Thomas Merton 

Pure Love

So far, though not explicitly dividing them, we have spoken about three

modes of contemplation. They are three possible beginnings.

1. The best of these kinds of beginnings is a sudden emptying of the soul

in which images vanish, concepts and words are silent, and freedom and

clarity suddenly open out within you until your whole being embraces the

wonder, the depth, the obviousness and yet the emptiness and unfathomable

incomprehensibility of God. This touch, this clean breath of understanding

comes relatively rarely. The other two beginnings can be habitual states.

2. The most usual entrance to contemplation is through a desert of

aridity in which, although you see nothing and feel nothing and apprehend

nothing and are conscious only of a certain interior suffering and anxiety,

yet you are drawn and held in this darkness and dryness because it is the

only place in which you can find any kind of stability and peace. As you

progress, you learn to rest in this arid quietude, and the assurance of a

comforting and mighty presence at the heart of this experience grows on

you more and more, until you gradually realize that it is God revealing

Himself to you in a light that is painful to your nature and to all its faculties,

because it is infinitely above them and because its purity is at war with your

own selfishness and darkness and imperfection.

3. Then there is a quietud sabrosa, a tranquillity full of savor and rest

and unction in which, although there is nothing to feed and satisfy either the

senses or the imagination or the intellect, the will rests in a deep, luminous

and absorbing experience of love. This love is like the shining cloud that

enveloped the Apostles on Thabor so that they exclaimed: “Lord, it is good

for us to be here!” And from the depths of this cloud come touches of

reassurance, the voice of God speaking without words, uttering His own

Word. For you recognize, at least in some obscure fashion, that this

beautiful, deep, meaningful tranquillity that floods your whole being with

its truth and its substantial peace has something to do with the Mission of

the Second Person in your soul, is an accompaniment and sign of that

mission.

Thus, to many, the cloud of their contemplation becomes identified in a

secret way with the Divinity of Christ and also with His Heart’s love for us,

so that their contemplation itself becomes the presence of Christ, and they

are absorbed in a suave and pure communion with Christ. And this

tranquillity is learned most of all in Eucharistic Communion.

He becomes to them a sensible presence Who follows them and

envelops them wherever they go and in all that they do, a pillar of cloud by

day and a pillar of fire in the night, and when they have to be absorbed in

some distracting work, they nevertheless easily find God again by a quick

glance into their own souls. And sometimes when they do not think to

return to the depths and rest in Him, He nevertheless draws them

unexpectedly into His obscurity and peace, or invades them from within

themselves with a tide of quiet, unutterable joy.

Sometimes these tides of joy are concentrated into strong touches,

contacts of God that wake the soul with a bound of wonder and delight, a

flash of flame that blazes like an exclamation of inexpressible happiness

and sometimes burns with a wound that is delectable although it gives pain.

God cannot touch many with this flame, or touch even these heavily. But

nevertheless it seems that these deep movements of the Spirit of His Love

keep striving, at least lightly, to impress themselves on every one that God

draws into this happy and tranquil light.

IN all these three beginnings you remain aware of yourself as being on the

threshold of something more or less indefinite. In the second you are

scarcely conscious of it at all: you only have a vague, unutterable sense that

peace underlies the darkness and aridity in which you find yourself. You

scarcely dare admit it to yourself, but in spite of all your misgivings you

realize that you are going somewhere and that your journey is guided and

directed and that you can feel safe.

In the third you are in the presence of a more definite and more personal

Love, Who invades your mind and will in a way you cannot grasp, eluding

every attempt on your part to contain and hold Him by any movement of

your own soul. You know that this “Presence” is God. But for the rest He is

hidden in a cloud, although He is so near as to be inside you and outside

you and all around you.

When this contact with God deepens and becomes more pure, the cloud

thins. In proportion as the cloud gets less opaque, the experience of God

opens out inside you as a terrific emptiness. What you experience is the

emptiness and purity of your own faculties, produced in you by a created

effect of God’s love. Nevertheless, since it is God Himself Who directly

produces this effect and makes Himself known by it, without any other

intermediary, the experience is more than purely subjective and does tell

you something about God that you cannot know in any other way.

