Solition | Endings | Merton

Just spent the weekend with Si and Gareth over in Northern Ireland. Good to see Pete Rollins too (his book is going to go ballistic). They also had the guys over from The Bridge in Ventura for a few days, and it was excellent to spend time hanging out, doing some Guinness, and doing the Celtic Solition day on the Saturday. It was a great time, but hung with sadness as we heard of the death of someone from The Bridge. It’s been a painful year for them.

Some of the conversations turned to why we had stopped Vaux, and it’s still something I/we think about a lot. I might do some posts of reflections about this over the next few weeks, but talking got me thinking, and my thoughts turned to this passage from Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation.

“All sin starts from the assumption that my false self, the self that exists only in my egocentric desires, is the fundamental reality of life to which everything else in the universe is ordered…. I wind experiences around myself and cover myself with pleasures and glory like bandages in order to make myself perceptible to myself and to the world, as if I were an invisible body that could become visible when something visible covered its surface. But there is no substance under the things with which I am clothed. I am objectified in them. When they are gone there will be nothing left of me but my own nakedness and emptiness and hollowness, to tell me that I am my own mistake.”

I think in a funny way we at Vaux had grown worried about the false self that we were projecting. We’d wound a lot of bandages, and it was time for a bit of naked truth. This is, for Merton, the essence of contemplation. To put down the fantasy self and “pass through the centre of our own nothingness […] and awake as our true selves.” “We become contemplatives when God discovers Godself in us.”

I’m glad we left the building. The stones were heavy. Perhaps you’ll find us in a tent somewhere, someday.

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