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Thích Nhất Hạnh. (釋一行) (1926-). Internationally renowned Vietnamese monk and one of the principal propounders of "Engaged Buddhism." He was born in southern Vietnam, the son of a government bureaucrat. Nhát Hạnh entered a Buddhist monastery as a novice in 1942, where he studied with a Vietnamese Zen master, and received full ordination as a monk in 1949. His interests in philosophy, literature, and foreign languages led him to leave the Buddhist seminary to study at Saigon University. While teaching in a secondary school, he served as editor of the periodical "Vietnamese Buddhism," the organ of the Association of All Buddhists in Vietnam. In 1961, he went to the United States to study at Princeton University, returning to South Vietnam in December 1963 after the overthrow of the government of the Catholic president Ngô Đình Diem, which had actively persecuted Buddhists. The persecutions had led to widespread public protests that are remembered in the West through photographs of the self-immolation of Buddhist monks. Nhát Hạnh worked to found the Unified Buddhist Church and the Institute of Higher Buddhist Studies, which later became Vạn Hạnh University. He devoted much of his time to the School of Youth for Social Service, which he founded and of which he was the director. The school's activities included sending teams of young people to the countryside to offer various forms of social assistance to the people. He also founded a new Buddhist sect (the Order of Interbeing), and helped establish a publishing house, all of which promoted what he called Engaged Buddhism. A collection of his pacifist poetry was banned by the governments of both North and South Vietnam. While engaging in nonviolent resistance to the Vietnam War, he also sought to aid its victims. In 1966, Nhát Hạnh promulgated a five-point peace plan while on an international lecture tour, during which he met with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (who would later nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize) and Thomas Merton in the United States, addressed the House of Commons in Britain, and had an audience with Pope Paul VI in Rome. The book that resulted from his lecture tour, Vietnam: Lotus in a Sea of Fire, was banned by the South Vietnamese government. Fearing that he would be arrested or assassinated if he returned to Vietnam after the lecture tour, his supporters urged him to remain abroad and he has lived in exile ever since, residing primarily in France. He founded a center called Plum Village in southern France, whence he has sought to assist Vietnamese refugees and political prisoners and to teach Engaged Buddhism to large audiences in Europe and the Americas. A prolific writer, he has published scores of books on general, nonsectarian Buddhist teachings and practices, some of which have become bestsellers. He has made numerous trips abroad to teach and lead meditation retreats. In his teachings, Nhát Hạnh calls for a clear recognition and analysis of suffering, identifying its causes, and then working to relieve present suffering and prevent future suffering through nonviolent action. Such action in bringing peace can only truly succeed when the actor is at peace or, in his words, is "being peace."
KEYS (10k)
5 Thomas Merton
1 Thomas merton. The Way Of Chuang Tzu
1 Thomas Merton. "The Way Of Chuang Tzu
1 Thomas merton. "No man is an island"
NEW FULL DB (2.4M)
1421 Thomas Merton
7 Richard Rohr
5 Bryan Stevenson
4 Michael Finkel
4 Brennan Manning
3 Stephen Cope
2 Will Oldham
2 Thich Nhat Hanh
2 Pico Iyer
2 Peter Enns
2 Ian Morgan Cron
2 Henri J M Nouwen
2 Christian Wiman
1:And the need to win, drains his power. ~ Thomas Merton. "The Way Of Chuang Tzu, #KEYS
2:Every man knows how useful it is to be useful. No one seems to know How useful it is to be useless. ~ Thomas merton. The Way Of Chuang Tzu, #KEYS
3:The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. … " ~ Thomas Merton, #KEYS
4:In God there can be no selfishness, because the Three Selves of God are three subsistent relations of selflessness, overflowing and superabounding in joy in the perfection of their gift of their one life to one another. ~ Thomas Merton, #KEYS
5:The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them. ~ Thomas merton. "No man is an island", #KEYS
6:If you go into solitude with a silent tongue, the silence of mute beings will share with you their rest. But if you go into solitude with a silent heart, the silence of creation will speak louder than the tongues of men or angels. ~ Thomas Merton, #KEYS
7:Julian gets greater and greater in my eyes as I grow older and whereas in the old days I used to be crazy about St John of the Cross, I would not exchange him now for Julian if you gave me the world and the Indies & all the Spanish mystics rolled up in one bundle. ~ Thomas Merton, #KEYS
8:If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I am living for, in detail, ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for . . . To be grateful is to recognize the Love of God in everything He has given us - and He has given us everything. Every breath we draw is a gift of His love, every moment of existence is a grace, for it brings with it immense graces from Him.
Gratitude therefore takes nothing for granted, is never unresponsive, is constantly awakening to new wonder and to praise of the goodness of God. For the grateful person knows that God is good, not by hearsay but by experience. And that is what makes all the difference. ~ Thomas Merton,#KEYS
*** WISDOM TROVE ***
1:Whose silence are you? ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 2:Love is its own reward. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 3:The root of war is fear. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 4:A daydream is an evasion. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 5:Love is our true destiny. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 6:Love is its own reward... . ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 7:Today will never come again. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 8:Love is the door to eternity. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 9:We do not exist for ourselves. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 10:To be a saint is to be yourself. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 11:The gate of heaven is everywhere. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 12:Take more time, cover less ground. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 13:Love is an intensification of life. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 14:Perhaps I am stronger than I think. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 15:The end of the world will be legal. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 16:The goal of fasting is inner unity. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 17:Humility is a virtue, not a neurosis. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 18:Love is a special way of being alive. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 19:Our real journey in life is interior. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 20:When ambition ends, happiness begins. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 21:Hurry ruins saints as well as artists. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 22:Lovely morning! How lovely life can be! ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 23:For me to be a saint means to be myself. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 24:Love winter when the plant says nothing. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 25:The only unhappiness is not to love God. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 26:It might be good to open our eyes and see. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 27:We love the things we pretend to laugh at. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 28:Love is the epiphany of God in our poverty. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 29:The tighter you squeeze, the less you have. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 30:Anxiety is the mark of spiritual insecurity. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 31:My best writing has always been in journals. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 32:If you have love you will do all things well. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 33:You are made in the image of what you desire. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 34:Love is perfect in proportion to it's freedom. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 35:Infinite sharing is the law of God s inner life. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 36:Music and art and poetry attune the soul to God. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 37:Thinking prevents the unconscious from speaking. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 38:The biggest disease in North America is busyness. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 39:We are already ONE. We just think we are separate. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 40:The speech of God is silence. His Word is solitude. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 41:A bad book about the love of God remains a bad book. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 42:To be unknown to God is altogether too much privacy. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 43:Pride makes us artificial and humility makes us real. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 44:Action is the stream, and contemplation is the spring. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 45:The God of peace is never glorified by human violence. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 46:When you see God in everyone, then they see God in you. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 47:No one is so wrong as the man who knows all the answers. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 48:There is a logic of language and a logic of mathematics. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 49:Life reveals itself to us only in so far as well live it. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 50:The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 51:A faith that is afraid of other people is no faith at all. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 52:You cannot be a man of faith unless you know how to doubt. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 53:A faith that is afraid of other people is not faith at all. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 54:The least of the work of learning is done in the classroom. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 55:The only way to make a man worthy of love is by loving him. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 56:A man who fails well is greater than one who succeeds badly. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 57:My spiritual goal is to one day walk into God and disappear. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 58:Teach me to go to the country beyond words and beyond names. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 59:Our idea of God tells us more about ourselves than about Him. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 60:The biggest human temptation is... to settle for too little. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 61:The purpose of our lives is to find the purpose of our lives. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 62:To be grateful is to recognize the love of God in everything. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 63:Violence is not completely fatal until it ceases to disturb us. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 64:What I do is live, how I pray is breathe, what I wear is pants. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 65:What I wear is pants. What I do is live. How I pray is breathe. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 66:God, my God, the night has values that the day never dreamed of. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 67:Happiness that is sought for ourselves alone can never be found. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 68:How far have I to go to find you in whom I have already arrived. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 69:I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 70:In Silence God ceases to be an object and becomes an experience. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 71:The great thing, and the only thing, is to adore and praise GOD. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 72:The problem today is that there are no deserts, only dude ranches. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 73:We stumble and fall constantly, even when we are most enlightened. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 74:Man was made for the highest activity, which is, in fact, his rest, ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 75:The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 76:Power always protects the good of some at the expense of all others. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 77:Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 78:Compassion is the keen awareness of the interdependence of all things. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 79:To hope is to risk frustration. Make up your mind to risk frustration. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 80:The man of faith who has never experienced doubt is not a man of faith. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 81:We cannot achieve greatness unless we lose all interest in being great. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 82:God, have mercy on me in the blindness in which I hope I am seeking You! ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 83:Zen insight is not our awareness, but Being's awareness of itself in us. