him to desire God powerfully and to face familiar struggles in his prayer life. His words land on my prayer struggles with precision:
Only save me from myself. Save me from my own, private, poisonous urge to change everything, to act without reason, to move for movement’s sake, to unsettle everything You have ordained. Let me rest in your Will and be silent. Then the light of Your joy will warm my life. Its fire will burn in my heart and shine for Your glory. This is what I live for. Amen. Amen. (A Book of Hours)
Merton is revealing how he talks to God, lays out his weaknesses to the One who already knows, and asks for what he needs. I need to do more of that.
At the Abbey of Gethsemani outside of Louisville, Kentucky, we join the monks in the chapel five times in two days for the Liturgy of the Hours, or Divine Office. Following a worship practice that originated in the Middle Ages, we chant the psalms in a simple melody, blending our voices with theirs as they pray and listen for God. The practice is self-emptying and self-forgetting. Peace flows in my heart as I practically skip out of the chapel.
Between sessions, we wander the public areas and bookstore, pray and hike the trails, and eat our take-away lunches. The monastery’s grounds feel sacred and quiet. Few vestiges remain of the novice master who lived there 60 years ago. We watch the abbey documentary, pause at Merton’s gravesite, and voice our desire to visit the Merton hermitage, which is secreted less than a mile inside the abbey’s gates, not part of the public area.
Our leader had pre-arranged a visit with Brother Paul Quenon. Brother Paul is an author and a once-Merton novice, who is still vigorous in his 80s. He invites us to tour the hermitage privately and then gather in a circle on the porch to pray. Brother Paul recalls his interactions with Merton and reads an entry from Merton’s journals, published 50 years after his death. We are filled with awe for the graces of our visit with Brother Paul: 11 pilgrims communing with the Holy One on the porch of Merton’s hermitage, grateful for our unforgettable moments here.
The parallels between the lives of Merton and St. Ignatius, whom Merton read and admired, are profound. Both men experienced radical personal transformation from worldly pursuits to lifelong dedication to God. Both joined religious orders after being disenchanted with the sins, emptiness, and excesses of their disordered youths. They dedicated to God “all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my entire will, all that I have and possess.”
They each fulfilled their truest selves in God, through their imperfect journeys and unceasing prayer, even when they experienced dry periods in prayer. Merton chose simplicity, silence, and separation from culture. Ignatius, whose life was deeply rooted in prayer and contemplation, wrote The Spiritual Exercises and taught a defining method of discernment for the Society of Jesus.
If holy figures like Merton and Ignatius could still their active minds, overcome their strong wills, and pray through dry periods, so would I. The pilgrimage rekindled my desire to desire God. My heart is filled with love of God, contentment, consolation, and curiosity.
Returning home, my morning prayer time is rich with possibilities. Should I pray with the Book of Psalms or Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation? Return to my daily prayer practices and start to journal again, or wait in the darkness for God to answer me?
Oh, right. “Let me rest in your Will and be silent.” Amen.
What do I and/or You really want, presuming there is sufficient cause for Us the be related in this certain place on earth, as it is, in the beyond of all difference? In that complicated web of relations between the various parts of that unified whole, this dynamic differentiation and return are the Ultimate in paradox. We are each uniquely and fully involved in the Christian Trinity, why not differentiate and return on pilgrimage every day, moment by moment watching and bearing witness to the beating of One Heart ~ One Light?
Thanks to this post I discovered the Center for Spiritual Wisdom.
What a gem.
And I copied the Prayer from Murray that you included in your post so that I could pray it again. Blessings to you, Gerri.
Thank you for sharing Ms. Gerri Leder. Who doesn’t need to rekindle. Why not now? 😊🙏
Thank you so much. I admire both men tremendously.
This arrived in my email on the very day I asked myself the same question. I shall spend some time in silence knowing God loves me and will is waiting for me welcome Him. Thank you for your openness in sharing your reflection with us. I will pray that we will both awaken our desire for God.