Out to Sea Without Constraints

 

For most of my life, Thomas Merton (1915-1968) has been in the background of my thoughts since I first read “Seven Story Mountain” as a young Marine guarding an aircraft carrier in the South Pacific. I have made numerous monastic retreats throughout the years. After all, it was Merton who brought me back to my Christian faith and, years later, to priesthood.

Now that I am alone. I am too old to enter a monastery. My age is a liability. But am I not now in my own monastery here in the beautiful mounds of south central Wisconsin? A place of prayer and meditation in the eastern tradition, a “skete,” or hermitage. where seclusion can be mixed with occasional community contacts? This is a most interesting and somewhat confusing place to find myself.

Here’s what Merton writes about this; it’s “being out to sea without constraints;” going with the eternal flow, no sail, no rudder. He writes:

“What more do I seek than this silence, this simplicity, this ‘living together with wisdom’?  For me there is nothing else. Last night, before going to bed, realized momentarily what solitude really means: when the ropes are cast off and the skiff is no longer tied to land, but heads out to sea without ties, without restraints!  

“Not the sea of passion, on the contrary, the sea of purity and love that is without care, that loves God alone immediately and directly in Himself as the All (and seeming Nothing that is all).  The unutterable confusion of those who think that God is a mental object and that to love ‘God alone’ is to exclude all other objects to concentrate on this one! Fatal. 

“Yet that is why so many misunderstand the meaning of contemplation and solitude, and condemn it. But I see too that I no longer have the slightest need to argue with them.  I have nothing to justify and nothing to defend: I need only defend this vast simple emptiness from my own self, and the rest is clear  -- Trappist Monk Thomas Merton January 31, 1965 from A Year with Thomas Merton.

Sailing with friends in the Haida Gwai islands north of Vancouve,

And so I walk this unfamiliar road — alone. Wishing Sabine was physically here, talking and laughing with me. We often recalled that life was walking together, meeting new friends, while other friends dropped away finding a new path. Yet, at the same time, we were grateful for the time they spent with us. How many friends, can a person truly have? 

I remember my father telling me that if I was to grow up and have five friends, I would be a lucky man. Friends stay with us for a while, laughing, conversing, and then waving goodbye after an enjoyable time together. Very few remain for a lifetime.

The image we had provided a comfortable explanation as to why friends come and go during various stages of our life. And that’s okay! That’s the journey.We simply could not physically and emotionally walk with all the friends we made over all our years together.

But now Sabine, too, has been called to walk a different path; a path without me. And so, knowing and loving her, and doing what she would want me to do, I continue to walk the same direction we once walked together...