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 84:The closer we are to God, the closer we are to those who are close to him. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 85:We must slow down to a human tempo and we’ll begin to have time to listen. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 86:If a man is to live, he must be all alive, body, soul, mind, heart, spirit. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 87:In the end, it's the reality of personal realtionships that save everything. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 88:The imagination should be allowed a certain amount of time to browse around. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 89:Wheels of fire, cosmic, rich, full-bodied honest victories over desperation. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 90:If we seek paradise outside ourselves, we cannot have paradise in our hearts. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 91:If you yourself are at peace, then there is at least some peace in the world. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 92:Meditation is one of the ways in which the spiritual man keeps himself awake. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 93:While some men see ordinary happenings, others see divine light and guidance. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 94:Do not be one of those who, rather than risk failure, never attempts anything. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 95:Every other man is a piece of myself, for I am a part and a member of mankind. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 96:... but any fool knows that you don't need money to get enjoyment out of life. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 97:Conscience is the light by which we interpret the will of God in our own lives. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 98:The very contradictions in my life are in some ways signs of God's mercy to me. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 99:To be ordinary is not a choice: It is the usual freedom of men without visions. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 100:Contemplation is the loving sense of this life, this presence and this eternity. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 101:Duty does not have to be dull. Love can make it beautiful and fill it with life. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 102:In the spiritual life there is no such thing as an indifference to love or hate. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 103:Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance, order, rhythm and harmony. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 104:When we are strong, we are always much greater than the things that happen to us. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 105:Here is an unspeakable secret: paradise is all around us and we do not understand. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 106:Charity is without fear: having given all that it has, it has nothing left to lose. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 107:Every breath we draw is a gift of God's love; every moment of existence is a grace. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 108:If you want to study the social and political history of modern nations, study hell. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 109:Solitude is a way to defend the spirit against the murderous din of our materialism. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 110:We are obliged to love one another. We are not strictly bound to "like" one another. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 111:A man searching for enlightenment is like a man sitting on an Ass in search of an Ass ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 112:Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 113:Our whole life is a meditation of our last decision - the only decision that matters. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 114:Christ is born to us today, in order that he may appear to the whole world through us. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 115:God Himself begins to live in me not only as my Creator but as my other and true self. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 116:Reason is in fact the path to faith, and faith takes over when reason can say no more. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 117:To worship our false selves is to worship nothing. And the worship of nothing is hell. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 118:Because of their enmity you will be left alone. They will cast you out and forsake you. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 119:Every moment and every event of every man's life on earth plants something in his soul. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 120:Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance and order and rhythm and harmony. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 121:God has brought me to Kentucky... the precise place he has chosen for my sanctification. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 122:In our creation, God asked a question and in our truly living; God answers the question. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 123:The meaning of life is found in openness to being and "being present" in full awareness. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 124:There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 125:Advertising treats all products with the reverence and the seriousness due to sacraments. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 126:Be human in this most inhuman of ages; guard the image of man for it is the image of God. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 127:The whole world is charged with the glory of God and I feel fire and music under my feet. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 128:But there is greater comfort in the substance of silence than in the answer to a question. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 129:Love not only prefers the good of another to my own, but it does not even compare the two. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 130:You are certainly one of the joys of life for all who have ever come within a mile of you. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 131:If Zen has any preference it is for glass that is plain, has no color, and is "just glass." ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 132:People have no idea what one saint can do: for sanctity is stronger than the whole of hell. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 133:Solitude and silence teach me to love my brothers for what they are, not for what they say. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 134:Finally I am coming to the conclusion that my highest ambition is to be what I already I am. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 135:The peace produced by grace is a spiritual stability too deep for violence, it is unshakeable ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 136:To find love I must enter into the sanctuary where it is hidden, which is the mystery of God. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 137:We must make the choices that enable us to fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 138:Grains of error planted innocently in a well-kept greenhouse can become giant poisonous trees. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 139:Let us come alive to the splendor that is all around us and see the beauty in ordinary things. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 140:Love is free; it does not depend on the desirability of its object, but loves for love's sake. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 141:The peace produced by grace is a spiritual stability too deep for violence — it is unshakeable ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 142:There is not true intimacy between souls who do not know how to respect one another's solitude. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 143:I have learned that one cannot truly know hope unless he has found out how like despair hope is. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 144:True happiness is found in unselfish Love, A love which increases in proportion as it is shared. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 145:A Christian is committed to the belief that Love and Mercy are the most powerful forces on earth. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 146:Actions are the doors and windows of being. Unless we act, we have no way of knowing what we are. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 147:Gratitude takes nothing for granted, is never unresponsive, is constantly awakening to new wonder. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 148:There is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 149:Be good, keep your feet dry, your eyes open, your heart at peace and your soul in the joy of Christ. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 150:love-why can't you leave me alone? Which is a rhetorical question meaning: for heaven's sake, don't. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 151:The degradation of the sense of symbol in modern society is one of its many signs of spiritual decay. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 152:And that is why the man who wants to see clearly, before he will believe, never starts on the journey. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 153:How do you expect to arrive at the end of your own journey if you take the road to another man's city? ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 154:Our destiny is to live out what we think, because unless we live what we know, we do not even know it. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 155:Prayer is not so much a way to find God as a way of resting in him... who loves us, who is near to us. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 156:What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we cannot cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 157:A life that is without problems may literally be more hopeless, than one that always verges on despair. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 158:A man knows when he has found his vocation when he stops thinking about how to live and begins to live. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 159:If we have not silence, God is not heard in our music. If we have no rest God, does not bless our work. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 160:Nothing has ever been said about God that hasn't already been said better by the wind in the pine trees. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 161:Technology is not in itself opposed to spirituality and to religion. But it presents a great temptation. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 162:We have what we seek, it is there all the time, and if we give it time, it will make itself known to us. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 163:Prayer and love are learned in the hour when prayer becomes impossible and the heart has turned to stone. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 164:Prayer is not so much a way to find God as a way of resting in him... who loves us, who is near to us... ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 165:The sky is my prayer, the birds are my prayer, the wind in the trees is my prayer, for God is all in all. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 166:Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone - we find it with another. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 167:If we are to love sincerely, and with simplicity, we must first of all overcome the fear of not being loved. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 168:You pray best when the mirror of your soul is empty of every image except the Image of the Invisible Father. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 169:Good moral actions are not enough. Everything in us, from the very depths, must be cleansed and reordered... ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 170:I see no contradiction between Buddhism and Christianity ... I intend to become as good a Buddhist as I can. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 171:It is in deep solitude and silence that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brother and sister. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 172:The real reason why so few men believe in God is that they have ceased to believe that even a God can love them. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 173:The spiritual life is first of all a life. It is not merely something to be known and studied, it is to be lived. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 174:I shall lead you through the loneliness, the solitude you will not understand; but it is my shortcut to your soul. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 175:The simplest and most effective way to sanctity is to disappear into the background of ordinary every day routine. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 176:Violence is essentially wordless. and it can begin only where thought and rational communication have broken down. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 177:May God prevent us from becoming "right-thinking men"-that is to say men who agree perfectly with their own police. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 178:People are in a hurry to magnify themselves by imitating what is popular- and too lazy to think of anything better. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 179:The center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 180:The light of truth burns without a flicker in the depths of a house that is shaken with storms of passion and fear. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 181:Ash Wednesday is full of joy... The source of all sorrow is the illusion that of ourselves we are anything but dust. