One of the most widespread errors of our time is a superficial “personalism” which identifies the “person” with the external self, the empirical ego, and devotes itself solemnly to the cultivation of this ego.
But this is the cult of a pure illusion, the illusion of what is popularly imagined to be “personality” or worse still “dynamic” and “successful” personality. When this error is taken over into religion it leads to the worst kind of nonsense — a cult of psychologism and self-expression which vitiates our whole cultural and spiritual self. Our reality, our true self, is hidden in what appears to us to be nothingness and void. What we are not seems to be real, what we are seems to be unreal. We can rise above this unreality, and recover our hidden identity. And that is why the way to reality is the way of humility which brings us to reject the illusory self and accept the “empty” self that is “nothing” in our own eyes and in the eyes of men, but is our true reality in the eyes of God: for this reality is “in God” and “with Him” and belongs entirely to Him. Yet of course it is ontologically distinct from Him and in no sense part of the divine ature or absorbed in that nature.
This inmost self is beyond the kind of experience which says “I want,” “I love,” “I know,” “I feel.” It has its own way of knowing, loving, and experiencing which is a divine way and not a human one, a way of identity, of union, of “espousal,” in which there is no longer a separate psychological individuality drawing all good and truth toward itself, and thus loving and knowing for itself. Lover and Beloved are “one spirit.”
Therefore, as long as we experience ourselves in prayer as an “I” standing on the threshold of the abyss of purity and emptiness that is God, waiting to “receive something” from Him, we are still far from the most intimate and secretive union that is pure contemplation.
From our side of the threshold this darkness, this emptiness, Iboks deep and vast-and exciting. There is nothing we can do about entering it. We cannot force our way over the edge, although there is no barrier.
But the reason is perhaps that there is also no abyss.
There you remain, somehow feeling that the next step will be a plunge and you will find yourself flying in interstellar space.
Thomas Merton
New Seeds of Contemplation. pp. 281-82
