Monday, July 04, 2005

High Falls Ga

I am vacationing in Georgia. His is Merton quote from Wayne Burns.

"Now you ask about my method of meditation. Strictly speaking I have a
very simple way of prayer. It is centered entirely on attention to the
presence of God and to His will and His love. That is to say that it is
centered on faith by which alone we can know the presence of God. One
might say this gives my meditation the character described by the
Prophet as 'being before God as if you saw Him.' Yet it does not mean
imagining anything or conceiving a precise image of God, for to my mind
this would be a kind of idolatry. On the contrary, it is a matter of
adorning Him as invisible and infinitely beyond our comprehension, and
realizing Him as all. My prayer tends very much toward what you call
'fana.' There is in my heart this great thirst to recognize totally the
nothingness of all that is not God. My prayer is then a kind of praise
rising up out of the center of Nothing and Silence."

( THOMAS MERTON THE HIDDEN GROUND OF LOVE Letters on Religious
Experience and Social Concerns, page 63-64. Merton wrote this on
January 2, 1966, to Abdul Aziz, whose letters sparked Merton's interest
in Sufism. Aziz live all his life in Karachi, Pakistan. )

What is my method for meditation and prayer.

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