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 182:For although God is right with us and in us and out of us and all through us, we have to go on journeys to find him. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 183:There is a subtle but inescapable connection between the "sacred" attitude and the acceptance of one's in most self. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 184:The truth never becomes clear as long as we assume that each one of us, individually, is the center of the universe. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 185:We have to have a deep, patient compassion for the fears of men and irrational mania of those who hate or condemn us. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 186:If you want to have a spiritual life you must unify your life. A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 187:It is in the ordinary duties and labors of life that the Christian can and should develop his spiritual union with God. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 188:The greatest need of our time is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 189:When you reread your journal you find out that your newest discovery is something you already found out five years ago. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 190:A gentle sense of humor will be alert to detect anything that savors of a pious & 191:How can I be sincere if I am constantly changing my mind to conform with the shadow of what I think others expect of me? ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 192:The grateful person knows that God is good, not by hearsay but by experience. And that is what makes all the difference. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 193:True encounter with Christ liberates something within us, a power we did not know we had, a capacity to grow and change. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 194:We have to have a deep, patient compassion for the fears of others and irrational mania of those who hate or condemn us. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 195:He who hopes in God trusts God, Whom he never sees, to bring him to the possession of things that are beyond imagination. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 196:The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the other... . The whole purpose of life is to live by love. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 197:I myself am part of the weather and part of the climate and part of the place … It is certainly part of my life of prayer. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 198:It is when we love the other, the enemy, that we obtain from God the key to an understanding of who He is, and who we are. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 199:The sacred attitude is, then, one of deep and fundamental respect for the real in whatever new form it may present itself. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 200:The solution of the problem of life is life itself. Life is not attained by reason and analysis but first of all by living. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 201:In the devil's theology, the important thing is to be absolutely right and to prove that everybody else is absolutely wrong. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 202:Our happiness consists in sharing the happiness of God, the perfection of His unlimited freedom, the perfection of His love. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 203:Fear narrows the little entrance of our heart. It shrinks up our capacity to love. It freezes up our power to give ourselves. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 204:The Holy Spirit is the most perfect gift of the Father to men, and yet He is the one gift which the Father gives most easily. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 205:For perfect hope is achieved on the brink of despair, when instead of falling over the edge, we find ourselves walking on air. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 206:Spread abroad the name of Jesus in humility and with a meek heart; show him your feebleness, and he will become your strength. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 207:For our duties and our needs, in all the fundamental things for which we were created, come down in practice to the same thing. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 208:For the ones who are called saints by human opinion on earth may very well be devils, and their light may very well be darkness ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 209:May we all grow in grace and peace and not neglect the silence that is printed in the center of our being. It will not fail us. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 210:Our knowledge of God is perfected by gratiitude: we are thankful and rejoice in the experience of the truth that He is love... ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 211:Prayer is an expression of who we are... We are a living incompleteness. We are a gap, an emptiness that calls for fulfillment. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 212:There was this shadow, this double, this writer who had followed me into the cloister. He rides my shoulders I cannot lose him. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 213:To consider persons and events and situations only in the light of their effect upon myself is to live on the doorstep of hell. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 214:Contemplative living is living in true relationship with oneself, God, others and nature, free of the illusions of separateness. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 215:Just remaining quietly in the presence of God, listening to Him, being attentive to Him, requires a lot of courage and know-how. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 216:Art is not an end in itself. It introduces the soul into a higher spiritual order, which it expresses and in some sense explains. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 217:The deepest of level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless ... beyond speech ... beyond concept. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 218:... love triumphs, at least in this life, not by eliminating evil once for all, but by resisting and overcoming it anew every day. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 219:One might say I have decided to marry the silence of the forest. The sweet dark warmth of the whole world will have to be my wife. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 220:The truth that many people never understand until it is too late is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 221:Each individual Christian and each new age of the Church has to make this rediscovery, this return to the source of Christian life. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 222:The real hope is not in something we think we can do, but in God, who is making something good out of it in some way we cannot see. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 223:Today the artist has inherited the combined functions of hermit, pilgrim, prophet, priest, shaman, sorcerer, soothsayer, alchemist. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 224:Show us your Christ, Lady, after this our exile, yes: but show Him to us also now, show Him to us here, while we are still wanderers. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 225:Sincerity must be bought at a price: the humility to recognize our innumerable errors, and fidelity in tirelessly setting them right. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 226:We refuse love, and reject society, in so far as it seems, in our own perverse imagination, to imply some obscure kind of humiliation ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 227:Our minds are like crows. They pick up everything that glitters, no matter how uncomfortable our nests get with all that metal in them. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 228:Zen is consciousness unstructured by particular form or particular system, a trans-cultural, trans-religious, transformed consciousness. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 229:The fact remains that we are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the wind, and join in the general Dance. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 230:For each one of us, there is only one thing necessary: to fulfill our own destiny, according to God's will, to be what God wants us to be. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 231:Humility sets us free to do what is really good, by showing us our illusions and withdrawing our will from what was only an apparent good. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 232:I will no longer wound myself with the thoughts and questions that have surrounded me like thorns: that is a penance You do not ask of me. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 233:I cannot make the universe obey me. I cannot make other people conform to my own whims and fancies. I cannot make even my own body obey me. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 234:We do not want to be beginners [at prayer]. but let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything but beginners, all our life! ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 235:Jesus lived and died in vain if He did not teach us to regulate the whole of life by the eternal law of love. Gandhi, quoted in Merton, p. 38 ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 236:The only right way: to love and serve the man of the modern world, but not simply to succumb, with him, to all his illusions about the world. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 237:An author in a Trappist monastery is like a duck in a chicken coop. And he would give anything in the world to be a chicken instead of a duck. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 238:But if you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I think I am living for. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 239:No writing on the solitary, meditative dimensions of life can say anything that has not already been said better by the wind in the pine trees. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 240:On Pride: This sickness is most dangerous when it succeeds in looking like humility. When a proud man thinks he is humble his case is hopeless. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 241:The artistic experience, at its highest, was actually a natural analogue of mystical experience. It produced a kind of intuitive of perception. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 242:In humility is the greatest freedom. As long as you have to defend the imaginary self that you think is important, you lose your peace of heart. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 243:Love is not a mere emotion or sentiment. It is the lucid and ardent responses of the whole person to a value that is revealed to him as perfect. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 244:The peculiar grace of a Shaker chair is due to the fact that it was made by someone capable of believing that an angel might come and sit on it. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 245:Every man has a vocation to be someone: but he must understand clearly that in order to fulfill this vocation he can only be one person: himself. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 246:It is by desiring to grow in love that we receive the Holy Spirit, and the thirst for more charity is the effect of this more abundant reception. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 247:The man who sweats under his mask, whose role makes him itch with discomfort, who hates the division in himself, is already beginning to be free. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 248:The greatest temptations are not those that solicit our consent to obvious sin, but those that offer us great evils masking as the greatest goods. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 249:Life is not accomplishing some special work but attaining to a degree of consciousness and inner freedom which is beyond all works and attainments. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 250:We are not converted only once in our lives but many times and this endless series of conversions and inner revolutions leads to our transformation. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 251:Others can give you a name or a number, but they can never tell you who you really are. That is something you yourself can only discover from within. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 252:Be still: There is no longer any need of comment. It was a lucky wind That blew away his halo with his cares, A lucky sea that drowned his reputation. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 253:If there was no other proof of the infinite patience of God, a very good one could be found in His toleration of the pictures that are painted of Him. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 254:I have only one desire, and that is the desire for solitude-to disappear into God, to be submerged in His peace, to be lost in the secret of His Face. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 255:We stumble and fall constantly even when we are most enlightened. But when we are in true spiritual darkness, we do not even know that we have fallen. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 256:I am earth, earth My heart's love Bursts with hay and flowers. I am a lake of blue air In which my own appointed place Field and valley Stand reflected ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 257:We are not at peace with others because we are not at peace with ourselves, and we are not at peace with ourselves because we are not at peace with God ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 258:It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes many terrible mistakes. