One of my favorite quotes from Cistercian monk Thomas Merton, comes from a talk he gave to a group of Catholic Sisters in Alaska two-and-a-half months before his death. His talks in Alaska focused on the spiritual life, and when he tried to articulate the experience of the depth of God’s love for us, he explained it with something he had learned from Sufism, the mystical dimension of Islam. Merton said,
Sufism looks at man as a heart and a spirit and a secret, and the secret is the deepest part. The secret of man is God’s secret; therefore, it is in God. My secret is God’s innermost knowledge of me, which He alone possesses. It is God’s secret knowledge of myself in Him, which is a beautiful concept. The heart is the faculty by which man knows God and there Sufism develops the heart.
Thomas Merton
For me, this quote is about love. When you love someone, you don’t know everything about them, and they know parts of you that you don’t necessarily know about yourself. Love is a source of discovery. Someone who loves you can help you to see more clearly who you really are. You are aware of some of your personal qualities only as hints and suspicions. But your beloved can reveal these qualities to you in a way that make them more visible and because they are more visible these qualities become a deeper, more profound aspect of who you are and you are able to live more deeply and fully from these truths about yourself.
The beauty of this statement by Merton is that it speaks of us as God’s beloved. God knows us and loves us more fully than anyone else does and more fully than we know and love ourselves. It is for this reason that saints and spiritual writers speak so frequently about the mutual discovery of both God and our deepest self. We are created in the image of God for relationship with God, and we only truly find ourselves when we enter fully into this relationship of love. The truth is we never fully find ourselves, but we listen for who we are, we pray, seek, and search for the secret or our identity which is hidden in God.
Fred Rogers sings a song most people are quite familiar with called, “It’s You I Like.” I was recently preparing to participate in a panel discussion for a Fred Rogers Conference at Saint Vincent College. Our panel focused on a week of episodes from Fred Rogers’ Neighborhood called Noisy and Quiet. During my preparation, one half of one line from that song captured my attention. That half a line goes,
The way you are right now, the way down deep inside you.
It’s You I Like
Fred Rogers
Like Merton, Rogers is writing of a true self, deep down within us, a self that is given to us by God, a self that is deeper than the way we look and deeper than the things we have or the things we do.
Rogers song, “It’s you I like,” is a statement of love and appreciation for that deep self. Rogers refers to God as the ultimate appreciator and in a graduation speech at Marquette in 2001 Rogers says,
You see, I believe that appreciation is a holy thing, that when we look for what is best in the person we happen to be with at the moment, we are doing what God does. So, in loving and appreciating our neighbor, we’re participating in something truly sacred.
Fred Rogers
While this appreciation of the deepest part of the self, the secret self God holds for us, is profound, what struck me most powerfully about this line was the part that says, the way you are right now. I was struck by the idea that God loves me right now for who I am at this moment, not for who I might become, not for who I might grow into, but right now. Rogers sings this song to small children, children who have a lifetime of growing and becoming ahead of them, and yet, he wants them to know that they have an inherent value that is theirs, way down deep inside them. This struck me powerfully because my whole life, I have been consistently striving to be more, to be better, always trying to become a more loving, kind, focused human being. This line in Rogers’ song reminds me that I can stop trying so hard to be enough and realize instead that I already am enough, and that God is with me right now. God has been my ultimate appreciator throughout my entire life, even when I did not realize it, even when I could not accept myself.
Jesuit theologian, Karl Rahner’s first book, Encounters with Silence, was written in the form of personal prayers to God. In one of these prayers, Rahner asks God a series of questions about God’s silence. He asks God how he can continue to pray when all he receives in return is God’s silence and then he writes,
Isn’t Your silence a sure sign that You’re not listening? Or do You really listen quite attentively, do You perhaps listen my whole life long, until I have told You everything, until I have spoken out my entire self to You? Do You remain so silent precisely because You are waiting until I am really finished, so that You can then speak Your word to me, the word of Your eternity…in which You will express Your very Self in the depths of my heart?
Encounters with Silence
Karl Rahner
Merton, Rogers, Rahner all expressing in different ways God’s faithful, loving presence way down deep inside us.
