My Aunt Lois is a Sister of the Immaculate Heart of Mary (IHM), Sister Rose Lawrence, and throughout my life she has provided me with great spiritual guidance, particularly with the spiritual authors to whom she has introduced me. The greatest of these treasures has been the love of Thomas Merton that I have developed and that I owe entirely to her. One of the Christmas gifts she gave me a few years ago was a devotional book comprised of Thomas Merton's journal writings. Today's entry struck me in particular (emphasis Merton's, emphasis mine):
The "spiritual preoccupations" of this time - the post Vatican II Conciliar years. (An imaginary era we have thought up for ourselves - divertissement!) I need perhaps to be less preoccupied with them, to show that one can be free of them, and go one's own way in peace. But there is inculcated in us such a fear of being out of everything, out of touch, left behind. This fear is a form of tyranny, a law - and one is faced with the choice between this law and true grace, hidden, paradoxical, but free.
An unformulated "preoccupation" of our time - the conviction that it is precisely in these (collective) preoccupations) that the Holy Spirit is at work. To be "preoccupied with the current preoccupations" is then the best - if not the only - way to be open to the Spirit.
Hence one must know what everybody is saying, read what everybody is reading, keep up with everything or be left behind by the Holy Spirit. Is this a perversion of the idea of the Church - a distortion of perspective due to the Church's situation in the world of mass communications? I wonder if this anxiety to keep up is not in fact an obstacle to the Holy Spirit.
Merton's prophetic voice never ceases to amaze me. This entry was written in 1966, and already he foresaw the dangers that come along with the wonder of mass communication. I see these dangers every day in my own spiritual life, and it is a struggle that too often I find myself losing. Certainly the internet is a wonderful thing, and it gives us access to information and to people in truly wonderful ways, and the Church is right to seek new ways to embrace this technology as a powerful evangelical tool. But it also poses serious threats, as well, in many various forms, depending on the individual person and his or her spiritual weaknesses. I know for myself, what Merton says about being preoccupied with the fear of being out of touch, left behind, being preoccupied with what everyone is saying, is definitely one of my greatest spiritual struggles vis-à-vis the internet. There are far too many times when I find myself reading blogs obsessively when I should be spending time in prayer, or doing homework, or communicating with the Body in person, or doing all sorts of other things. Too often for me it becomes an obsession, an addiction, and it too easily separates me from God.
One of the things that saddens me is when I look back over the past three years of my journey. It is clear to me that I have fallen backwards instead of progressing into a deeper relationship with God. It is evident in the way I live my life; it is evident just by reading my own writings. My writings used to have a real spiritual power and life to them, a life that sprung from the fact of my deep prayer and union with God. I have fallen in that relationship with God, my prayer life is diminished, and I no longer stand rooted in the fountain, but rather occasionally walk up to it for a drink. How did this happen? Nowadays my writings are mostly labored, they are attempts to reconnect with that participation in Christ that I once experienced so deeply.
I am not unaware of the causes of this drift. That I have a consciousness about them is a good thing, because it means I know what I have to do. Doing it is my problem. I need to act, and the sooner the better. For me, I believe this is all connected with my failures of humility. Humility compels me to recognize the gifts that God has given me, and to cultivate them so as to give them back to God, to offer them to the service of the Church. 1 Corinthians 12-14 comes to mind.
All of this is connected to my own obsession with the blogosphere, my constant desire to keep up with everything. There is an emptiness in my heart that was once filled by Christ. This is not to say of course that Christ is absent, but rather that I have marginalized His presence in my life. I have created a void where there should be the abundance of love. Now I seek to fill that void, that abyss, and instead of going to the only true Source of its being filled, I turn to any variety of external fixations. This is the same reason I have struggled with so many other areas of my life over the years, with sexuality, with drugs and alcohol, and so forth. All of this reaching out is a seeking of that transcendent fulfillment that in reality can only be found from turning within. In
my previous entry on prayer and St. Teresa I mentioned that famous passage from St. Augustine's Confessions, but it bears repeating here:
Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new; late have I loved you. And see, you were within me and I was in the external world and sought you there, and in my unlovely state I plunged into those lovely created things which you made. You were with me, and I was not with you. The lovely things kept me far from you, though if they did not have their existence in you, they had no existence at all. You called and cried out loud and shattered my deafness. You were radiant and resplendent, you put flight to my blindness. You were fragrant, and I drew in my breath and now I pant after you. I tasted you, and I feel but hunger and thirst for you. You touched me, and I am set on fire to attain the peace which is yours. (Confessions, X, xxvii, 38)
This passage has spoken to me so many times, and it continues to convict me because it tells me what I already know, what I have experienced and from which I have turned away. I once turned away from seeking my fulfillment in the external world, and turned within and found fulfillment in Christ. I experienced that panting and that radiance and that hunger and thirst, I too was once on fire to attain that peace which is Christ. Yet somehow I turned outward once again, and I have lost my peace. While it is true that I am nowhere near the place where I was when I was outside the Church, and I am not exactly on anything resembling dangerous ground like I once was, nonetheless I have forsaken the great gifts that God is offering to me, and offering them not just for my sake but for the sake of the Church. I find myself in this state of limbo, where I have not turned away from God, but at the same time I am no longer freely saying with Samuel, "Here I am," or with Mary, "Be it done unto me according to Thy will." My struggle now is to return to that place once again, and pray for the grace to never turn back.