Detachment

I  WONDER  if there are twenty men alive in the world now who see things as they really are. That would mean that there were twenty men who were free, who were not dominated or even influenced by any attachment to any created thing or to their own selves or to any gift of God, even to the highest, the most supernaturally pure of His graces. I don’t believe that there are twenty such men alive in the world. But there must be one or two. They are the ones who are holding everything together and keeping the universe from falling apart. EVERYTHING  you love for its own sake, outside of God alone, blinds your intellect and destroys your judgment of moral values. It vitiates your choices so that you cannot clearly distinguish good from evil and you do not truly know God’s will. When you love and desire things for their own sakes, even though you may understand general moral principles, you do not know how to apply them. Even when your application of principles is formally correct, there will probably be a hidden circumstance you have overlooked,  which will spoil your most virtuous actions with some imperfection. As for those who have thrown themselves entirely into the disorder of sin—they often make themselves incapable of understanding the simplest principles; they can no longer see the most obvious and the most natural moral law. They may have the most brilliant gifts and be able to discuss the subtlest of ethical questions—and they do not even have a faint appreciation of what they are talking about because they have no love for these things as values, only an abstract interest in them as concepts. THERE  are aspects of detachment and refinements of interior purity and delicacy of conscience that even the majority of sincerely holy men never succeed in discovering. Even in the strictest monasteries and in places where people have seriously dedicated their lives to the search for perfection, many never come to suspect how much they are governed by unconscious forms of selfishness, how much their virtuous acts are prompted by a narrow and human self-interest. In fact, it is often precisely the rigidity and the unbending formalism of these pious men that keep them from becoming truly detached. They have given up the pleasures and ambitions of the world, but they have acquired for themselves other pleasures and ambitions which have a higher and more subtle and more spiritual character. Sometimes they  never even dream that it is possible to seek perfection with an intensity of selfconscious zeal that is itself imperfect. They too are attached to the good things of their little enclosed world. Sometimes, for instance, a monk can develop an attachment to prayer or fasting, or to a pious practice or devotion, or to a certain external penance, or to a book or to a system of spirituality or to a method of meditation or even to contemplation itself, to the highest graces of prayer, to virtues, to things that are in themselves marks of heroism and high sanctity. And men who seemed to be saints have let themselves be blinded by their inordinate love for such things. They have remained almost as much in darkness and error as brothers in the monastery who seemed far less perfect than they. SOMETIMES  contemplatives think that the whole end and essence of their life is to be found in recollection and interior peace and the sense of the presence of God. They become attached to these things. But recollection is just as much a creature as an automobile. The sense of interior peace is no less created than a bottle of wine. The experimental “awareness” of the presence of God is just as truly a created thing as a glass of beer. The only difference is that recollection and interior peace and the sense of the presence of God are spiritual pleasures and the others are material. Attachment to spiritual things is therefore just as much an attachment as inordinate  love of anything else. The imperfection may be more hidden and more subtle: but from a certain point of view that only makes it all the more harmful because it is not so easy to recognize. And so, many contemplatives never become great saints, never enter into close friendship with God, never find a deep participation in His immense joys, because they cling to the miserable little consolations that are given to beginners in the contemplative way.

How many there are who are in a worse state still: they never even get as far as contemplation because they are attached to activities and enterprises that seem to be important. Blinded by their desire for ceaseless motion, for a constant sense of achievement, famished with a crude hunger for results, for visible and tangible success, they work themselves into a state in which they cannot believe that they are pleasing God unless they are busy with a dozen jobs at the same time. Sometimes they fill the air with lamentations and complain that they no longer have any time for prayer, but they have become such experts in deceiving themselves that they do not realize how insincere their lamentations are. They not only allow themselves to be involved in more and more work, they actually go looking for new jobs. And the busier they become the more mistakes they make. Accidents and errors pile up all around them. They will not be warned. They get further and further away from  reality—and then perhaps God allows their mistakes to catch up with them. Then they wake up and discover that their carelessness has involved them in some gross and obvious sin against justice, for instance, or against the obligations of their state. So, having no interior strength left, they fall apart. How many there must be who have smothered the first sparks of contemplation by piling wood on the fire before it was well lit. The stimulation of interior prayer so excites them that they launch out into ambitious projects for teaching and converting the whole world, when all that God asks of them is to be quiet and keep themselves at peace, attentive to the secret work He is beginning in their souls. And yet if you try to explain to them that there might be a considerable imperfection in their zeal for activities that God does not desire of them, they will treat you as a heretic. They know you must be wrong because they feel such an intense appetite for the results which they imagine they are going to accomplish. THE  secret of interior peace is detachment. Recollection is impossible for the man who is dominated by all the confused and changing desires of his own will. And even if those desires reach out for the good things of the interior life, for recollection, for peace, for the pleasures of prayer, if they are no more than the natural and selfish  desires they will make recollection difficult and even impossible. You will never be able to have perfect interior peace and recollection unless you are detached even from the desire of peace and recollection. You will never be able to pray perfectly until you are detached from the pleasures of prayer. If you give up all these desires and seek one thing only, God’s will, He will give you recollection and peace in the middle of labor and conflict and trial. THERE  is a kind of crude materialism in religious life which makes sincerely holy men believe that abnegation means simply giving up things that please the five exterior senses. But that is scarcely the beginning of abnegation. Of course we have to be detached from gross and sensual things before the interior life can even begin. But once it has begun it will make little progress unless we become more and more detached even from rational and intellectual and spiritual goods. A man who hopes to become a contemplative by detaching himself only from the things that are forbidden by reason, will not even begin to know the meaning of contemplation. For the way to God lies through deep darkness in which all knowledge and all created wisdom and all pleasure and prudence and all human hope and  human joy are defeated and annulled by the overwhelming purity of the light and the presence of God. It is not enough to possess and enjoy material and spiritual things within the limits of rational moderation: we must be able to rise above all joy and pass beyond all possession if we will come to the pure possession and enjoyment of God. This distinction is very important and yet it is often forgotten even by spiritual writers. It is quite true, of course, that God’s creatures are all good and that our moderate, temperate use of them brings us to closer union with Him. It is also true that those who are most closely united to Him and detached from their exterior self are able to taste the purest joy in the beauty of created things, which is no longer an obstacle to the light of God.

