Do you ever take an inventory of your personal fitness level? If so what is it that you consider being fit? Maybe it is that you can no longer “pinch that inch”, or that you are no longer out of breath when you climb the stairs. Perhaps it something much greater than that. More than likely it has components of strength, flexibility, agility, and cardio.

These are things that we take into consideration when trying to judge our personal physical fitness. But when we begin to take stock of the Kingdom of God and our place in it, are we fit for it? How is it that we are to evaluate our spiritual level of conditioning? In Scripture we have the words of Jesus in the Beatitudes and the teaching of Paul on the fruits of the Spirit, as prime examples of the level of fitness that is expected of those who are a part of God’s Kingdom. To live and move with that quality of spiritual health and vitality requires us to submit ourselves to the wisdom, experience and expectations of Jesus. It is not something that we do alone. We are to do it with His guidance by the Holy Spirit, yielding ourselves totally to Him.  As with any fitness program we will need to begin with small steps. We also need to be aware that we will not always like or agree with the training methods imposed by our coach. But as we progress, our faith and trust in him and our ability to yield ourselves to the process will grow.

We are also in training with others. Not just those present with us, but those cloud of witnesses before us and those who come after us. Those who are across physical borders and cultural boundaries as well. Part of God’s training plan requires us to rub shoulders, get bruised and dirty with people who are just like us. People who are broken and limited and in need of God’s grace and mercy just like you and me.  We are to encourage, push and prod one another so that we can move beyond our personal limitations and live like Christ in His Kingdom.

There is a yielding on our part as we follow God’s plan for us. There is a faithfulness and responsibility that is required of us too. And yes there are some keys to this fitness that we need to maintain, because as humans our fitness levels can be in constant flux. We just need to trust the coach, we need to listen and follow after him.

What are some of the ways in which you Follow the coach? Do you always agree with the training plan? How is it that you are trying to be fit for the Kingdom?

Photo by: Method Fitness

     Learn to be alone

     Physical solitude, exterior silence and real recollection are all morally necessary for anyone who wants to lead a contemplative life, But like everything else in creation they are nothing more than a means to an end, and if we do not understand the end we will make a wrong use of the means.

     We do not go into the desert to escape people but to learn how to find them; we do not leave them in order to have nothing more to do with them, but to find out the way to do them the most good.  But this is only a secondary end.

     The one end that includes all others is the love of God.

     How can people act and speak as if solitude were a matter of no importance in the interior life?  Only those who hae never experienced real solitude can glibly declare that it “makes no difference” and that only solitude of the heart really matters!  One solitude must lead to the other!

     However, the truest solitude is not something outside you, not an absence of men or of sound around you; it is an abyss opening up in the center of your own soul.

     An this abyss of interior solitude is by hunger and thirst and sorrow and poverty and desire, and the man who has found solitude is empty, as if he had been emptied by death.

     He has advanced beyond all horizons.  There are no directions in which he can travel.  This is a country whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.  You do not find it by traveling but by standing still.

     Yet is in this loneliness that the deepest activities begin.  It is here that you discover act without motion, labor that is in profound repose, vision in obscurity, and beyond all desire, a fulfillment whose limits extend to infinity.

Quote: Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, pgs. 82-83

     “To say that I am made in the image of God is to say that love is the reason fo my existence, for God is love.

Love is my true identity.  Selflessness is my true self.  Love is my true character.  Love is my name.

If therefore, I do anything or think anything or say anything or know anything that is not purely for the love of God, it cannot give me peace, or rest, or fulfillment, or joy.

To find love I must enter into the sanctuary where it is hidden, which is the mystery of God.  And to enter into His sanctuary I must become holy as He is holy, perfect as he is perfect.

How can I even dare to entertain such a thought?  Is it not madness?  It is certainly madness if I think I know what the holiness and perfection of God really are in themselves and if I think that there is some way in which I can apply myself to imitating them.  I must begin, then, by realizing that the holiness of God is something that is to me, and to all men, utterly mysterious, inscrutable, beyond the highest notion of any kind of perfection, beyond any relevant human statement whatever.

