Last week my alarm woke me from a deep dream-filled sleep. As I slowly came to consciousness, I had the feeling of traveling toward the external sound of my alarm through many hidden inner layers of light, dark, silence, and imagination. I was reminded at the start of my day how deep, complex, and unexplored we are below the surface of our lives.
Merton uses the image of his hermitage to write about the difference between the self we show to the world and the one that lies hidden from view.
All this wild area is the geographical unconscious of my hermitage. Out in front, the conscious mind, the ordered fields, the wide valley, tame woods. Behind, the unconscious, this lush tangle of life and death, full of danger, yet where beautiful beings move, the deer, and where there is a spring of sweet pure water buried.
A Vow of Conversation
Thomas Merton
We spend most of our life attending to the surface of our lives, to the part of our lives that we show to the world, the part that is acceptable to others and to ourselves. Sometimes, though the deep lush tangle of life and death within emerges and disturbs the calm surface of our lives. We feel its inescapable danger, its sadness, its fear, its freedom, and its wildness. We are reminded of how much of our lives exist below the calm surface of acceptability. If we can endure the discomfort of our emerging inner self for a time though, we might discover profound gifts of creativity, beauty, passion, love, healing, and art. We might catch a glimpse of the irrepressible light that shines in the darkness and is never overcome.
Merton felt called to explore the unknown wilderness of the heart. He gave his time and energy to the inner life eschewing a life measured by productivity, success, and the approval of others. I am not as brave as Merton. Though I am sometimes curious and intrigued by the call of my inner life, I usually try to stay in the calmer waters of control only acknowledging the lush, dangerous tangle of death and life when its waves crash onto my calm shores and threaten to drown me. I have been engulfed by these waters often enough to realize that a major task of my spiritual life is to reach for God through these swirling waters.
Experience has taught me to be more intrigued and less afraid of all that I do not control. Experience has taught me that though I don’t know myself as well as I think, this unknowing is a gift. When I meet the gift of unknowing with prayer, opening myself to God, I discover what Merton writes about. I see the shy but beautiful inner self moving gracefully like a deer in the woods and I taste hidden springs of sweet pure water. I hope one day to be as brave as Merton and begin to live more in and from these unknown depths within myself instead of giving all my energy to what appears on the surface.
As a deer longs for streams of water, so my soul longs for you, O God.
Psalm 42:2
