We continue with Thomas Merton in "New Seeds of Contemplation."
...contemplation reaches out to the knowledge and even the experience of the transcendent and inexpressible God. It knows God by seeming to touch Him. Or rather it knows Him as if it had been invisibly touched by Him.... Touched by Him Who has no hands, but Who is pure Reality and the source of all that is real! hence contemplation is a sudden gift of awareness, an awakening to the Real within all that is real. A vivid awareness of infinite Being at the roots of our own limited being. An awareness of our contingent reality as received, as a present from God, as a free gift of love. This is the existential contact of which we speak when we use the metaphor of being "touched by God."
The image of contemplation being one in which one knows God by "seeming to touch Him" and then...the realization that we are rather "invisibly touched by Him"....one "Who has no hands" was comical and wonder-filled. For in that description, it is not me who finds a way to touch God or who has a secret to how one touches God or draws close to God. It is rather an action from outside me. It is the God who creates out of nothing and even within chaos who also encounters me so that I am able to see beyond and within and under what is. It is in such seeing, that we have this a gift, that we enter into an awareness of the fullness of life that we often walk by. In the time of this gift, we are given the opportunity to see and think and feel "into" something more than my "turned-in-on-self." That...will always give us a moment of utter awareness of life within the moment. That awareness, I would guess, is the potential for us to connect with life in such a way that barriers begin to fall down and our understanding of creation and love and compassion stretches us beyond anything we may have been able to imagine.
Connection: When during this day will we realize that we have been touched been touch by God? I would suppose that one touch is enough to bring joy and fullness and gracious anticipation into the day.
When you touch us, O God, even when we do not know that we have been touched by you, our eyes are open and we are given a moment to re-view the ordinary and the common within the light of your Reign. We long to be surprised by your presence and your touch and what will become available to us in those moments. Amen.
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