From James Finley’s Merton’s Palace of Nowhere, Finley quotes Thomas Merton:
It is…a blindness to prayer that exposes us to the pitfalls of becoming ourselves like those,
…for whom a tree has no reality until they think of cutting it down, for whom an animal has no value until it enters a slaughterhouse, men who never look at anything until they decide to abuse it and who never even notice what they do not want to destroy.
This is the lowest kind of love, the love which destroys its object as the love is fulfilled. This is the love of the false self that can appreciate and acknowledge only that which it devours to feed and to foster its own frail shadow existence.
This is what the devil calls “love”, to use the object of its desire, to consume it.
In the preface to the 1961 edition of The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis describes one of the motives of devils as “a kind of hunger”.
I feign that devils can, in a spiritual sense, eat one another; and us. Even in human life we have seen the passion to dominate, almost to digest, one’s fellow; make his whole intellectual and emotional life merely an extension of one’s own—to hate one’s hatreds and resent one’s grievances and indulge one’s egoism through him as well as through oneself. His own little store of passion must of course be suppressed to make room for ours. If he resists this suppression he is being very selfish.
On Earth this desire is often called “love.” In Hell I feign that they recognise it as hunger. But there the hunger is more ravenous, and a fuller satisfaction is possible. There, I suggest, the stronger spirit—there are perhaps no bodies to impede the operation—can really and irrevocably suck the weaker into itself and permanently gorge its own being on the weaker’s outraged individuality.
From James Finley’s Merton’s Palace of Nowhere:
In prayer we are “useless.” We do not “do” anything, but rather open ourselves to be the person God calls us to be. The Moslems say, “God does nothing and therefore there is nothing God does not do.” God is beyond pragmatic functions. He is useless, yet by that very fact does all things.
Since we are like God, in our depths we are useless also. So, too, are children and sunsets and the simple recognition of the song of a bird. Death is useless, and so is a simple glance of love. Life itself is useless, for life is to be lived and not ridden in, eaten, packaged, sold, or patented. The self in us is useless and it is prayer that allows us to discover the positive uselessness of life in God.
Do things only become real or valuable when they can be used, manipulated, given purpose?
In uselessness, I am. The uselessness of life, the vanity of it all, is the essence of it all. A paradox. “Life itself is useless, for life is to be lived” — to be, not used. Subject, not object.
Something today reminded me of an analogy I had once read by Simone Weil. Joy and sorrow are like two sentences painted on a wall in different colors. Most people do not know how to read the language it is written in, and so only notice the difference in colors. Those who can read it, know that both sentences say the same thing.
To see joy in another is to see Christ in them. To see sorrow in another is also to see Christ in them.
I don’t want to see Jesus as sorrow, but He is there. I cannot deny Him. It saddens my heart. And sometimes in the midst of sadness and tears, when I remember to see, I simply have to smile with joy too.
I find myself asking God to have mercy on those who died in some long ago battle or tragedy described in the pages of history. Am I a fool? Does love and prayer reach far back into time?
What about the future, for people who will die to tomorrow or next year or ten years from now? Can I pray for the future spouses of my children, for my grandchildren? Does love and prayer reach into the future?
Yes it does, if love is eternal.