Ruminations on existence

In prayerful meditation over my lunch walk, the Spirit and I ruminated over Thomas Merton’s words in the opening fifty pages of New Seeds of Contemplation. The waters are very deep and I am at great risk of misinterpretation, but this is what light I seem to have gained:

The eternal I AM, who is no “thing” but creates all things and therefore defines reality, sustains all. Yet “sustain” is poor language, for it isn’t that He made it and then keeps it going. Rather, He makes anew everything at each moment.

He creates the original oak in what we call history, but at each moment of that oak’s development He creates it afresh to reflect Himself in a singularly unique expression. Never shall any of the billions of child oaks, at any moment, offer precisely the same reflection. And He does this with everything, at every moment. This continuous creative act is what is called His will.

It is beyond comprehension to think at such scale; I can only grasp a whispered syllable of Him by perceiving, at this moment, an oak. The entire dialog of His momentous will is a tidal wave.

All He wills display His glory, for it expresses exactly what He has spoken it to be. There is no deviation from His reality and the object’s existence. Except for humanity.

Humanity reflects I AM in freedom. A human can, each moment, align with His will. But a human may also choose to create separately from Him. “Create” is a misnomer, for anything which does not proceed from eternal Reality is unknown by Reality and cannot, by definition, exist. For a short time, however, He permits humans to pretend to create with one another what ultimately will be proven to never have had any existence, a dark and empty unreality.

A human who is, is what He spoke into reality. humans are words meant to respond. He alone knows what a human is, and He alone creates humanity. But unlike every other creation, He invites humanity to participate in the continuous creative act in themselves. our vocation is not simply to be but to work together with god.

every one of us is shadowed by a false self. But the false self is an illusion, for God does not recognize them. God defines reality, so what He does not recognize is not real. However, if i am true to the thought of him i shall find him everywhere in myself.

So, it is untrue to describe His will as sheet music, as though a human may play their strain either in harmony with the written note or collapse into dissonance because He invites the human even to ink in the notes as the composition unfolds. And yet each human is tuneless and produces at the final concert only empty silence. Those notes which were written in collaborative unity with Reality, however, will be heard and will produce a harmonious melody. This analogy is even more opaque than Merton, so bear with my grasping mind.

To the intensely practical, what I think, at this early stage, is that all meaning in human life centers on self-discovery amidst mundane living in collaboration with God. Comparision is fruitless, for no template exists for any human, the hermit’s or the entrepreneur’s, because God speaks each human image in a singularly unique dialog.

Even if none of this makes any sense to you (it hardly makes sense to me), I commend to you New Seeds of Contemplation, for Merton’s own words ought to be understood in their context and not merely filtered through my half-blind eyesight.