Tuesday, March 28, 2006

merton website


for all you thomas merton fans, check out this website.

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Anonymous said...

I could not tag to “Merton” tonight, I was told the page was unavailable, so I will write about myself instead, as I usually do. (Don’t we all?)

I return, soothed, from “Soul Space” at St Mary’s, this week provided by Clare and a gentleman whose name I did not catch. At the start of the time, I accepted I was in turmoil, that I was angry. That did not bother me, I am sometimes comfortable with feelings of anger. I accepted I would just have to stay with my feelings, my inner voice.

Clare had provided some text for the evening, an Irish Celtic piece and a Scottish blessing. Both had no relevance to my mood, and I quickly discarded them. But during the hour my thoughts turned to the early Irish and Scots, whose struggles with nature often gave them a life which was nasty, brutish and short, ending in many of both nations becoming immigrants in foreign lands, where they made a considerable difference, just as today’s immigrants are enhancing life in Walthamstow and beyond. And both the Irish and Scots were a warrior people. But their art, in all its forms, was superb, as reflected in the text Clare had provided us with, which illustrated both “the loving and the grieving” of their lives.

This gave a historical context to my perfectly healthy and normal initial emotions of turmoil and anger. Your Sunday blog interested me: “Consolation in the Cross”, with its statements like:
“I don’t always feel good about myself”
“I cannot think of anything to say in company”
“This is me, and I will learn to love me as you do”

Are we really so incapable of loving ourselves that we have to turn to another person, or to Allah/Yahweh/God/Jesus/Jehovah or whoever, to do it for us? Why has “self-love” got such a bad name? As an atheist I am loathe to quote from religious writings, as I feel it would be presumptuous of me. But I do like the statement “Love your neighbour as yourself”. If you cannot love yourself, your own needs are surely going to be so great that you will be incapable of loving anyone else.

I entered the mental health system in 1992, and found myself in an extraordinary art therapy group. One day we discovered we all have tremendous love, admiration and sensitivity for the other members of the group, but a huge feeling of self loathing and feelings of inadequacy about ourselves. And the other interesting thing about the group was that several of these so called “mentally ill” people were the ones other members of their families or their friends first turned to for help when they themselves had problems.
We all found it impossible, or called ourselves selfish, if we felt to had to say no to other peoples cries for help.

Someone once said the only problem with Christianity and Communism were their adherents. An unfair statement, for I have met wonderful human beings of both persuasions. And in the so called “mentally ill” community, I have certainly met an equal number of “pains in the neck” as I have in both Christian and Communist “believers”

And people who go around preaching “self love” tend to do so in such a way that I find equally repugnant to some of the people who go around “preaching” Christianity, or what used to be called Communism, instead of simply living it.

I do not romanticise the “good old days” - life was indeed nasty and brutish and short, as it still is today for large numbers of people. Very few people can now be unaware that every three seconds a child in Africa dies needlessly from poverty.

But in our “comfortable” existence today, where everyone has to say they are “fine“, have we not lost something of the awareness of the deep inner life of turmoil which the Irish, Scots and many other civilisations once had, and many so called “less developed” civilisations still have, as well as the so called “mentally ill”

We are now more than half way through Lent, and if anyone is reading this rather lengthy piece, inspired by what St Mary’s provided me with tonight, I leave you with that wonderful Irish form of farewell
“Go carefully into the night”

11:22 pm

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