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 259:Now anxiety is the mark of spiritual insecurity. It is the fruit of unanswered questions. But questions cannot go unanswered unless they first be asked. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 260:Self-conquest is really self-surrender. Yet before we can surrender ourselves we must become ourselves. For no one can give up what he does not possess. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 261:A happiness that is sought for ourselves alone can never be found: for a happiness that is diminished by being shared is not big enough to make us happy. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 262:In a world of noise, confusion and conflict it is necessary that there be places of silence, inner discipline and peace. In such places love can blossom. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 263:We cannot possess the truth fully until it has entered into the very substance of our life by good habits, and by a certain perfection of moral activity. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 264:Love in fact is the spiritual life, and without it all the other exercises of the spirit, however lofty, are emptied of content and become mere illusions. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 265:Even the darkest moments of the liturgy are filled with joy, and Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the lenten fast, is a day of happiness, a Christian feast. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 266:People may spend their whole lives climbing the ladder of success only to find, once they reach the top, that the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 267:Stop asking yourself questions that have no meaning. Or if they have, you'll find out when you need to - find out both the questions and the answers. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 268:It is true that we are called to create a better world. But we are first of all called to a more immediate and exalted task: that of creating our own lives. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 269:The humble person receives praise the way a clean window takes the light of the sun. The truer and more intense the light is, the less you see of the glass. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 270:To love blindly is to love selfishly, because the goal of such love is not the real advantage of the beloved but only the exercise of love in our own souls. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 271:The cause of liberty becomes a mockery if the price to be paid is the wholesale destruction of those who are to enjoy liberty. Ghandi, quoted in Merton, p. 68 ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 272:There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist fighting for peace by nonviolent methods most easily succumbs; activism and overwork. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 273:To love our nothingness we must love everything in us that the proud man loves when he loves himself. But we must love it all for exactly the opposite reason. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 274:Love seeks one thing only: the good of the one loved. It leaves all the other secondary effects to take care of themselves. Love, therefore, is its own reward. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 275:What is the use of praying if at the very moment of prayer, we have so little confidence in God that we are busy planning our own kind of answer to our prayer? ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 276:Music is pleasing not only because of the sound but because of the silence that is in it: without the alternation of sound and silence there would be no rhythm. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 277:We do not exist for ourselves alone, and it is only when we are fully convinced of this fact that we begin to love ourselves properly and thus also love others. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 278:Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false Self. We are not very good at recognizing illusions, least of all the ones we cherish about ourselves. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 279:Modern man believes he is fruitful and productive when his ego is aggressively affirmed, when he is visibly active, and when his action produces obvious results. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 280:That is God's call to us - simply to be people who are content to live close to him and to renew the kind of life in which the closeness is felt and experienced. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 281:The whole aim of Zen is not to make foolproof statements about experience, but to come to direct grips with reality without the mediation of logical verbalizing. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 282:This is the crucifixion of Christ: in which He dies again and again in the individuals who were made to share the joy and freedom of His grace, and who deny Him. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 283:A humble man is not afraid of failure. In fact, he is not afraid of anything, even himself, since perfect humility implies perfect confidence in the power of God. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 284:And the deepest level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless. it is beyond words, and it is beyond speech, and it is beyond concept. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 285:Everybody has an instinctive desire to do good things and avoid evil. But that desire is sterile as long as we have no experience of what it means to be good... . ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 286:I can depend less and less on my own power and sense of direction... It is so strange to advance backwards and get where you are going in a totally unexpected way ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 287:We must be true inside, true to ourselves, before we can know a truth that is outside us. But we make ourselves true inside by manifesting the truth as we see it. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 288:Before we can realize who we really are, we must become conscious of the fact that the person we think we are, here and now, is at best an impostor and a stranger. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 289:October is a fine and dangerous season in America. a wonderful time to begin anything at all. You go to college, and every course in the catalogue looks wonderful. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 290:The evil in the world is all of our own making, and it proceeds entirely from our ruthless, senseless, wasteful, destructive, and suicidal neglect of our own being. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 291:My God, I pray better to you by breathing and walking than by talking, just as in choir I sing best when I am thinking about something else, or better still, praying. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 292:Solitude is not something you must hope for in the future. Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present you will never find it. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 293:Our vocation is not simply to be, but to work together with God in the creation of our own life, our own identity, our own destiny... .To work out our identity in God. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 294:For me to be a saint means to be myself. Therefore the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and of discovering my true self. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 295:We cannot love ourselves unless we love others, and we cannot love others unless we love ourselves. But a selfish love of ourselves makes us incapable of loving others. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 296:Saints are what they are not because their sanctity makes them admirable to others, but because the gift of sainthood makes it possible for them to admire everyone else. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 297:How deluded we sometimes are by the clear notions we get out of books. They make us think that we really understand things of which we have no practical knowledge at all. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 298:Indeed, it is a kind of quintessence of pride to hate and fear even the kind and legitimate approval of those who love us! I mean, to resent it as a humiliating patronage. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 299:It is my belief, that we should not be too sure of having found Christ in ourselves until we have found him also in that part of humanity that is most remote from our own. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 300:The first step toward finding God, Who is Truth, is to discover the truth about myself: and if I have been in error, this first step to truth is the discovery of my error. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 301:True contemplation is not a psychological trick but a theological grace. It can come to us ONLY as a gift, and not as a result of our own clever use of spiritual techniques. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 302:For if I am to love truly and freely, I must be able to give something that is truly my own to another. If my heart does not first belong to me, how can I give it to another? ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 303:A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all. No man can serve two masters. Your life is shaped by the end you live for. You are made in the image of what you desire. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 304:The man who lives in division is living in death. He cannot find himself because he is lost; he has ceased to be a reality. The person he believes himself to be is a bad dream. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 305:The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another, and all involved in one another. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 306:Not all of us are called to be hermits, but all of us need enough silence and solitude in our lives to enable the deeper voice of our own self to be heard at least occasionally. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 307:We live on the brink of disaster because we do not know how to let life alone. We do not respect the living and fruitful contradictions and paradoxes of which true life is full. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 308:The art of our time, sacred art included, will necessarily be characterized by a certain poverty, grimness and roughness which correspond to the violent realities of a cruel age. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 309:There were only a few shepherds at the first Bethlehem. The ox and the donkey understood more of the first Christmas than the high priests in Jerusalem. And it is the same today. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 310:To Serve the God of Love one must be free, one must face the terrible responsibility of the decision to love in spite of all unworthiness whether in oneself or in one's neighbor. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 311:Let me rest in Your will and be silent. Then the light of Your joy will warm my life. Its fire will burn in my heart and shine for Your glory. This is what I live for. Amen, amen. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 312:The selfishness of an age that has devoted itself to the mere cult of pleasure has tainted the whole human race with an error that makes all our acts more or less lies against God. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 313:When I pray for peace, I pray not only that the enemies of my own country may cease to want war, but above all that my country will cease to do the things that make war inevitable. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 314:Grace is not a strange, magic substance which is subtly filtered into our souls to act as a kind of spiritual penicillin. Grace is unity, oneness within ourselves, oneness with God. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 315:Life is this simple: we are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and the divine is shining through it all the time. This is not just a nice story or a fable, it is true. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 316:But precisely this illusion that everything is "clear" is what is blinding us all. It is a serious temptation, and it is a subtle form of pride and worldly love of power and revenge. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 317:The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 318:Souls are like athletes, that need opponents worthy of them, if they are to be tried and extended and pushed to the full use of their powers, and rewarded according to their capacity. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 319:There is no greater disaster in the spiritual life than to be immersed in unreality, for life is maintained and nourished in us by our vital relation with realities outside and above us. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 320:Ours is a time of anxiety because we have willed it to be so. Our anxiety is not imposed on us by force from outside. We impose it on our world and upon one another from within ourselves. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 321:To be alone by being part of the universe-fitting in completely to an environment of woods and silence and peace. Everything you do becomes a unity and a prayer. Unity within and without. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 322:In an age where there is much talk about "being yourself," I reserve to myself the right to forget about being myself, since in any case there is very little chance of my being anybody else. