The Path

 

"Do I want this, or do I only want to want this?" In other words, am I a seeker, or do I just want to be able to call myself a seeker? Am I on a journey or an ego trip?

Those are the questions I'm asking myself when I ... you should pardon the pun ... contemplate contemplation.

Merton:

Tepitidy, in which the soul is neither 'hot or cold'—is a state in which one rejects God and rejects the will of God while maintaining an exterior pretense of loving Him in order to keep out of trouble and save one's supposed self-respect. It is the condition that is soon arrived at by those who are habitually ungrateful for the graces of God.

I love contemplation in the abstract, but I'm very afraid I'm tepid in practice. ("The spirit is willing, but ....") I suspect (fear!) I'm just plain tepid at heart. Tepid love for God. Tepid desire to personally experience Them. (Habitually feeling virtually no gratitude for Their graces.)

Worse, I'm crippled by an almost nonexistent belief that my heart will ever warm.

Contemplating the path leaves me—I was going to say cold, but it's worse than that. It leaves me unmoved (or ... you guessed it ... tepid). Sometimes it leaves me skeptical, sardonic, and/or resistant. 

And yet ....

My tepid heart paradoxically, stubbornly, persistently insists there must be More. More than dogma. More than theology. More than the Bible. Just More.

So while I resist stepping fully onto the path—or edge onto it halfheartedly—I can't completely turn my back on it.

James Finley likes to say that if you're reading the mystics, you're already on the path. But how can I be, when my heart feels so dry? When I'm only halfway committed to the possibility of mystical communion with the Divine? 

Who am I resisting? Why am I resisting? And why, in a real sense, can't I resist?

Ay, there's the rub.

Thinking too much again, no doubt. Trying to apply egoic logic to that which the ego can never figure out.

Bottom line, I can't do anything but what I'm doing, halfhearted though it may be, for now. The More I sense, the More I can't help but believe in, will, I hope, warm my tepid heart.

The he said to me, "Prophesy to these bones and say to them, 'Dry bones [or in my case, dry heart], hear the word of the LORD! This is what the Sovereign LORD says to these bones: I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life.'

Create in me a clean heart, O God ....