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102 Meredith Secomb
ourselves. Given the imperative for all Christians to be alert to the
demands of social justice, how can we responsibly follow a call to a
relatively simple life which gives priority to prayer? Do we not run the
risk of camouflaging an essentially egocentric existence with the label
‘contemplative’? Could this not be, rather, merely a ‘cop-out’, avoiding
the ‘real’ concerns of Christian living?
The ‘Ordinary’ Contemplative Life: Call or Cop-Out?
Early in his account of life in a Cistercian monastery, Thomas Merton
addresses the commonplace, but mistaken, view that the contemplative
life is merely a strategy for avoiding the mundane and often burdensome
reality of ordinary, everyday life. Forcefully, he asserts,
Let no one justify the monastery as a place from which anguish is
utterly absent and in which men ‘have no problems’. This is a myth,
closely related to the other myth that religion itself disposes of all
man’s anxieties. 6
He goes on to indicate something of the nature of the struggles
encountered by one pursuing a contemplative life:
Faith itself implies a certain anguish, and it is a way of confronting
inner suffering, not a magic formula for making all problems vanish. It
is not by extraordinary spiritual adventures or by dramatic and heroic
exploits that the monk comes to terms with life. The monastery teaches
men to take their own measure and to accept their ordinariness; in
a word, it teaches them that truth about themselves which is known
as ‘humility’. 7
Another mistaken notion about the contemplative life is that it is
self-focused and individualistic. Elsewhere Merton opposes this idea,
noting that prayer exposes its practitioner to self-searching and to the
‘sham and indignity of the false self that seeks to live for itself alone and
to enjoy the “consolation of prayer” for its own sake’. 8 Those called to
such a way of living are responding to a vocation to journey inwards, to
encounter the self in the demands of intimate engagement with God.
They are responding to an internal imperative which calls them to carve
out a contemplative life.
6
7
8
Thomas Merton, Cistercian Life (Spencer: Cistercian, 1974), 2–3.
Merton, Cistercian Life, 3.
Thomas Merton, Contemplative Prayer (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1969), 25–26.