The PATH: Happiness, Humility, and Being Enough
sent by J.W. Bertolotti | March 21, 2022
Welcome to The PATH — A weekly reflection with three timeless insights into daily life. This week’s reflection searches for ancient lessons from the Trappist monk Thomas Merton. Specifically, the insights of — happiness, humility, and being enough.
1. Happiness
Thomas Merton was an American Trappist monk, writer, theologian, mystic, poet, and scholar of comparative religion. Merton wrote more than 50 books throughout his short life, mainly on spirituality.
In his classic book, No Man is Island, Merton wrote,
It is therefore of supreme importance that we consent to live not for ourselves but for others. When we do this we will be able first of all to face and accept our own limitations. As long as we secretly adore ourselves, our own deficiencies will remain to torture us with an apparent defilement. But if we live for others, we will gradually discover that no one expects us to be ‘as gods’. We will see that we are human, like everyone else, that we all have weaknesses and deficiencies, and that these limitations of ours play a most important part in all our lives.
Because of these weaknesses, we need others, and others need us. The beautiful thing is that we are not all weak in the same spots. “We supplement and complete one another,” explained Merton, “each one making up in themselves for the lack in another.”
These lessons apply to happiness as well. We cannot be happy if we expect to live all the time at the highest peak of intensity. Happiness is not a matter of intensity but balance, order, rhythm, and harmony. Merton suggested,
Music is pleasing not only because of the sound but also because of the silence in it: without the alternation of sound and silence, there would be no rhythm. If we strive to be happy by filling all the silences of life with sound… we will only succeed in producing a hell on earth.
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2. Humility
The spiritual path has no shortage of paradoxes. According to Merton, “We cannot achieve greatness unless we lose all interest in being great.” Our idea of greatness is illusory, and if we pay too much attention to it, it will lure us out of peace and stability.
In No Man is an Island, Merton wrote,
But the person who is not afraid to admit everything they see to be wrong with themselves, and yet recognizes that they may be the object of God’s love precisely because of their shortcomings, can begin to be sincere.
For this person, sincerity is based on confidence, not illusions about themselves, but God's endless, unfailing mercy.
Similarly, the theologian Richard Rohr writes in Everything Belongs,
Try to say: “I don’t know anything”. We used to call it “tabula rasa” in Latin. Maybe you could think of yourself as an erased blackboard, ready to be written on. By and large, what blocks spiritual teaching is the assumption that we already know, or that we don’t need to know. We have to pray for the grace of a beginner’s mind. We need to say with the blind man — “I want to see.”
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3. Being Enough
If you’re human, you’ve experienced feelings of not being enough. In my interview with Sebene Selassie (author of You Belong), she suggested we all need to realize that we are perfect the way we are, and we could use a slight improvement. Selassie writes, “the second part of the sentence sounds like a sly insult, but it’s an invitation to deep self-love. It’s an opportunity to adore oneself so completely that imperfections are part of the perfection of your being.”
In No Man is an Island, Merton put it this way,
If we are to love sincerely, and with simplicity, we must, first of all, overcome the fear of not being loved. And this cannot be done by forcing ourselves to believe in some illusion, saying that we are loved when we are not. We must somehow strip ourselves of our greatest illusions about ourselves, frankly recognize in how many ways we are unlovable, descend into the depths of our being until we come to the basic reality that is in us, and learn to see that we are lovable after all, in spite of everything!
The path of accepting ourselves entirely and realizing we are enough shows up across traditions and disciplines. For example, the psychologist Carl Jung said, “The most terrifying thing in the world is to accept oneself completely.”
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Thank you for reading; I hope you found something useful. If so, please consider sharing it with others.
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Image credit: The Monk by Camille Corot (1874)
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