During these past weeks of, once again, embracing my struggle with the discipline of ‘Deep Stillness/Hesychia’ I returned to the words of Thomas Merton.
Late in his life, Thomas Merton traveled to Northern California in order to spend time at Redwoods Monastery. He had arrive at a moment in his own life in which he felt the need to go deeper still – to discern a more honest way of living out his monastic vocation.
For Merton, among other things, this meant questioning some of the basic truths he had been living with for decades. Sitting on a ledge over-looking the Northern California coast he took pen in hand and he wrote:
In our monasticism, we have been content to find our way to a kind of peace, a simple, undisturbed thoughtful life. And this is certainly good. But is it good enough?
I, for one, realize that now I need more. Not simply to be quiet, somewhat productive, to pray, to read, to cultivate leisure. . . There is a need of effort, deepening, change and transformation. Not that I must undertake a special project of self-transformation or that I must ‘work on myself.’ In that regard, it would be better to forget it. Just go for walks, live in peace, let change come quietly and invisibly inside.
But I have a past to break with, an accumulation of inertia, waste, wrong, foolishness, rot, junk, a great need of clarification of mindfulness, or rather of no mind – a return to genuine practice, right effort, need to push on to the great doubt. Need for the Spirit.
Hang on to the clear light!
This is truly a ‘personal statement.’ It is uttered by a human being standing at a crossroads in his life, looking for a more authentic way of living. Merton is also speaking, I think, to a larger and more widely shared hunger – for honesty, integrity and peace. Not any peace. The peace closer to what the Desert Fathers called Hesychia. A deep, abiding peace, born of struggle, surrender and letting go and ‘letting in’.
For me, as for Merton, the prospect of ‘break[ing] with [the] accumulation of inertia, waste, wrong, foolishness, rot, junk…’ is both anxiety producing and inviting. I am drawn to it and I am repulsed by it. This paradox, among other things, confirms my being a fully human being; a living paradox.
When I am at my best I cannot deny the need for this type of clarification and purification in my own life nor can I deny the sense of relief I can, at times, experience when I finally commit to this search/discipline.
In order to embrace this search/discipline I know that something(s) in me must shift, change or transform. I must choose to be vulnerable. I must let go of stuff in order to create a space – even a small space. When I am ‘full of myself’ I have no room for…
Hesychia is such a space. It was in this space that the monks believed that the tap roots could be nurtured and sustained. The tap roots that would then nurture and sustain the ‘Deep Stillness’ – the ‘Deep Stillness’ that would open a space for God to find the one searching.
Whenever there is stillness there is the still small voice, God’s speaking from the whirlwind…–Annie Dillard
Searcher-Seeker 
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