Louisville Process Theology Network

Homo Liturgicus

According to Thomas Merton "the encounter with God is the same encounter to which all Christians are called; and here of course, we are reminded of Merton’s constant insistence that contemplative prayer is the vocation of every believer. Or rather, that the contemplative dimension exists in everyone, and that the Christian is called up to realize it as their true identity …

To know God in this ‘coming to ourselves’ is to know ourselves as God knows us, to know our true identity. The ‘opposition’ between us and God is done away with, and we may speak of our ‘divinization’… To arrive at ‘true identity’ is to arrive at ‘true personhood’ ….

Solitude, then, is a form of kenosis: the solitary is not merely imitating a past event when he follows Christ into the desert. He is participating in the whole work of Christ, the kenosis of the whole of his existence ….

He enters into the ‘the radical and essential solitude of man – a solitude which was assumed by Christ …. He becomes the ‘poor man with the poor Christ’…

As Merton reflects in The Sign of Jonas, ‘Day after day I am more and more aware that I am anything but my everyday self at the altar … I am superseded by One in whom I am fully real … This is really the only moment at which I can give anything to the rest of men.’

The priesthood of the contemplative or the solitary is a very different matter from the priesthood of the pastor, teacher, the confessor … but the significant element here is a kenosis or poverty.

There are in fact two priesthoods in the Church, ‘the universal priesthood of the baptized’ whose vocation is the consecration of all human existence, the offering of the whole of human being to God, and the ‘functional’ or ‘ministerial’ priesthood; whose vocation is to teaching, leading, and explicating the consecration of the world …

The Christian layperson is ‘homo liturgicus’, the man whose whole life is directed to God, and who this is able to direct all that is in the world to God, ‘to be in love with all of God’s creation in order to decipher the meaning of God in everything.’"

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Page 30, from "A Silent Action" by Rowan Williams.