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September 30, 2008
> 8:48 AM
wisdom of the desert > one > quies I picked up a little book a week or so ago - Thomas Merton's Wisdom of the Desert. It's one I've seen quotes from here and there but have never owned. I'm already glad I found it. It's not very big at all but nuggets abound. Here's the first among several quotes that I'll share with you. He's speaking of the Desert Fathers of Christian monasticism, mostly hermits, and why they went into the desert... ...the proximate end of all this striving was "purity of heart" – a clear unobstructed vision of the true state of affairs, an intuitive grasp of one's own inner reality as anchored, or rather lost, in God through Christ. The fruit of this was quies: "rest." Not rest of the body, nor even fixation of the exalted spirit upon some point or summit of light. The Desert Fathers were not, for the most part, ecstatics. Those who were have left some strange and misleading stories behind them to confuse the true issue. The "rest" which these men sought was simply the sanity and poise of a being that no longer has to look at itself because it is carried away by the perfection of freedom that is in it. And caried where? Wherever Love itself, or the Divine Spirit, sees fit to go. Rest, then, was a kind of simple nowhereness and no-mindedness that had lost all preoccupation with a false or limited "self." At peace in the possession of a sublime "Nothing" the spirit laid hold, in secret, upon the "All" – without trying to know what it possessed.Quies - I like that. Rest - think Sabbath - THE Sabbath. This is the fullness of the experience of our Salvation. Resting inside our identity in Him. And it's not just a chosen mindset. I mean, this "rest" is not simply our choosing to say to ourselves that we are resting in Christ. I think it's much more than that. Perhaps we should start that way, but also realize that what we're doing in saying that is beginning a path of real and substantive change that will end (this is our hope) in true quies, true rest. I've said things like this before, about how unnatural our state is now, having been cut off from God's Life - having to follow a way back into a union that we were created for to begin with. It sort of requires a bit of preoccupation, of "anxious concern" or "fear and trembling." We know this. What I'm afraid we have forgotten to some degree is that this is not the ideal state, this striving preoccupation. This is not intended to be our ongoing way, as if that were the goal. We treat it that way, though. We get to this point of watching ourselves, what we do and don't do, how we act, making sure that this and that are in order, all the while glancing back and forth up to God to make sure He's watching us too - "see, see, I'm doing it, you see me - watch me Daddy!" That's fine for a child, but if we get to be 30 years old and we're still constantly glancing back and yelling, "watch me Daddy, watch!" - we generally go to therapy. It would be good if, fairly early on, we came to at least the realization that we are on a journey in a direction - that we are headed somewhere and as we go, things change and grow. If we knew this from the get-go, maybe we wouldn't despise the change so much. We would less likely think that where we happen to be at any point along the way is the destination. There are unfortunate consequences to believing that you're "there" when you're not. What's this go to do with Desert monks and quies? Good question - here's the answer: They were about getting to that "place" where God could transform them. Their search was to find out how to tap into His ever-flowing Stream of Life and be carried away by it, into the great, deep ocean of union with Him. That quies business is about getting to a point where you're not having to watch yourself so closely because you've been changed into the kind of person who's nature guides your steps as naturally as it always did, but now in the Way of God. Imagine not having to strive to be or do good, but just doing it because that's how and what you are. This is what God wants for us. Of course that takes a while, so we should settle in for the trip. technorati tags > desert fathers, thomas merton Labels: christian life, merton, spiritual formation, theology 0 Comments:| permalink | e-mail me | 
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