Christ, The Incarnate Word: From Thoughts in Solitude by the Reverend Thomas Merton (vegetarian), Part 2 of 2

We will now continue with the Reverend Thomas Merton’s shared wisdom from his book “Thoughts in Solitude.” In these chapters, the mystic elaborates on finding God and ourselves in silence, and in the song of the bells.

“Bells are meant to remind us that God alone is good, that we belong to Him, that we are not living for this world. They break in upon our cares in order to remind us that all things pass away and that our preoccupations are not important. They speak to us of our freedom, which responsibilities and transient cares make us forget. They are the voice of our alliance with the God of Heaven.” “And we said: ‘Come with us, God is good, salvation is not hard, His Love has made it easy!’ And this, our message, has always been for everyone, for those who came and for those who did not come, for our song is perfect as the Father in Heaven is perfect and we pour our charity out upon all.”

“His Presence is present in my own presence. If I am, then He is. And in knowing that I am, if I penetrate to the depths of my own existence and my own present reality, the indefinable ‘am’ that is myself in its deepest roots, then through this deep center I pass into the infinite ‘I Am’ which is the very Name of the Almighty. My knowledge of myself in silence (not by reflection on myself, but by penetration to the mystery of my true self which is beyond words and concepts because it is utterly particular) opens out into the silence and the ‘subjectivity’ of God’s own Self. The grace of Christ identifies me with the ‘engrafted word’ (insitum verbum) which is Christ living in me. Vivit in me Christus.”

“When we ‘know’ (in the dark certitude of faith illumined by spiritual understanding) that we are sons of God in the one Son of God, then we experience something of the great mystery of our being in God and God in us. For we grasp, without knowing how, the awe-inspiring and admirable Truth that God, bending over the abyss of His own inexhaustible Being, has drawn us forth from Himself, and has clothed us in the Light of His Truth, and purified us in the Fires of His Love, and made us one, by the power of the Cross, with His only begotten Son.”