If I am to be “holy” I must therefore be something that I do not understand, something mysterious and hidden, something apparently self-contradictory; for God, in Christ, “emptied Himself”.  He became a man, and dwelt among sinners.  He was considered a sinner.  He was put to death as a blasphemer, as one who at least implicitly denied God, as one who revolted against the holiness of God.  Indeed, the great question in the trial and condemnation of Christ was precisely the denial of God and the denial of His holiness.  So God himself was put to death on the cross because He did not measure up to man’s conception of His holiness…. He was not holy enough, He was not holy in the right way, He was not holy in the way they  had been led to expect.  Therefore he was not God at all.  And, indeed, He was abandoned and forsaken even by Himself.  It was as if the Father had denied the Son, as if the Divine Power and mercy had utterly failed.

In dying on the Cross, Christ manifested the holiness of God in apparent contradiction with itself.  But in reality this manifestation was the complete denial and rejection of all human ideas of holiness and perfection.  The wisdom of God became folly to men, His power manifested itself as weakness, and His holiness was, in their eyes, unholy.  But Scripture says that “what is great in the eyes of men is an abomination in the sight of God,” amd again, “my thoughts are not your thoughts,” says God to men.

If, then, we want to seek some ways of being holy, we must first of all renounce our own way and our own wisdom.  We must “empty ourselves” as He did.  We must “deny ourselves” and in some sense make ourselves “nothing” in order that we may live not so much in ourselves as in Him.  We must live by a power and a light that seem not to be there.  We must live by the strength of an apparent emptiness that is always truly empty and yet never fails to support us at every moment.

This is holiness.

None of this can be achieved by any effort of my own, by any striving of my own, by any competiton with other men.  It means leaving all the ways that men can follow or understand.

I who am without love cannot become love unless Love identifies me with Himself.  But if He sends His own Love, Himself, to act and love in me and in all that I do, then I shall be transformed, I shall discover who I am and shall possess my true identity by losing myself in Him.

And this is what I call sanctity”.

  I thought that this was a great way to begin the New Year.  I enjoy spending time with Merton and I hope that this will be useful to you as well.  Though the quotes are generally shorter, but I wanted to capture all of what he was saying.  As you read this what resonates most within you?  How might it cause you to live differently this year?

Quote: Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, pgs. 63-65

Thoughts on Contemplative Prayer

    “Contemplation is essentially a listening in silence, an expectancy.  And yet in a certain sense, we must truly begin to hear God when we have ceased to listen.  What is the explanation of this paradox? Perhaps only that there is  a higher kind of listening, which is not an attentiveness to some special wave length, a receptivity to a certain kind of message, but a general emptiness that waits to realize the fullness of the message of God within its own apparent void.  In other words, the true contemplative is not the one who prepares his mind for a particular message that he wants or expects to hear, but who remains empty because he knows that he can never expect or anticipate the word that will transform his darkness into light.  He does not even anticipate a special kind of transformation.  He does not demand light instead of darkness.  He waits on the word of God in silence, and when he is “answered,” it is not so much by a word that bursts into his silence.  It is by his silence itself suddenly, inexplicably revealing itself to him in a word of great power, full of the voice of God.”

     Thomas Merton, Contemplative Prayer, pg. 90

     Thoughts in Solitude

     “The Psalms are the true garden of the solitary and the Scripture are his paradise.  They reveal their secrets to him because, in his extreme poverty and humility, he has nothing else to live by except their fruits.  For the true solitary the reading of Scripture ceases to be an “exercise” among other exercises, as means of “cultivating” the intellect or “the spiritual life” or “appreciating the liturgy.” To those who read Scripture in an academic or aesthetic or merely devotional way the Bible indeed offers pleasant refreshment and profitable thoughts.  But to learn the inner secrets of the Scriptures we must make them our true daily bread, find God in them when we are in greatest need—and usually when we can find Him nowhere else and have nowhere else to look!”

Quote: Thomas Merton, Thomas Merton: Spiritual Master the Essential Writings. pg. 248