Last night we were discussing a sentence from Thomas Merton’s Seeds of Contemplation :
“When a man is virtuous enough to be able to delude himself that he is almost perfect, he may enter into a dangerous condition of blindness in which all his violent effort finally to grasp perfection strengthen his hidden imperfections and confirm him in his attachment to his own judgment and his own will.”
I remembered a line from Rodger’s and Hammerstein’s musical Carousel :
I’ve never seen it yet to fail
I'll never see it fail
A girl who's in love with a virtuous man
Is doomed to weep and wail
Stonecutters cut it on stone
Woodpeckers peck it on wood
There's nothin' so bad for a woman
As a man who thinks he's good!
(A reflection on Merton should remind us that the blindness induced by spiritual pride make’s a man very hard to live with.)
My mother used to say to me
When you grow up, my son
I hope you're a bum like your father was
'Cause a good man ain't no fun!
Stonecutters cut it on stone
Woodpeckers peck it on wood
There's nothin' so bad for a woman
As a man who thinks he's good!
As I was writing last Sunday: if we’ve read this far and are feeling pretty good about our spiritual progress, it’s time to reflect on John 9:41 Jesus said, “If you were blind, you would not be guilty of sin; but now that you claim you can see, your guilt remains.
So what are we to do? First, we remember that our vision is, at best, clouded and that we are powerless when we think we see clearly. Second we can reflect on the great line from Lincoln’s second inaugural and act
…with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right".
There is genuine humility in this line. God gives us this day what we need. We can act on that, remembering that God may give some one else “to see the right” differently and that we may see it differently tomorrow. If we do that, we can trust that we are headed in the right direction and be free from the warnings thundered by Merton and sung in Rodgers and Hammerstein.
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