Reading from Thomas Merton this AM. Merton was temperamentally impatient with run-of-the-mill pieties and warned that "real Christian living is stunted and frustrated if it remains content with the bare externals of worship, with 'saying prayers' and 'going to church,' with fulfilling one's external duties and merely being respectable."
He was writing during the 1968 college campus world of anti-war activism and counter-culture. He called on his youthful readers to stop — to understand how activism, despite lofty intentions, can do real harm because it is so oblivious to its own subtle egotism. He was aware of fads among college students, their dabblings in Oriental meditation, and argued that "the real purpose of meditation . . . is the exploration and discovery of new dimensions of freedom, illumination and love, in deepening our awareness of our life in Christ."
He insisted not on saying prayers, but on prayer, and prayer meant the awareness of God . . . even if sometimes this awareness may amount to an apparent negative, a seeming 'absence.'
So, on one hand, the doing (political activism) and on the other dabbling (spiritual exploration, if not christian) was an issue 50 years ago, and the same is at issue today (social activism and spiritual experiences, if only via horror movies and groupthink).
Okay. Not much has changed at the foundation, only the verbage and the tone, but - and here is our question yesterday - what is the cure as we ask "What do we save people to?"
What is the relation of salvation to action? Or, for us, what does ministry look like as we parade what is essentially a personal relationship with God before others as a demonstration of what is Real Life?
Because we are supposed to be the cure, but we are operating within (and here I say "We" but I mean "Me") a christianized mirror-image of activism and dabbling if we are so focused on ministry as empowerment or spiritual experiences He who attempts to act and do things for others or for the world without deepening his own self understanding, freedom, and integrity and capacity to love, will not have anything to give others. He will communicate to them nothing but the contagion of his own obsessions, his aggressiveness, his ego-centeredness, his delusions about ends and means, his doctrinaire prejudices and ideas. I hate to say it, but the ministry-as-efficacy that is a subtle competition with some dig-me and envy that is nurtured in say, the supernatural schools is antithetical to Who Jesus is.
We see enough of this all around today (Sunday, yes, *today*) from pulpits driven by ego, or the ways of mankind. Maybe there needs to be a "seeming absence" from this forefront mentality.
Needing to go deep, where no one is watching and none of it is presentable on social media.
Need to step back from doing stuff in the name of Jesus, and step forward into a standing before others with some silence, with eyes of love and nothing to do.
Absent minded a bit. A seeming absence ... of ego. A seeming absence of a need to do, and therefore feel useful. Nothing to do but be in the moment of a straight line relationship with Jesus. See him in His activism. Aware of Him.