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 323:Love is not a matter of getting what you want. Quite the contrary. The insistence on always having what you want, on always being satisfied, on always being fulfilled, makes love impossible. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 324:To become attached to the experience of peace is to threaten the true and essential and vital union of our soul with God above sense and experience in the darkness of a pure and perfect love. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 325:For pride, which is the inordinate attribution of goods and values and glories to one's own contingent self, cannot exist where there is no contingent self to which anything can be attributed. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 326:Do not be too quick to condemn the man who no longer believes in God: for it is perhaps your own coldness and avarice and mediocrity and materialism and selfishness that have chilled his faith. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 327:Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 328:Death is someone you see very clearly with eyes in the center of your heart: eyes that see not by reacting to light, but by reacting to a kind of a chill from within the marrow of your own life. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 329:One of the strange laws of the contemplative life is that in it you do not sit down and solve problems: you bear with them until they somehow solve themselves. Or until life solves them for you. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 330:The only influence that can really upset the injustice and iniquity of men is the power that breathes in the Christian tradition, renewing our participation in the Life that is the Light of men. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 331:One of the first things to learn if you want to be a contemplative is to mind your own business. Nothing is more suspicious, in a man who seems holy, than an impatient desire to reform other men. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 332:The logic of the poet - that is, the logic of language or the experience itself - develops the way a living organism grows: it spreads out towards what it loves, and is heliotropic, like a plant. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 333:The artist should preach nothing-not even his own autonomy. His art should speak its own truth, and in so doing it will be in harmony with every other kind of truth- moral, metaphysical, mystical. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 334:In meditative prayer, one thinks and speaks not only with the mind and lips, but in a certain sense with one's whole being... All good meditative prayer is a conversation of our entire self to God. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 335:One has to be alone, under the sky, Before everything falls into place and one finds his or her own place in the midst of it all. We have to have the humility to realize ourselves as part of nature. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 336:The true contemplative is one who has discovered the art of finding leisure even in the midst of his work, by working with such a spirit of detachment and recollection that even his work is a prayer ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 337:We are so obsessed with doing that we have no time and no imagination left for being. As a result, men are valued not for what they are but for what they do or what they have - for their usefulness. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 338:I refuse to be misled by any kind of a mirage about any alleged success of what I write. Those things are too easily exaggerated, and even when they are true, they always mean less than they seem to. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 339:There is only one problem on which all my existence, my peace, my happiness depend: to discover myself in discovering God. If I find Him I will find myself and if I find my true self I will find Him. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 340:This is the greatest stumbling block in our spiritual discipline, which, in actuality, consists not in getting rid of the self but in realizing the fact that there is no such existence from the first. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 341:Do not look for rest in any pleasure, because you were not created for pleasure: you were created for joy. And if you do not know the difference between pleasure and joy you have not yet begun to live. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 342:Pardon all runners, All speechless, alien winds, All mad waters. Pardon their impulses, Their wild attitudes, Their young flights, their reticence. When a message has no clothes on How can it be spoken. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 343:The most awful tyranny is that of the proximate Utopia where the last sins are currently being eliminated and where, tomorrow, there will be no more sins because all the sinners will have been wiped out. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 344:... .it is of the very essence of Christianity to face suffering and death not because they are good, not because they have meaning, but because the resurrection of Jesus has robbed them of their meaning. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 345:I suppose what makes me most glad is that we all recognize each other in this metaphysical space of silence and happening, and get some sense, for a moment, that we are full of paradise without knowing it. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 346:My life is ... a mystery which I do not attempt to really understand, as though 1 were led by the hand in a night where I see nothing, but can fully depend on the love and protection of Him who guides me. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 347:The whole world has risen in Christ... If God is & 348:No matter how ruined man and his world may seem to be, and no matter how terrible man's despair may become, as long as he continues to be a man his very humanity continues to tell him that life has a meaning. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 349:The true inner self must be drawn up like a jewel from the bottom of the sea, rescued from confusion, from indistinction, from immersion in the common, the nondescript, the trivial, the sordid, the evanescent. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 350:To say that I am made in the image of God is to say that love is the reason for my existence, for God is love. Love is my true identity. Selflessness is my true self. Love is my true character. Love is my name. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 351:If we examine ourselves carefully we shall see most of us have an enormous amount of unfinished business... We have to be free so that we can just step across the line and that's it. That is what real freedom is. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 352:Solitude is so necessary both for society and for the individual that when society fails to provide sufficient solitude to develop the inner life of the persons who compose it, they rebel and seek false solitudes. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 353:We have the choice of two identities: the external mask which seems to be real... and the hidden, inner person who seems to us to be nothing, but who can give himself eternally to the truth in whom he subsists. (295) ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 354:The fruitfulness of our lives depends in large measure in our ability to doubt our own words and to question the value of our own work. The man who completely trusts his own estimate of himself is doomed to sterility. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 355:Our real journey in life is interior; It is a matter of growth, deepening, and of an ever greater surrender to the creative action of love and grace in our hearts. Never was it more necessary to respond to that action. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 356:Why do we have to spend our lives striving to be something that we would never want to be, if we only knew what we wanted? Why do we waste our time doing things which... are just the opposite of what we were made for? ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 357:If there is no silence beyond and within the many words of doctrine, there is no religion, only a religious ideology. For religion goes beyond words and actions, and attains to the ultimate Truth only in silence and Love. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 358:The only trouble is that in the spiritual life there are no tricks and no shortcuts. Those who imagine that they can discover spiritual gimmicks and put them to work for themselves usually ignore God's will and his grace. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 359:The world as pure object is something that is not there. It is not a reality outside us for which we exist... .It is a living and self-creating mystery of which I am myself a part, to which I am myself, my own unique door. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 360:Humble people can do great things with uncommon perfection because they are no longer concerned about their own interests and their own reputation, and therefore they no longer need to waste their efforts in defending them. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 361:The geographical pilgrimage is the symbolic acting out an inner journey. The inner journey is the interpolation of the meanings and signs of the outer pilgrimage. One can have one without the other. It is best to have both. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 362:They were in the world and not of it& 363:What do I mean by loving ourselves properly? I mean first of all, desiring to live, accepting life as a very great gift and a great good, not because of what it gives us, but because of what it enables us to give to others. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 364:God, Who is everywhere, never leaves us. Yet He seems sometimes to be present, sometimes to be absent. If we do not know Him well, we do not realize that He may be more present to us when He is absent than when He is present. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 365:As long as I continue to take myself seriously, how can I consider myself a saint? How can I consider myself a contemplative? For the self I bother about does not really exist, never will, never did except in my own imagination. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 366:If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I am living for, in detail, ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 367:His justice is the love that gives to each one of His creatures the gifts that His mercy has previously decreed. And His mercy is His love, doing justice to its own exigencies, and renewing the gift which we had failed to accept. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 368:It seems to me that the darkness that has troubled you ... comes from one very serious source. Without wanting to be in conflict with the truth and with the will of God, we are actually going against God's will and His teaching. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 369:To be truly Catholic is not merely to be correct according to an abstractly universal standard of truth, but also and above all to be able to enter into the problems and the joys of all, to understand all, to be all things to all. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 370:You do not need to know precisely what is happening, or exactly where it is all going. What you need is to recognize the possibilities and challenges offered by the present moment, and to embrace them with courage, faith and hope. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 371:Nevertheless, the liturgy of Ash Wednesday is not focussed on the sinfulness of the penitent but on the mercy of God. The question of sinfulness is raised precisely because this is a day of mercy, and the just do not need a savior. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 372:Thinking about monastic ideals is not the same as living up to them, but at any rate such thinking has an important place in a monk's life, because you cannot begin to do anything unless you have some idea what you are trying to do. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 373:It is both dangerous and easy to hate man as he is because he is not what he ought to be. If we do not first respect what he is we will never suffer him to become what he ought to be: in our impatience we do away with him altogether. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 374:To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to the violence of our times. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 375:For the birds there is not a time that they tell, but the point vierge between darkness and light, between being and nonbeing. You can tell yourself the time by their waking, if you are experienced. But that is your folly, not theirs. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 376:In the last analysis, the individual person is responsible for living his own life and for & 377:What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it, all the rest are not only useless, but disastrous. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 378:One of the most important-and most neglected-elements in the beginning of the interior life is the ability to respond to reality, to see the value and the beauty in ordinary things, to come alive to the splendour that is all around us. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 379:Yet it is in this loneliness that the deepest activities begin. It is here that you discover act without motion, labor that is profound repose, vision in obscurity, and, beyond all desire, a fulfillment whose limits extend to infinity. