Even though I grew up within a religious family, going to church each Sunday as a kid, I wouldn’t really call myself a religious person, so much as I’d describe myself as a spiritual person.
The differentiation for me is important because I think this is the transition and journey my mother went through in her own life. She was deeply religious when I was a kid but by the time I reached my teenage years, she was finding the church life cynical and petty, with people often judging others so that they themselves wouldn’t be judged by others themselves (aka psychological projection).
So she went on a journey beyond religion and stepped into the realm of the spiritual, finding her own way, which gave her life a lot more meaning and gave her a much more personal inner journey and understanding of the basic tenets of religion that I think a lot of religious people today are completely missing. It’s not about what’s happening out there and what other people are doing wrong. But about what’s happening within you and how you can let go of these things that are not letting you be the person you want to be (and who you already are deep down inside).
This touches upon my discovery (via Margaret Wheatley) in the past of Thomas Merton, an American monk and writer, and some of the quotes from his writings that I’ve only recently read in-depth.
For example, this quote below touches upon a mantra of mine which is “work on living what you’ve learnt through play.”
A purely mental life may be destructive if it leads us to substitute thought for life and ideas for actions. The activity proper to man is purely mental because man is not just a disembodied mind. Our destiny is to live out what we think, because unless we live what we know, we do not even know it. It is only by making our knowledge part of ourselves, through action, that we enter into the reality that is signified by our concepts.
Thomas Merton
Thoughts in Solitude
What I find fascinating about his work and writings though is that in some of his most famous quotes, you can see someone who is on a spiritual journey of self-discovery that resonates closely with what Joseph Campbell describes as The Hero Path, where at “the center of our existence” we aren’t alone but “shall find God” and “be with all the world.”
In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world…
This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud. . . . I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.
Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed. . . . But this cannot be seen, only believed and ‘understood’ by a peculiar gift.
Thomas Merton
Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander
I think this is in the deeper sense the connectedness that underlies all religions, yet is somewhat sadly blocked by most religions, as each one often sees their view of the world as superior and right compared to the wrongness of others. So often most religions stand in their own way, just as our own ego stands in our own way as well.
If you can get past this limiting view of the world though, as Thomas Merton did, you can discover a whole new way of being and a whole new way of perceiving the world. This is just another way of describing what vertical development is to me without calling it “vertical development.”
It is liking climbing a mountain into your “self” but with each progressive vista completely shattering and upending the way you view the world and your “self” as a whole.
For me to be a saint means to be myself. Therefore the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and of discovering my true self.”
Thomas Merton