Vocations Blog

The Season of Lent: Unify your Life

08 March 2010

“IF YOU WANT TO HAVE A SPIRITUAL LIFE,” wrote Thomas Merton, “you must unify your life.  A life is either spiritual or it is not spiritual at all.  No-one can serve two masters.  Your life is shaped by the end you live for.  You are made in the image of what you desire.”
Merton, as we know, was not writing from his armchair, so to speak, on the subject of spirituality but from the fruit of his own monastic living and hard-won experience.  Well does the monk know the dividedness in his or her heart when human pride and greed begin to set in; such is the “spiritual battle” of the desert journey.  The subject of desire and the multiplicity of longings that we are prone to in our human condition has been much written about in the monastic tradition. If the goal of the monastic journey is union with God then the intermediate aim, the means by which we strive, is that “purity of heart” that Merton writes of as a unification of one’s life.  It is this understanding that undergirds our efforts during the Lenten season in the Church.  Lent, then, is a gift to free our true selves in Christ, a time to breathe again in the simplicity of an unfragmented heart and a life wholly given to God.  This is why true penance has a joyful character; it is a coming home to the truth of who we really are.

When Thomas Merton entered the monastery in 1942, two words greeted him inscribed above the doorway into the monastic enclosure: “GOD ALONE.”  Indeed, St Benedict counselled that “the life of a monk ought to be a continuous Lent.”  Only our wholehearted search for God will reveal the God who desires us wholeheartedly.

“My child, if you take my words to heart,
if you set store by my commandments,
tuning your ear to wisdom,
tuning your heart to understanding,
yes, if your plea is for clear perception,
if you cry out for understanding,
if you look for it as though for silver,
search for it as though for buried treasure,
then you will understand what the fear of Yahweh is,
and discover the knowledge of God…” (Proverbs 2:1-3, 5-6)

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