These effects are intensified by the light of understanding, infused into

your soul by the Spirit of God and raising it suddenly into an atmosphere of

dark, breathless clarity in which God, though completely defeating and

baffling all your natural understanding, becomes somehow obvious.

However, in all these things you remain very far from God, much farther

than you realize. And there are always two of you. There is yourself and

there is God making Himself known to you by these effects.

BUT as long as there is this sense of separation, this awareness of distance

and difference between ourselves and God, we have not yet entered into the

fullness of contemplation.

As long as there is an “I” that is the definite subject of a contemplative

experience, an “I” that is aware of itself and of its contemplation, an “I” that

can possess a certain “degree of spirituality,” then we have not yet passed

over the Red Sea, we have not yet “gone out of Egypt.” We remain in the

realm of multiplicity, activity, incompleteness, striving and desire. The true

inner self, the true indestructible and immortal person, the true “I” who

answers to a new and secret name known only to himself and to God, does

not “have” anything, even “contemplation.” This “I” is not the kind of

subject that can amass experiences, reflect on them, reflect on himself, for

this “I” is not the superficial and empirical self that we know in our

everyday life.

It is a great mistake to confuse the person (the spiritual and hidden self,

united with God) and the ego, the exterior, empirical self, the psychological

individuality who forms a kind of mask for the inner and hidden self. This

outer self is nothing but an evanescent shadow. Its biography and its

existence both end together at death. Of the inmost self, there is neither

biography nor end. The outward self can “have” much, “enjoy” much,

“accomplish” much, but in the end all its possessions, joys and

accomplishments are nothing, and the outer self is, itself, nothing: a

shadow, a garment that is cast off and consumed by decay.

It is another mistake to identify the outer self with the body and the inner

self with the soul. This is an understandable mistake, but it is very

misleading because after all body and soul are incomplete substances, parts

of one whole being: and the inner self is not a part of us, it is all of us. It is

our whole reality. Whatever is added to it is fortuitous, transient, and

inconsequential. Hence both body and soul belong to, or better, subsist in

our real self, the person that we are. The ego, on the other hand, is a selfconstructed

illusion that “has” our body and part of our soul at its disposal

because it has “taken over” the functions of the inner self, as a result of

what we call man’s “fall.” That is precisely one of the main effects of the

fall: that man has become alienated from his inner self which is the image

of God. Man has been turned, spiritually, inside out, so that his ego plays

the part of the “person”—a role which it actually has no right to assume.

In returning to God and to ourselves, we have to begin with what we

actually are. We have to start from our alienated condition. We are prodigals

in a distant country, the “region of unlikeness,” and we must seem to travel

far in that region before we seem to reach our own land (and yet secretly we

are in our own land all the time!). The “ego,” the “outer self,” is respected

by God and allowed to carry out the function which our inner self can not

yet assume on its own. We have to act, in our everyday life, as if we were

what our outer self indicates us to be. But at the same time we must

remember that we are not entirely what we seem to be, and that what

appears to be our “self” is soon going to disappear into nothingness.

One of the most widespread errors of our time is a superficial

“personalism” which identifies the “person” with the external self, the

empirical ego, and devotes itself solemnly to the cultivation of this ego.

But this is the cult of a pure illusion, the illusion of what is popularly

imagined to be “personality” or worse still “dynamic” and “successful”

personality. When this error is taken over into religion it leads to the worst

kind of nonsense—a cult of psychologism and self-expression which

vitiates our whole cultural and spiritual self. Our reality, our true self, is

hidden in what appears to us to be nothingness and void. What we are not

seems to be real, what we are seems to be unreal. We can rise above this

unreality, and recover our hidden identity. And that is why the way to

reality is the way of humility which brings us to reject the illusory self and

accept the “empty” self that is “nothing” in our own eyes and in the eyes of

men, but is our true reality in the eyes of God: for this reality is “in God”

and “with Him” and belongs entirely to Him. Yet of course it is

ontologically distinct from Him, and in no sense part of the divine nature or

absorbed in that nature.

