All methods of meditation that are, in effect, merely devices for allaying and assuaging the experience of emptiness and dread are ultimately evasions which can do nothing to help us. Indeed, they may confirm us in delusions and harden us against that fundamental awareness of our real condition, against the truth for which our hearts cry out in desperation.

What we need is not a false peace which enables us to evade the implacable light of judment, but the grace courageously to accept the bitter truth that is revealed to us; to abandon our inertia, our egoism and submit entirely to the demands of the Spirit, praying earnestly for help, and giving ourselves generously to every effort asked of us by God.

A method of meditation or a form of contemplation that merely produces the illusion of having "arrived somewhere," of having achieved security and preserved one's familiar status by playing a part, will eventually have to be unlearned in dread - or else we will be confirmed in the arrogance, the impenetrable self-assurance of the Pharisee. We will become impervious to the deepest truths. We will be closed to all who do not participate in our illusion. We will live "good lives" that are basically inauthentic, "good" only as long as they permit us to remain established in our respectable and impermeable identities...Such "goodness" is preserved by routine and the habitual avoidance of serious risk - indeed of serious challenge. In order to avoid apparent evil, this pseudo-goodness will ignore the summons of genuine good. It will prefer routine duty to courage and creativity.

| posted by Matt | 11:29 PM | |