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Vigils Reading – Office for Vocations
September 26, 2022
A READING ABOUT THE MONK AND THE WORLD
from a Book by Thomas Merton.[1]
The monastic life is a search for God and not a mission to accomplish this or that work for souls. The monk fulfills his function in the Church in proportion as he finds God in the peculiar way that God makes possible for him. Each of us will find God in our own way, but all of us together will find Him by living together in the Spirit, in perfect charity, as members of one another in Christ, recognizing the fact that Christ lives in us both as a community and as individuals. Our vocation is to live by the will of God in prayer and sacrifice that we may become able to see and glorify Christ in His Church and reach perfect union with Him by the action of the Spirit, in the sanctuary of our own souls. Thus we return, through Christ, to the Father of all.
We must never forget that we will not be able to do this unless we have really renounced the past and left the world for the love of God. It is not possible to be a monk and at the same time to live in the monastery in a spirit of compromise, retaining all the comforts and ambitions and concerns that characterize life n the world. Without true metanoia, a true conversion of one’s whole life, monastic discipline is an illusion. There must be a total reorientation of our entire being from the love of self to the love of God. We cultivate “contempt” for the world in the sense in which the world is opposed to God. But at the same time, we retain our love for and concern with all those souls redeemed by Christ, who are struggling to find Him and serve Him even in the midst of the world–and above all for those who, loved and sought by Christ, never think of Him and have never, perhaps, heard His Holy Name.
It would be an illusion to think that the monk could live entirely unrelated to the rest of the world. As individuals, it is true, we retain only a minimum of contact with worldly society. We live in solitude, far from the world’s cities. We do not go out to preach or teach. We remain in the cloister contemplating and praising God. Nevertheless, we are inextricably involved in the common sufferings and problems of the society in which we live. From these sufferings and problems there is and can be no escape.
On the contrary, they may perhaps be felt more acutely, because in a more spiritual form in the cloister. Far from being exempted from service in the battles of his age, the monk, as a Soldier of Christ, is appointed to fight these battles on a spiritual, hidden front–in mystery–by prayer and self-sacrifice. We cannot do this unless we are somehow in contact with the rest of the world, somehow identified with the others who suffer outside the cloister walls and for whom we are fighting in our solitude, fighting not against flesh and blood “but against principalities and powers, against the rulers of the world of this darkness, and against the spirits of wickedness in the high places” (Eph 6,12).
Hence, though we are withdrawn from the world, we preserve an intimate spiritual contact with those with whom we are actually or potentially united “in Christ”–in the Mystery of our unity in the Risen Savior, the Son of God. Their needs are our own, their interests are our interests, their joys and sorrows are ours, for we have identified ourselves with them not only by a realization that they all share one human nature, but above all by the charity of Christ, poured forth in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who is given to us in Christ.
[1]Basic Principles of Monastic Spirituality, Gethsemani, KY. 1957, 28-29.