This inmost self is beyond the kind of experience which says “I want,”

“I love,” “I know,” “I feel.” It has its own way of knowing, loving and

experiencing which is a divine way and not a human one, a way of identity,

of union, of “espousal,” in which there is no longer a separate psychological

individuality drawing all good and all truth toward itself, and thus loving

and knowing for itself. Lover and Beloved are “one spirit.”

Therefore, as long as we experience ourselves in prayer as an “I”

standing on the threshold of the abyss of purity and emptiness that is God,

waiting to “receive something” from Him, we are still far from the most

intimate and secret unitive knowledge that is pure contemplation.

From our side of the threshold this darkness, this emptiness, look deep

and vast—and exciting. There is nothing we can do about entering in. We

cannot force our way over the edge, although there is no barrier.

But the reason is perhaps that there is also no abyss.

There you remain, somehow feeling that the next step will be a plunge

and you will find yourself flying in interstellar space.

WHEN the next step comes, you do not take the step, you do not know the

transition, you do not fall into anything. You do not go anywhere, and so

you do not know the way by which you got there or the way by which you

come back afterward. You are certainly not lost. You do not fly. There is no

space, or there is all space: it makes no difference.

The next step is not a step.

You are not transported from one degree to another.

What happens is that the separate entity that is you apparently disappears

and nothing seems to be left but a pure freedom indistinguishable from

infinite Freedom, love identified with Love. Not two loves, one waiting for

the other, striving for the other, seeking for the other, but Love Loving in

Freedom.

Would you call this experience? I think you might say that this only

becomes an experience in a man’s memory. Otherwise it seems wrong even

to speak of it as something that happens. Because things that happen have

to happen to some subject, and experiences have to be experienced by

someone. But here the subject of any divided or limited or creature

experience seems to have vanished. You are not you, you are fruition. If you

like, you do not have an experience, you become Experience: but that is

entirely different, because you no longer exist in such a way that you can

reflect on yourself or see yourself having an experience, or judge what is

going on, if it can be said that something is going on that is not eternal and

unchanging and an activity so tremendous that it is infinitely still.

And here all adjectives fall to pieces. Words become stupid. Everything

you say is misleading—unless you list every possible experience and say:

“That is not what it is.” “That is not what I am talking about.”

Metaphor has now become hopeless altogether. Talk about “darkness” if

you must: but the thought of darkness is already too dense and too coarse.

Anyway, it is no longer darkness. You can speak of “emptiness” but that

makes you think of floating around in space: and this is nothing spatial.

What it is, is freedom. It is perfect love. It is pure renunciation. It is the

fruition of God.

It is not freedom inhering in some subject; it is not love as an action

dominated by an impulse germane to one’s own being; it is not renunciation

that plans and executes itself after the manner of a virtue.

It is freedom living and circulating in God, Who is Freedom. It is love

loving in Love. It is the purity of God rejoicing in His own liberty.

And here, where contemplation becomes what it is really meant to be, it

is no longer something infused by God into a created subject, so much as

God living in God and identifying a created life with His own Life so that

there is nothing left of any significance but God living in God.

If a man who had thus been vindicated and delivered and fulfilled and

destroyed could think and speak at all it would certainly never be to think

and speak of himself as someone separate, or as the subject of a grandiose

experience.

And that is why it does not really make much sense to speak of all this

as the high point of a series of degrees, and as something great by

comparison with other experiences which are less great. It is outside the

limit within which comparisons have meaning. It is beyond the level of

“ways” that correspond to any of our notions of travel, beyond the degrees

that correspond to our ideas of a progression.

Yet this too is a beginning. It is the lowest level in a new order in which

all the levels are immeasurable and unthinkable. It is not yet the perfection

of the interior life.

THE most important thing that remains to be said about this perfect

contemplation in which the soul vanishes out of itself by the perfect

renunciation of all desires and all things, is that it can have nothing to do

with our ideas of greatness and exaltation, and is not therefore something

which is subject to the sin of pride.

