Catching Sight Of Your Soul
“There is, in all things…a hidden wholeness.”
— Thomas Merton, Trappist monk and contemplative spiritual writer
A central theme of Thomas Merton’s writings is the challenge of being able to recognize the “hidden wholeness” in all things, including in ourselves.
But the ability to recognize our own wholeness, our inner power and intrinsic goodness, is often obscured by an overlay of our feelings of inadequacy, our own protective defenses, and our insecurities – what some theologians and psychologists call our illusory “false self.”
There is a folklore legend that illustrates this true self vs. false self challenge, based on the events surrounding the 1955 discovery of the Golden Buddha –
A long time ago, there stood a Golden Buddha, nearly 10 feet tall, in front of a village monastery. When the village received the news that an army from a neighboring country was about to invade their village, the monks covered the Golden Buddha with stone and plaster.
For many, many years the golden Buddha remained covered, until after several generations, no one remembered the secret of the Golden Buddha.
One day, a young monk was meditating, sitting on the knee of the stone Buddha. When he stood up, a small piece of the stone fell off of the Buddha, and the monk saw a glint of gold. He pushed away small pieces and then larger pieces of the stone, realizing, finally, that the entire stone Buddha was actually golden.
I love the wonderful metaphor of this story: Over time, most of us come to believe we are the stone Buddha, not the Golden one, allowing our insecurities to get in the way of our relationships and our dreams.
Then something, or someone, comes along and shakes us free of a bit of our stone casing. We see a glint of gold; we catch a glimpse of our soul and its completeness, just as we are.
But how do we remove the rest of the stone covering the golden Buddha? Here then is the gift of engaging in any contemplative practice: The act of continually returning to our center, to our essence, to that of God within us, however we imagine God to be, fundamentally weakens the constructs of the false, reactive self, and the true (golden, hidden) self begins to emerge more completely.
Our hidden wholeness is golden.
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(as published in the Bucks County Herald)
