"It is enough to be, in an ordinary human mode, with one's hunger and sleep, one's cold and warmth, rising and going to bed. Putting on blankets and talking them off, making coffee and then drinking it. Defrosting the refrigerator, reading, meditating, working, praying, I live as my fathers have lived on this earth, until eventually I die. Amen. There is no need to make an assertion of my life, especially so about it as mine, though doubt less it is not somebody else's. I must learn gradually to forget program and artifice."
I came across that quote from Thomas Merton while doing my reading for our "Real Men's" meeting tomorrow. Ronald Rolheiser quotes Merton in his book, The Shattered Lantern, Rediscovering a Felt Presence of God. In the section of the book we are reading Rolheiser talks about the constraints to contemplation. What he calls "Unbridled Restlessness" is one of the constraints to contemplation he explores. After an extended time in solitude Merton reflects in his journal, "It is enough to be, in an ordinary human mode..." Ordinary human mode is the reverse of unbridled restlessness./p>
Working to be satisfied with being in an ordinary human mode is something for me to work on tonight. I do find myself in a perpetual state of unbridled restlessness searching for one more computer program, one more book, or one more program. Perhaps this is what April 19, 2005 has to teach me. Thank you.