In fact, this perfect contemplation implies, by its very essence, the

perfection of all humility. Pride is incompatible with it in every possible

way. It is only something that a man could be proud of, or desire

inordinately, or in some other way make material for sin, when it is

completely misunderstood and taken for something which it is not and

cannot be.

For pride, which is the inordinate attribution of goods and values and

glories to one’s own contingent and exterior self, cannot exist where one is

incapable of reflecting on a separate “self” living apart from God.

How can a man be proud of anything when he is no longer able to reflect

upon himself or realize himself or know himself? Morally speaking he is

annihilated, because the source and agent and term of all his acts is God.

And the essence of this contemplation is the pure and eternal joy that is in

God because God is God: the serene and interminable exultation in the truth

that He Who is Perfect is infinitely Perfect, is Perfection.

To think that a man could be proud of this joy, once it had discovered

him and delivered him, would be like saying: “This man is proud because

the air is free.” “This other man is proud because the sea is wet.” “And here

is one who is proud because the mountains are high and the snow on their

summits is clean and the wind blows on the snow and makes a plume of

cloud trail away from the high peaks.”

Here is a man who is dead and buried and gone and his memory has

vanished from the world of men and he no longer exists among the living

who wander about in time: and will you call him proud because the sunlight

fills the huge arc of sky over the country where he lived and died and was

buried, back in the days when he existed?

So it is with one who has vanished into God by pure contemplation. God

alone is left. He is the “I” who acts there. He is the one Who loves and

knows and rejoices.

Can God be proud, or can God sin?

Suppose such a man were once in his life to vanish into God for the

space of a minute.

All the rest of his life has been spent in sins and virtues, in good and

evil, in labor and struggle, in sickness and health, in gifts, in sorrows, in

achieving and regretting, in planning and hoping, in love and fear. He has

seen things, considered them, known them; made judgments; spoken; acted

wisely or not. He has blundered in and out of the contemplation of

beginners. He has found the cloud, the obscure sweetness of God. He has

known rest in prayer.

In all these things his life has been a welter of uncertainties. In the best

of them he may have sinned. In his imperfect contemplation he may have

found sin.

But in the moment of time, the minute, the little minute in which he was

delivered into God (if he truly was so delivered) there is no question that

then his life was pure; that then he gave glory to God; that then he did not

sin; that in that moment of pure love he could not sin.

Can such union with God be the object of inordinate desire? Not if you

understand it. Because you cannot inordinately desire God to be God. You

cannot inordinately desire that God’s will be done for His own sake. But it

is in these two desires perfectly conceived and fulfilled that we are emptied

into Him and transformed into His joy and it is in these that we cannot sin.

It is in this ecstasy of pure love that we arrive at a true fulfillment of the

First Commandment, loving God with our whole heart and our whole mind

and all our strength. Therefore it is something that all men who desire to

please God ought to desire—not for a minute, nor for half an hour, but

forever. It is in these souls that peace is established in the world.

They are the strength of the world, because they are the tabernacles of

God in the world. They are the ones who keep the universe from being

destroyed. They are the little ones. They do not know themselves. The

whole earth depends on them. Nobody seems to realize it. These are the

ones for whom it was all created in the first place. They shall inherit the

land.

They are the only ones who will ever be able to enjoy life altogether.

They have renounced the whole world and it has been given into their

possession. They alone appreciate the world and the things that are in it.

They are the only ones capable of understanding joy. Everybody else is too

weak for joy. Joy would kill anybody but these meek. They are the clean of

heart. They see God. He does their will, because His will is their own. He

does all that they want, because He is the One Who desires all their desires.

They are the only ones who have everything that they can desire. Their

freedom is without limit. They reach out for us to comprehend our misery

and drown it in the tremendous expansion of their own innocence, that

washes the world with its light.

Come, let us go into the body of that light. Let us live in the cleanliness

of that song. Let us throw off the pieces of the world like clothing and enter

naked into wisdom. For this is what all hearts pray for when they cry: “Thy

will be done.”

From - Seeds of Pure Love