Rooting Action in Prayer . . . with Thanks to Merton

In some contemporary expressions of spirituality the life of the Spirit is pitted against life lived in the world. The inward journey is set against the outward journey. It is common for folks to choose between perceived opposites:

prayer and action . . .
the inner life and the outer life . . .
meditation and mission . . .
contemplation and service . . .
the journey into the heart and the journey into the world. . . .

I run into people with hearts bent toward serving and mission who find prayer and meditation to be a waste of time. And I have conversations with persons who have "discovered" a substantial connection to God through prayer and contemplation who find ministry and mission to be "too worldly."

It's possible to fall over the edge in either direction.

In reality, spirituality moves us in both directions. An inward journey that does not lead to a corresponding outward movement demonstrates an impotent, lifeless spirituality.

Activity in the world without an interior source and rooting is hollow. It tends to transmit the personality and flaws of the person serving more than incarnating the living Christ in the world.

In the 1960's Thomas Merton wrote these words, holding the two ends of the spectrum in balance. He gives a good sense, I believe, of the relationship between prayer and action.

Real Christian living is stunted and frustrated if it remains content with the bare externals of worship, with "saying prayers" and "going to church," with fulfilling one's external duties and merely being respectable. The real purpose of prayer (in the fully personal sense as well as in the Christian assembly) is the deepening of personal realization in love, the awareness of God (even if sometimes this awareness may amount to a negative factor, a seeming "absence"). The real purpose of meditation -- or at least that which recommends itself as most relevant for modern persons -- is the exploration and discovery of new dimensions in freedom, illuminations and love, in deepening our awareness of our life in Christ.

What is the relation of this to action? Simply this. The one who attempts to act and do things for others or for the world without deepening their own self-understanding, freedom, integrity and capacity to love, will not have anything to give others. They will communicate to others nothing but the contagion of their own obsessions, their aggressiveness, their ego-centered ambitions, their delusions about ends and means, their doctrinaire prejudices and ideas. There is nothing more tragic in the modern world than the misuse of power and action to which humans are driven by their own Faustian misunderstandings and misapprehensions. We have more power at our disposal today than we have ever had, and yet we are more alienated and estranged from the inner ground of meaning and of love than we have ever been. The result of this is evident. We are living through the greatest crisis in the history of humanity; and this crisis is centered precisely in the country that has made a fetish out of action and has lost (or perhaps never had) a sense of contemplation. Far from being irrelevant, prayer, meditation and contemplation are of the utmost importance in America today.


[Thomas Merton, Contemplation in a World of Action (Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1973), 178-79.]