Absurd

For Bob.

We think there will be a time when we are true to ourselves and that we will recognize that moment on our own..it will "come to us". A word, a sentence spoken or retracted, so that after years of stumbling through life and of viewing the world with blurred eyes all that has passed before us will suddenly make sense. But without discipline or love, what felicity can there be, what image will inhere and be seen with clarity? It is absurd to think life has no meaning; equally, it is absurd to believe it will all be brought into focus when you ask the wrong questions. What resolution is there to be had in the time(s) we live in? What understanding do we merit?

From Frithjof Schuon:

If every man lived in the love of God, the monastery would be everywhere...

Islam aims to carry the contemplative life into the very framework of society as a whole...

A world is absurd exactly to the extent that the contemplative, the hermit, the monk appear in it as a paradox or as an "anachronism". The monk however is in the present precisely because he is timeless. We live in an epoch of idolatry of the "age"... 

Monasticism is there to remind us that man exists only by the virtue of his permanent consciousness of the Absolute and of absolute values, and that the works of man are nothing in themselves...

In our age man is defined, not by reference to his specific nature-which cannot be defined otherwise than in a divine context-but by reference to the inextricable consequences of a Prometheanism that has become secular...

The relevance of monasticism is that it incarnates, whether we like it or not, precisely that very thing in religion that is extreme and absolute and is of a spiritual and contemplative essence...

The vocation of the monk is perpetual prayer, not because life is long, but because it is only a moment...

The great mission of monasticism is to show to the world that happiness does not lie somewhere far away, or in something situate outside ourselves, in a treasure to be sought or a world to be built, but here where we belong to God. The monk represents, in face of a dehumanized world, what are true standards are; his mission is to remind us what man is.'

Some Merton:

'To be contemplative is therefore to be an outlaw. As was Christ...

the more busily men dedicate themselves to it, the more certainly it becomes a collective illusion, until in the end we have the enormous, obsessive, uncontrollable dynamic of fabrications designed to protect mere fictitious identities-- "selves," that is to say, regarded as objects. Selves that can stand back and see themselves having fun (an illusion which reassures them that they are real).

He [the last man] looks in the mirror and sees that he no longer resembles anyone . He searches madly for a photograph of people as they were before the big change. But now humanity itself has become incredible, as well as hideous..

Ionesco portrays the absurdity of a logically consistent individualism which, in fact, is a self-isolation by the pseudo-logic of proliferating needs and possessions.

Collectivity needs not only to absorb everyone it can, but also implicitly to hate and destroy whoever cannot be absorbed. Paradoxically, one of the needs of collectivity is to reject certain classes, or races, or groups, in order to strengthen its own self-awareness by hating them instead of absorbing them.'

~~~

These last lines struck me as being very pertinent today. Of course there is hatred for the fundamentalists and extremists-and rightly so! (to state the bleedin' obvious). But is the hostility to Islam not at least in part the hostility of capitalism to a way of life that stubbornly resists thinking the question of 'giving to Caesar' is a foregone conclusion?