But in between the temperate use of created things, the virtuous life of reasonable moderation, and the totally spiritualized purity of the saint, which is like a recovery of Adam’s innocence in Paradise, in the world’s childhood, there lies an abyss which can only be crossed by a blind leap of ascetic detachment. Beyond rational temperance there comes a sacrificial death which is on a higher level than mere virtue or practiced discipline. Here the Cross of Christ enters into the life of the contemplative. Without the mystical death that completely separates him from created things, there  is no perfect freedom and no advance into the promised land of mystical union. But this “death” of sense and of spirit which brings the final liberation from attachment, is not the fruit of man’s own ascetic effort alone. The Dark Night, the crisis of suffering that rends our roots out of this world, is a pure gift of God. Yet it is also a gift which we must in some degree prepare ourselves to receive by heroic acts of self-denial. For unless it is clear that we mean seriously to undertake a  total renunciation of all attachments, the Holy Spirit will not lead us into the true darkness, the heart of mystical desolation, in which God Himself mysteriously liberates us from confusion, from the multiplicity of needs and desires, in order to give us unity in and with Himself. In a word, we must face with great resoluteness the task of going beyond ordinary temperance and strive for complete emptiness if we seek to pass beyond the limitations of human virtuousness and enter into the perfect freedom of the sons of God for whom all things are light and joy because all are seen and tasted in and for God. The mystic lives in emptiness, in freedom, as if he had no longer a limited and exclusive “self” that distinguished him from God and other men. He has, therefore, died with Christ and entered into the “risen life” promised to the true sons of God. Even the joys of the lower levels of contemplation must themselves be renounced by anyone who seeks to pass over into the Promised Land. AND SO  the true contemplative life does not consist in the enjoyment of interior and spiritual pleasures. Contemplation is something more than a refined and holy aestheticism of the intellect and of the will, in love and faith. To rest in the beauty of God as a pure concept, without the accidents of image or sensible species or any other representation, is a pleasure which still belongs to the human order. It is perhaps the highest pleasure to which nature has access and many people do not arrive at it by their natural powers alone—they need grace before they can experience this satisfaction which is of itself within the reach of nature. And nevertheless, since it is natural and can be desired by nature and acquired by natural disciplines, it must not be confused with supernatural contemplation. True contemplation is the work of a love that transcends all satisfaction and all experience to rest in the night of pure and naked faith. This faith brings us so close to God that it may be said to touch and grasp Him as He is, though in darkness. And the effect of such a contact is often a deep peace that overflows into the lower faculties of the soul and thus constitutes an “experience.” Yet that experience or feeling of peace always remains an accident of contemplation, so that the absence of this “sense” does not mean that our contact with God has ceased. To become attached to the “experience” of peace is to threaten the true and essential and vital union of our  soul with God above sense and experience in the darkness of a pure and perfect love. And so, although this sense of peace may be a sign that we are united to God, it is still only a sign—an accident. The substance of the union may be had without any such sense, and sometimes when we have no feeling of peace or of God’s presence He is more truly present to us than He has ever been before. If we attach too much importance to these accidentals we will run the risk of losing what is essential, which is the perfect acceptance of God’s will, whatever our feelings may happen to be. But if I think the most important thing in life is a feeling of interior peace, I will be all the more disturbed when I notice that I do not have it. And since I cannot directly produce that feeling in myself whenever I want to, the disturbance will increase with the failure of my efforts. Finally I will lose my patience by refusing to accept this situation which I cannot control and so I will let go of the one important reality, union with the will of God, without which true peace is completely impossible. When we consider the fidelity, the resoluteness, the determination to renounce all things for the love of God, without which we cannot pass over to the higher levels of purity and contemplation, we remain aghast at our own weakness, our own poverty, our evasions, our infidelity, our hesitancy. Our very weakness clouds our  vision. We are left helpless, knowing very well that we are asked to give up everything, yet not knowing how or where to begin. In such a condition there is no use in forcing the issue. Great patience and humility are needed, and humble prayer for light, courage and strength. If we resolutely face our cowardice and confess it to God, no doubt He will one day take pity on us, and show us the way to freedom in detachment.

Thomas Merton