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 380:You will never be able to have perfect interior peace and recollection unless you are detached even from the desire of peace and recollection. You will never be able to pray perfectly until you are detached from the pleasures of prayer. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 381:The gift of love is the gift of the power and capacity to love, and therefore, to give love with full effect is also to receive it. So love can only be kept by being given away, and it can only be given perfectly when it is also received. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 382:The truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering the more you suffer because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you in proportion to your fear of being hurt ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 383:The mission of Christian humility in social life is not merely to edify, but to keep minds open to many alternatives. The rigidity of a certain type of Christian thought has seriously impaired this capacity, which nonviolence must recover. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 384:The secret of my full identity is hidden in Him. He alone can make me who I am, or rather who I will be when at last I fully begin to be. But unless I desire this identity and work to find it with Him and in Him, the work will never be done ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 385:To desire Him to be merciful to us is to acknowledge Him as God. To seek His pity when we deserve no pity is to ask Him to be just with a justice so holy that it knows no evil and shows mercy to everyone who does not fly from Him in despair. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 386:A superficial freedom to wander aimlessly here or there, to taste this or that, to make a choice of distractions, is simply a sham. It claims to be a freedom of "choice" when it has evaded the basic task of discovering who it is that chooses. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 387:If our life is poured out in useless words, we will never hear anything, never become anything, and in the end, because we have said everything before we had anything to say, we shall be left speechless at the moment of our greatest decision. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 388:a man can radically change his life and attain to a deeper meaning, a more perfect integration, a more complete fulfillment, a more total liberty of spirit than are possible in the routines of a purely active existence centered on money-making. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 389:The Hindus are not looking for us to send them men who will build schools and hospitals, although those things are good and useful in themselves& 390:Curiously, the most serious religious people, or the most concerned scholars, those who constantly read the Bible as a matter of professional or pious duty, can often manage to evade a radically involved dialogue with the book they are questioning. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 391:We assume that others are receiving the kind of appreciation we want for ourselves, and we proceed on the assumption that since we are not loveable as we are, we must become lovable under false pretenses, as if we were something better than we are. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 392:Faith is a light of such supreme brilliance that it dazzles the mind and darkens all its visions of other realities, but in the end when we become used to the new light, we gain a new view of all reality transfigured and elevated in the light itself. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 393:Hurry ruins saints as well as artists. They want quick success, and they are in such a hurry to get it that they cannot take time to be true to themselves. And when the madness is upon them, they argue that their very haste is a species of integrity. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 394:The more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 395:Instead of hating the people you think are war-makers, hate the appetites and disorder in your own soul, which are the causes of war. If you love peace, then hate injustice, hate tyranny, hate greed - but hate these things in yourself, not in another. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 396:For the sinful self is not my real self, it is not the self YOU have wanted for me, only the self that I have wanted : And I no longer want this false self. But now, Father, I come to You in your own Son's self ... and it is He Who Presents me to You. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 397:If a writer is so cautious that he never writes anything that cannot be criticized, he will never be able to write anything that can be read. If you want to help other people you have got to make up your mind to write things that some men will condemn. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 398:By reading the scriptures I am so renewed that all nature seems renewed around me and with me. The sky seems to be a pure, a cooler blue, the trees a deeper green. The whole world is charged with the glory of God and I feel fire and music under my feet. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 399:The monk in hiding himself from the world becomes not less than himself, not less of a person, but more of a person, more truly and perfectly himself: for his personality and individuality are perfected in their true order, the spiritual, interior order. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 400:We who claim to love peace and justice must always be careful that we do not use our righteousness to provoke the violent, and in this way bring about the conflict for which we, too, like other men, are hungering in secret, and with suppressed barbarity. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 401:God must be allowed the right to speak unpredictably... . We must find him in our enemy, or we may lose him even in our friend. We must find him in the pagan or we will lose him in our own selves, substituting for his living presence an empty abstraction. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 402:Business is not the supreme virtue, and sanctity is not measured by the amount of work we accomplish. Perfection is found in the purity of our love for God, and this pure love is a delicate plant that grows best where there is plenty of time for it to mature ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 403:Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody's business. What we are asked to do is to love, and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbors worthy. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 404:The only thing to seek in contemplative prayer is God; and we seek Him successfully when we realize that we cannot find Him unless He shows Himself to us, and yet at the same time that He would not have inspired us to seek Him unless we had already found Him. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 405:We do not pray for the sake of praying, but for the sake of being heard. We do not pray in order to listen to ourselves praying but in order that God may hear us and answer us. Also, we do not pray in order to receive just any answer: it must be God's answer. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 406:Every man becomes the image of the God he adores. He whose worship is directed to a dead thing becomes dead. He who loves corruption rots. He who loves a shadow becomes, himself, a shadow. He who loves things that must perish lives in dread of their perishing. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 407:The importance of detachment from things, the importance of poverty, is that we are supposed to be free from things that we might prefer to people. Wherever things have become more important than people, we are in trouble. That is the crux of the whole matter. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 408:The things I thought were so important - because of the effort I put into them - have turned out to be of small value. And the things I never thought about, the things I was never able to either to measure or to expect, were the things that mattered. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 409:Every moment and every event of everyman's life on earth plants something in his soul. For just as the wind carries thousands of winged seeds, so each moment brings with it germs of spiritual vitality that come to rest imperceptibly in the minds and wills of men. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 410:Finally I am coming to the conclusion that my highest ambition is to be what I already am. That I will never fulfill my obligation to surpass myself unless I first accept myself, and if I accept myself fully in the right way, I will already have surpassed myself. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 411:October is a fine and dangerous season in America. It is dry and cool and the land is wild with red and gold and crimson, and all the lassitudes of August have seeped out of your blood, and you are full of ambition. It is a wonderful time to begin anything at all. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 412:I seek to speak to you, in some way, as your own self. Who can tell what this may meanI myself do not know, but if you listen, things will be said that are perhaps not written in this book. And this will be due not to me but to the One who lives and speaks in both. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 413:I am beginning to realize that "sanity" is no longer a value or an end in itself. If modern people were a little less sane, a little more doubtful, a little more aware of their absurdities and contradictions, perhaps there might be the possibility of their survival. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 414:True encounter with Christ liberates something in us, a power we did not know we had, a hope, a capacity for life, a resilience, an ability to bounce back when we thought we were completely defeated, a capacity to grow and change, a power of creative transformation. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 415:Contemplation is not and cannot be a function of this external self. There is an irreducible opposition between the deep transcendent self that awakens only in contemplation, and the superficial, external self which we commonly identify with the first person singular. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 416:And of course most non-Catholics imagine that the Church is immensely rich, and that all Catholic institutions make money hand over fist, and that all the money is stored away somewhere to buy gold and silver dishes for the Pope and cigars for the College of Cardinals. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 417:We must suffer. Our five sense are dulled by inordinate pleasure. Penance makes them keen, gives them back their natural vitality, and more. Penance clears the eye of conscience and of reason. It helps think clearly, judge sanely. It strengthens the action of our will. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 418:From the moment you put a piece of bread in your mouth you are part of the world. Who grew the wheat? Who made the bread? Where did it come from? You are in relationship with all who brought it to the table. We are least separate and most in common when we eat and drink. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 419:The things we really need come to us only as gifts, and in order to receive them as gifts we have to be open. In order to be open we have to renounce ourselves, in a sense we have to die to our image of ourselves, our autonomy, our fixation upon our self-willed identity. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 420:The Lord did not create suffering. Pain and death came into the world with the fall of man. But after man had chosen suffering in preference to the joys of union with God, the Lord turned suffering itself into a way by which man could come to the perfect knowledge of God. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 421:..takes created things for ends in themselves, which they are not. The will that seeks rest in creatures for their own sake stops on the way to its true end, terminates in a value which does not exist, and thus frustrates all its deepest capacities for happiness and peace. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 422:I stand among you as one who offers a small message of hope. . . there are always people who dare to seek on the margin of society, who are not dependent on social acceptance, not dependent on social routine, and prefer a kind of free-floating existence under a state of risk. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 423:To those who have no personal experience of this revolutionary aspect of Christian truth, but who see only the outer crust of dead, human conservatism that tends to form around the Church the way barnacles gather on the hull of a ship, all this talk about dynamism sounds foolish. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 424:This act of total surrender is not merely a fantastic intellectual and mystical gamble; it is something much more serious. It is an act of love for this unseen person, who, in the very gift of love by which we surrender ourselves to his reality also makes his presence known to us. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 425:Weaknesses and deficiencies . . . play a most important part in all our lives. It is because of them that we need others and others need us. We are not all weak in the same spots, and so we supplement and complete one another, each one making up in himself for the lack in another. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 426:In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 427:If we live with possibilities we are exiles from the present which is given us by God to be our own, homeless and displaced in a future or a past which are not ours because they are always beyond our reach. The present is our right place, and we can lay hands on whatever it offers us. