In response to my blog on "slowing," my friend Bill, made this connection between two of the great contemplative giants of the 20th Century:  Henri Nouwen and Thomas Merton.  Here are their reflections on slowing as they both stood on street corners.  [Thanks Bill for typing these up!]

Henri Nouwen,  Here and Now, p. 100

The Still Small Voice

I am constantly puzzled by my eagerness to get something done, to see someone, to finish some job, while I am fully aware that within a month or even a week I will have completely forgotten what it was that seemed so urgent.  It seems that I share this restlessness with many others.

Recently I was standing at the corner of Bloor and Yonge streets in downtown Toronto.  I saw a young man crossing the street while the stoplight turned red.  He just missed being hit by a car.  Meanwhile, hundreds of people were moving in all directions.  Most faces looked quite tense and serious, and no one greeted anyone.  They were all absorbed in their own thoughts, trying to reach some unknown goal.  Long rows of cars and trucks were crossing the intersection or making right and left turns in the midst of the large pedestrian crowd.

I wondered: “What is going on in the minds of all these people? What are they trying to do, what are they hoping for, what is pushing them?  As I stood at that busy intersection, I wished I were able to overhear the inner ruminations of all these people.  But I soon realized that I didn’t have to be so curious.  My own restlessness was probably not very different from that of all those around me!

Why is it so difficult to be still and quiet and let God speak to me about the meaning of my life?  Is it because I don’t trust God?  Is it because I don’t know God?  Is it because I wonder if God really is there for me?  Is it because I am afraid of God?  Is it because everything else is more real for me than God?  Is it because, deep down, I do not believe that God cares what happens at the corner of Yonge and Bloor?

Still there is a voice –right there, in downtown Toronto.  “Come to me, you who labor and are overburdened, and I will give you rest.  Shoulder my yoke and learn from e, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your soul.  Yes, my yoke is easy and my burden light” (Matthew 11:28-30).

Can I trust that voice and follow it?  It is not a very loud voice, and often it is drowned out by the  clamor of the inner city.  Still, when I listen attentively, I will hear that voice again and again and come to recognize it as the voice speaking to the deepest places of my heart.


Thomas Merton,  Conjectures of A Guilty Bystander:


In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness. The whole illusion of a separate holy existence is a dream. Not that I question the reality of my vocation, or of my monastic life: but the conception of “separation from the world” that we have in the monastery too easily presents itself as a complete illusion: the illusion that by making vows we become a different species of being, pseudo-angels, “spiritual men,” men of interior life, what have you.


Certainly these traditional values are very real, but their reality is not of an order outside everyday existence in a contingent world, nor does it entitle one to despise the secular: though “out of the world,” we are in the same world as everybody else, the world of the bomb, the world of race hatred, the world of technology, the world of mass media, big business, revolution, and all the rest. We take a different attitude to all these things, for we belong to God. Yet so does everybody else belong to God. We just happen to be conscious of it, and to make a profession out of this consciousness. But does that entitle us to consider ourselves different, or even better, than others? The whole idea is preposterous.


This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud. And I suppose my happiness could have taken form in the words: “Thank God, thank God that I am like other men, that I am only a man among others.” To think that for sixteen or seventeen years I have been taking seriously this pure illusion that is implicit in so much of our monastic thinking.


It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes many terrible mistakes: yet, with all that, God Himself gloried in becoming a member of the human race. A member of the human race! To think that such a commonplace realization should suddenly seem like news that one holds the winning ticket in a cosmic sweepstake.


I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.


This changes nothing in the sense and value of my solitude, for it is in fact the function of solitude to make one realize such things with a clarity that would be impossible to anyone completely immersed in the other cares, the other illusions, and all the automatisms of a tightly collective existence. My solitude, however, is not my own, for I see now how much it belongs to them — and that I have a responsibility for it in their regard, not just in my own. It is because I am one with them that I owe it to them to be alone, and when I am alone, they are not “they” but my own self. There are no strangers!


Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed…I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other. But this cannot be seen, only believed and “understood” by a peculiar gift.