Advent, Day 20

Charm with your stainlessness these winter nights,
Skies, and be perfect! Fly, vivider in the fiery dark, you quiet meteors,
And disappear.
You moon, be slow to go down,
This is your full!

The four white roads make off in silence
Towards the four parts of the starry universe.
Time falls like manna at the corners of the wintry earth.
We have become more humble than the rocks,
More wakeful than the patient hills.

Charm with your stainlessness these nights in Advent,
holy spheres,
While minds, as meek as beasts,
Stay close at home in the sweet hay;
And intellects are quieter than the flocks that feed by starlight.

Oh pour your darkness and your brightness over all our
solemn valleys,
You skies: and travel like the gentle Virgin,
Toward the planets' stately setting,

Oh white full moon as quiet as Bethlehem!

Words: Advent by Thomas Merton, written in 1946

Image: Annunciation (Detail) by Ruth Councell

Advent, Day 13

"...there is a way of being and knowing that is grounded in timing I did not create. There is a way of being and knowing that dimly remembers that waiting in hope is an attitude of faith.

Waiting in silence, creating space for steadfast love to grow within, may be the most essential practice of all. It is in many ways the spirit of Advent, that time of the Christian liturgical year when we practice the waiting of gestation and hoping, of trusting in new life not yet fully known.

Thomas Merton, Trappist monk and author, remarked that life is a perpetual Advent. He sensed that in that waiting, trust began to grow. Trust in God, trust in the Holy One who is beyond all that is created and is the source of all things, seen and unseen. Trusting and waiting allow the loving-kindness that is the essence of God’s own Life to grow in us, and to bear fruit that we never expected."

Words: The Rev. Mary C. Earle in Waiting in Silence.

Image: Photography by Diane Walker

Advent, Day 12

"Mary is, in a certain sense, the community which is my Mother. It is her love that has brought us here and keeps the community together. It is her love I have known out under the cedars, and working in the fields and singing in choir. It is her love that has made me desire solitude, and she will fulfill that desire. She is my solitude and she is here. It seems I have to keep finding it out over and over again. "

Words: Thomas Merton [Journals 3:26]

Image: Navaho Madonna by John Giuliani

Advent, Day 2

Advent Reflection from The Merton Institute

Merton's Voice:

Last night all I could think of was to give my will entirely to God and desire no light or consolation, but only His will. I chanted the psalms of Lauds thinking how the only thing that matters is the glory of God....[Journals 2:149-150]

The Bible NRSV:

And may the Lord make you increase and abound in love for one another and for all, just as we abound in love for you. [I Thessalonians 3:12]

Prayer:

I revere your commandments, which I love, and I will meditate on your statutes. [Psalm 119:48]

Seen Above: "Fear Not" by Ruth Councell

First Sunday Of Advent, Day 1

Advent Reflection from The Merton Institute

Merton's Voice:

I give myself completely to God-He draws me more and more to that. I cannot know what lies ahead for me, for us, but more and more I realize God wants me to put myself in His hands, and let Him take me through the things that are to come.... [Journal 2:145]

The Bible (NRSV):

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the House of Judah. In those days and at that time I will cause a righteous Branch to spring up for David; and he shall execute justice and righteousness in the Land. [Jeremiah 33:14-15]

Prayer
The mighty one, God the LORD, speaks and summons the earth from the rising of the sun to its setting. [Psalm 50:1]

Seen Above:

PSALM 19: A unique contemporary interpretation of the beloved psalm, "The Song to The Choirmaster," also the oft-heard words prior to a sermon, "May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight."

Created by Roz Dimon working in collaboration with Kathy Bozzuti-Jones, Click HERE to participate in this multimedia event.

Soul Silence

Contradictions have always existed in the soul of [individuals]. But it is only when we prefer analysis to silence that they become a constant and insoluble problem. We are not meant to resolve all contradictions but to live with them and rise above them and see them in the light of exterior and objective values which make them trivial by comparison.

Words: Thomas Merton. Thoughts in Solitude (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1956): 80-81.

Image: A. R. Pinkus, Waterfalls in Maui

Creativity

Creativity becomes possible
insofar as man can forget
his limitations and his selfhood
and lose himself in abandonment
to the immense creative power
of a love too great to be seen or comprehended.

Words: Thomas Merton
Image: Photograph by Diane Walker

Perfect Peace

"Where is silence? Where is solitude? Where is love?

Ultimately, these cannot be found anywhere except in the ground of our own being. There in the silent depths, there is no more distinction between the I and the Not-I. There is perfect peace, because we are grounded in infinite creative and redemptive Love."

Words: Thomas Merton. Love and Living. Naomi Burton Stone and Br. Patrick Hart, editors (Orlando, Florida: Harcourt, Inc., 1979): 20.

Image: Woodblock by Connie Butler

Working Together

Our vocation is not simply to be, but to work together with God in the creation of our own life, our own identity, our own destiny. We are free beings and sons and daughters of God. This means to say that we should not passively exist, but actively participate in His creative freedom, in our own lives, and in the lives of others, by choosing the truth. To put it better, we are even called to share with God the work of creating the truth of our identity. ...To work out our own identity in God, which the Bible calls "working out our salvation," is a labor that requires sacrifice and anguish, risk and many tears. It demands close attention to reality at every moment, and great fidelity to God as He reveals Himself, obscurely, in the mystery of each new situation.

Words: Thomas Merton. New Seeds of Contemplation (New York: New Directions Press, 1961): 32.

Image: "St. Francis" by James Mangum

Speaking His Own Name

"Unless He utters Himself in you, and speaks His own name in the center of your soul, you will no more know Him than a stone knows the ground upon which it rests in its inertia."

Words: Thomas Merton in New Seeds of Contemplation: 39.

Image: Viola by Ruth Councell

Morning Glory

From Thomas Merton: If I had no choice about the age in which I was to live, I nevertheless have a choice about the attitude I take and about the way and the extent of my participation in its living ongoing events. To choose the world is not then merely a pious admission that the world is acceptable because it comes from the hand of God. It is first of all an acceptance of a task and a vocation in the world, in history and in time. In my time, which is the present. (Thomas Merton. Contemplation in A World of Action, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1973)

From Rabbi Rami Shapiro: Cultivating grace is a bit of a paradox. You cannot get what you always and already have. There is noting you can or need do to merit grace. All you need do is accept grace. The reason this is so difficult for us is that our hands are full. We are burdened by carrying the past and future around with us wherever we go, and have no room for the grace of the present moment. Cultivating grace means putting down the burden of time, and opening our hands to the timeless now.(Rabbi Rami Shapiro, The Sacred Art of Lovingkindness:Preparing to Practice; forward by Marcia Ford, SkyLight Paths Publishing, 2006)

When I write and think about art, I often use the words acceptance, vocation, grace, and now. Thomas Merton and Rabbi Shapiro are my teachers. What they teach me about art is transmitted from heart to heart; soul to soul. Be here, be now. Listen. Accept grace. Give it all back. Start again each morning... each moment.

Words and Image by C. Robin Janning