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 428:I came with the notion of perhaps saying something for monks and to monks of all religions because I am supposed to be a monk. ... My dear brothers, WE ARE ALREADY ONE. BUT WE IMAGINE THAT WE ARE NOT. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 429:For power can guarantee the interests of some men but it can never foster the good of man. Power always protects the good of some at the expense of all the others. Only love can attain and preserve the good of all. Any claim to build the security of all on force is a manifest imposture. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 430:Learn how to meditate on paper. Drawing and writing are forms of meditation. Learn how to contemplate works of art. Learn how to pray in the streets or in the country. Know how to meditate not only when you have a book in your hand but when you are waiting for a bus or riding in a train. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 431:The simplicity that all this presupposes is not easy to attain. I find that my life constantly threatens to become complex and divisive. A life of prayer is basically a very simple life. This simplicity, however, is the result of asceticism and effort: it is not a spontaneous simplicity. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 432:For power can guarantee the interests of some men but it can never foster the good of man. Power always protects the good of some at the expense of all the others. Only love can attain and preserve the good of all. Any claim to build the security of all on force is a manifest imposture. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 433:The devil makes many disciples by preaching against sin. He convinces them that the great evil of sin, induces a crisis of guilt by which God is satisfied," and after that he lets them spend the rest of their lives meditating on the intense sinfulness and evident reprobation of other men. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 434:The whole function of the life of prayer is, then, to enlighten and strengthen our conscience so that it not only knows and perceives the outward, written precepts of the moral and divine laws, but above all lives God's law in concrete reality by perfect and continual union with His will. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 435:Peace cannot be built on exclusivism, absolutism, and intolerance. But neither can it be built on vague liberal slogans and pious programs gestated in the smoke of confabulation. There can be no peace on earth without the kind of inner change that brings man back to his "right mind." p. 31 ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 436:To consider persons and events and situations only in the light of their effect on me is to live on the doorstep of hell. Selfishness is doomed to frustration centered as it is upon a lie. To live exclusively for myself, I must make all things bend themselves to my will as if I were a god. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 437:It is not only our hatred of others that is dangerous but also and above all our hatred of ourselves: particularly that hatred of ourselves which is too deep and too powerful to be consciously faced. For it is this which makes us see our own evil in others and unable to see it in ourselves. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 438:Let no one hope to find in contemplation an escape from conflict, from anguish or from doubt. On the contrary, the deep inexpressible certitude of the contemplative experience awakens a tragic anguish and opens many questions in the depths of the heart like wounds that cannot stop bleeding. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 439:The silence of the forest is my bride and the sweet dark warmth of the whole world is my love, and out of the heart of that dark warmth comes the secret that is heard only in silence, but it is the root of all the secrets that are whispered by all the lovers in their beds all over the world. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 440:We are not perfectly free until we live in pure hope. For when our hope is pure, it no longer trusts exclusively in human and visible means, nor rests in any visible end. He who hopes in God trusts God, Whom he never sees, to bring him to the possession of things that are beyond imagination. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 441:A tree gives glory to God by being a tree. For in being what God means it to be it is obeying [God]. It consents, so to speak, to [God's] creative love. It is expressing an idea which is in God and which is not distinct from the essence of God, and therefore a tree imitates God by being a tree ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 442:Living is not thinking. Thought is formed and guided by objective reality outside us. Living is the constant adjustment of thought to life and life to thought in such a way that we are always growing, always experiencing new things in the old and old things in the new. Thus life is always new. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 443:God has left sin in the world in order that there may be forgiveness: not only the secret forgiveness by which He Himself cleanses our souls, but the manifest forgiveness by which we have mercy on one another and so give expression to the fact that He is living, by His mercy, in our own hearts. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 444:A tree gives glory to God by being a tree. For in being what God means it to be it is obeying [God]. It “consents,” so to speak, to [God's] creative love. It is expressing an idea which is in God and which is not distinct from the essence of God, and therefore a tree imitates God by being a tree ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 445:Imagination has the creative task of making symbols, joining things together in such a way that they throw new light on each other and on everything around them. The imagination is a discovering faculty, a faculty for seeing relationships, for seeing meanings that are special and even quite new. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 446:Not only does silence give us a chance to understand ourselves better, to get a truer and more balanced perspective on our own lives in relation to the lives of others: silence makes us whole if we let it. Silence helps draw together the scattered and dissipated energies of a fragmented existence. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 447:The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men! A weird life it is, indeed, to be living always in somebody else's imagination, as if that were the only place in which one could at last become real! ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 448:Are they moved by a sense of human need for silence, for reflection, for inner seeking? So they want to get away from the noise and tension of modern life, at least for a little while, in order to relax their minds and wills and seek a blessed healing sense of inner unity, reconciliation, integration? ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 449:I am against war, against violence, against violent revolution, for peaceful settlement of differences, for nonviolent but nevertheless radical changes. Change is needed, and violence will not really change anything: at most it will only transfer power from one set of bull-headed authorities to another. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 450:The pleasure of a good act is something to be remembered - not in order to feed our complacency but in order to remind us that virtuous actions are not only possible and valuable, but that they can become easier and more delightful and more fruitful than the acts of vice which oppose and frustrate them. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 451:Persons are not known by intellect alone, not by principles alone, but only by love. It is when we love the other, the enemy, that we obtain from God the key to an understanding of who he is, and who we are. It is only this realization that can open to us the real nature of our duty, and of right action. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 452:The married man and the mother of a Christian family, if they are faithful to their obligations, will fulfill a mission that is as great as it is consoling: that of bringing into the world and forming young souls capable of happiness and love, souls capable of sanctification and transformation in Christ. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 453:For every gain in deep certitude there is a corresponding growth of superficial "doubt." This doubt is by no means opposed to genuine faith, but it mercilessly examines and questions the spurious "faith" of everyday life, the human faith which is nothing but the passive acceptance of conventional opinion. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 454:Very well, then: why are you attached to any one book, or to the words and ways of one saint when he himself tells you to let them go and walk in simplicity? To hang on to him as if to make a method of him is to contradict him and to go in the opposite direction to the one in which he would have you travel. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 455:Do not be too quick to assume your enemy is a savage just because he is your enemy. Perhaps he is your enemy because he thinks you are a savage. Or perhaps he is afraid of you because he feels that you are afraid of him. And perhaps if he believed you are capable of loving him he would no longer be your enemy. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 456:Since no man ever can, or could, live by himself and for himself alone, the destinies of thousands of other people were bound to be affected, some remotely, but some very directly and near-at-hand, by my own choices and decisions and desires, as my own life would also be formed and modified according to theirs. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 457:Surrender your own poverty and acknowledge your nothingness to the Lord. Whether you understand it or not, God loves you, is present in you, lives in you, dwells in you, calls you, saves you and offers you an understanding and compassion which are like nothing you have ever found in a book or heard in a sermon. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 458:The whole purpose of spiritual direction is to penetrate beneath the surface of a man's life, to get behind the fa√ßade of conventional gestures and attitudes which he presents to the world, and to bring out his inner spiritual freedom, his inmost truth, which is what we call the likeness of Christ in his soul. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 459:Each particular being, in its individuality, its concrete nature and entity, with all its own characteristics and its private qualities and its own inviolable identity, gives glory to God by being precisely what He wants it to be here and now, in the circumstances ordained for it by His Love and His infinite Art. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 460:Life consists in learning to live on one's own, spontaneous, freewheeling: to do this one must recognize what is one's own-be familiar and at home with oneself. This means basically learning who one is, and learning what one has to offer to the contemporary world, and then learning how to make that offering valid. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 461:The only true liberty is in the service of that which is beyond all limits, beyond all definitions, beyond all human appreciation: that which is All, and which therefore is no limited or individual thing: The All is no-thing, for if it were to be a single thing separated from all other things, it would not be All. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 462:It is in deep solitude that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brothers. The more solitary I am, the more affection I have for them. It is pure affection, and filled with reverance for the solitude of others. Solitude and silence teach me to love my brothers for what they are, not for what they say. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 463:When your tongue is silent, you can rest in the silence of the forest. When your imagination is silent, the forest speaks to you. It tells you of its unreality and of the Reality of God. But when your mind is silent, then the forest suddenly becomes magnificently real and blazes transparently with the Reality of God. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 464:It is easy enough to tell the poor to accept their poverty as Gods will when you yourself have warm clothes and plenty of food and medical care and a roof over your head and no worry about the rent. But if you want them to believe youtry to share some of their poverty and see if you can accept it as Gods will yourself! ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 465:Keeping a journal has taught me that there is not so much new in your life as you sometimes think. When you re-read your journal you find out that your latest discovery is something you already found out five years ago. Still, it is true that one penetrates deeper and deeper into the same ideas and the same experiences. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 466:The lights of prayer that make us imagine we are beginning to be angels are sometimes only signs that we are finally beginning to be men. We do not have a high enough opinion of our own nature. We think we are at the gates of heaven and we are only just beginning to come into our own realm as free and intelligent beings. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 467:It is a kind of pride to insist that none of our prayers should ever be petitions for our own needs: for this is only another subtle way of trying to put ourselves on the same plane as God – acting as if we had no needs, as if we were not creatures, not dependent on Him and dependent, by His will, on material things, too. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 468:I was not sure where I was going, and I could not see what I would do when I got [there]. But you saw further and clearer than I, and you opened the seas before my ship, whose track led me across the waters to a place I had never dreamed of, and which you were even then preparing to be my rescue and my shelter and my home. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 469:In all His acts God orders all things, whether good or evil, for the good of those who know Him and seek Him and who strive to bring their own freedom under obedience to His divine purpose. All that is done by the will of God in secret is done for His glory and for the good of those whom He has chosen to share in His glory. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 470:At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 471:In humility is the greatest freedom. As long as you have to defend the imaginary self that you think is important, you lose your piece of heart. As soon as you compare that shadow with the shadows of other people, you lose all joy, because you have begun to trade in unrealities and there is no joy in things that do not exist. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 472:It is the will of God that we live not only as rational beings, but as "new men" regenerated by the Holy Spirit in Christ. It is His will that we reach out for our inheritance, that we answer His call to be His sons. We are born men without our consent, but the consent to be sons of God has to be elicited by our own free will. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 473:The desire to kill is like the desire to attack another with a red hot iron. I have to pick up the incandescent metal and burn my own hand while burning the other person. Hate itself is the seed of death in my own heart while it seeks death of another. Love is the seed of life in my own heart while it seeks the good of another. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 474:To be risen with Christ means not only that one has a choice and that one may live by a higher law - the law of grace and love - but that one must do so. The first obligation of the Christian is to maintain their freedom from all superstitions, all blind taboos and religious formalities, indeed from all empty forms of legalism. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 475:When I am liberated by silence, when I am no longer involved in the measurement of life, but in the living of it, I can discover a form of prayer in which there is effectively no distraction. My whole life becomes a prayer. My whole silence is full of prayer. The world of silence in which I am immersed contributes to my prayer. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 476:But the man who is not afraid to admit everything that he sees to be wrong with himself, and yet recognizes that he may be the object of God's love precisely because of his shortcomings, can begin to be sincere. His sincerity is based on confidence, not in his own illusions about himself, but in the endless, unfailing mercy of God. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 477:Who is willing to be satisfied with a job that expresses all his limitations? He will accept such work only as a & 478:We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and God is shining through it all the time. God manifests Himself everywhere, in everything - in people and in things and in nature and in events ... The only thing is we don't see it ... I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 479:Either you look at the universe as a very poor creation out of which no one can make anything or you look at your own life and your own part in the universe as infinitely rich, full of inexhaustible interest, opening out into infinite further possibilities for study and contemplation and interest and praise. Beyond all and in all is God. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 480:God utters me like a word containing a partial thought of him. A word will never be able to comprehend the voice that utters it. But if I am true to the concept that God utters in me, if I am true to the thought of Him that I was meant to embody, I shall be full of his actuality and find him everywhere in myself, and find myself nowhere. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 481:By my monastic life and vows I am saying no to all the concentration camps, the aerial bombardments, the staged political trials, the judicial murders, the racial injustices, the economic tyrannies, and the whole socioeconomic apparatus which seems geared for nothing but global destruction in spite of all its fair words in favor of peace. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 482:Detachment from things does not mean setting up a contradiction between & 483:The psychological impotence of our enraged generation must be traced to the overwhelming accusation of insincerity which every man and woman has to confront, in the depths of his own soul, when he seeks to love merely for his own pleasure.And yet the men of our time do not love with enough courage to risk even discomfort or inconvenience. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 484:My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me... you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 485:To know the Cross is not merely to know our own sufferings. For the Cross is the sign of salvation, and no man is saved by his own sufferings. To know the Cross is to know that we are saved by the sufferings of Christ; more, it is to know the love of Christ Who underwent suffering and death in order to save us. It is, then, to know Christ. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 486:Consequently, the truth of God lives in our souls more by the power of superior moral courage than by the light of an eminent intelligence. Indeed, spiritual intelligence itself depends on the fortitude and patience with which we sacrifice ourselves for the truth, as it is communicated to our lives concretely in the providential will of God ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 487:The camera does not know what it takes; it captures materials with which you reconstruct, not so much what you saw as what you thought you saw. Hence the best photography is aware, mindful, of illusion and uses illusion, permitting and encouraging it - especially unconscious and powerful illusions that are not usually admitted on the scene. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 488:Our technological society has no longer any place in it for wisdom that seeks truth for its own sake, that seeks the fullness of being, that seeks to rest in an intuition of the very ground of all being. Without wisdom, the apparent opposition of action and contemplation, of work and rest, of involvement and detachment, can never be resolved. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 489:I am beginning to realize that "sanity" is no longer a value or an end in itself. The "sanity" of modern man is about as useful to him as the huge bulk and muscles of the dinosaur. If he were a little less sane, a little more doubtful, a little more aware of his absurdities and contradictions, perhaps there might be a possibility of his survival. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 490:All men who live only according to their five senses, and seek nothing beyond the gratification of their natural appetites for pleasure and reputation and power, cut themselves off from that charity which is the principle of all spiritual vitality and happiness because it alone saves us from the barren wilderness of our own abominable selfishness. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 491:The thing about Zen is that it pushes contradictions to their ultimate limit where one has to choose between madness and innocence. Zen suggests that we may be driving toward one or the other on a cosmic scale. Driving toward them because, one way or the other, as madmen or innocents, we are already there. It might be good to open our eyes and see. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 492:We cannot master everything, taste everything, understand everything, drain every experience to its last dregs. But if we have the courage to let almost everything else go, we will probably be able to retain the thing necessary for us-whatever it may be. If we are too eager to have everything, we will almost certainly miss even the one thing we need ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 493:Zen enriches no one. There is no body to be found. The birds may come and circle for a while in the place where it is thought to be. But they soon go elsewhere. When they are gone, the "nothing," the "no-body" that was there, suddenly appears. That is Zen. It was there all the time but the scavengers missed it, because it was not their kind of prey. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 494:Contradictions have always existed in the soul of [individuals]. But it is only when we prefer analysis to silence that they become a constant and insoluble problem. We are not meant to resolve all contradictions but to live with them and rise above them and see them in the light of exterior and objective values which make them trivial by comparison. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 495:The land which thou goest to possess is not like the land of Egypt from whence thou camest out... For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor your ways my ways, saith the Lord... Seek the Lord while He may be found, call upon Him while He is near... Why do you spend money for that which is not bread and your labor for that which doth not satisfy you? ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 496:In the natural order no matter what ideals may be theoretically possible, most people more or less live for themselves and for their own interests and pleasures or for those of their own family or group, and therefore they are constantly interfering with one another's aims, and hurting one another and injuring one another, whether they mean it or not. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 497:The thing about Zen is that it pushes contradictions to their ultimate limit where one has to choose between madness and innocence. And Zen. suggests that we may be driving toward one or the other on a cosmic scale. Driving toward them because, one way or the other, as madmen or innocents, we are already there. It might be good to open our eyes and see. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 498:When society is made up of men who know no interior solitude it can no longer be held together by love: and consequently it is held together by a violent and abusive authority. But when men are violently deprived of the solitude and freedom which are their due, then society in which they live becomes putrid, it festers with servility, resentment and hate. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 499:The question of love is one that cannot be evaded. Whether or not you claim to be interested in it from the moment you are alive you are bound to be concerned with love because love is not just something that happens to you: It is a certain special way of being alive. Love is in fact an intensification of life a completeness a fullness a wholeness of life. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove 500:Teach me to take all grace / And spring it into blades of act, / Grow spears and sheaves of charity, / While each new instant, (new eternity) / Flowering with clean and individual circumstance, / Speaks me the whisper of [God's] consecrating Spirit. / Then will obedience bring forth new Incarnations / Shining to God with the features of [the Lord's] Christ. ~ thomas-merton, @wisdomtrove *** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***
1:live,” said Paul, ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
2:Songs of Innocence ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
3:There is only now. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
4:Whose silence are you? ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
5:Love is its own reward. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
6:Grace, which is charity, ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
7:The root of war is fear. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
8:A daydream is an evasion. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
9:Love is our true destiny. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
10:Today will never come again. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
11:Love is the door to eternity. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
12:We do not exist for ourselves. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
13:Stop thinking and start looking. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
14:To be a saint is to be yourself. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
15:The gate of heaven is everywhere. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
16:Take more time, cover less ground. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
17:Thomas Merton’s Thoughts in Solitude. ~ Peter Enns, #NFDB
18:What we have to be is what we are. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
19:I need my heart to be moved by you. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
20:Love is an intensification of life. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
21:Perhaps I am stronger than I think. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
22:The end of the world will be legal. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
23:The goal of fasting is inner unity. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
24:SIT FINIS LIBRI, NON FINIS QUAERENDI ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
25:We discover our true selves in love. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
26:Humility is a virtue, not a neurosis. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
27:Love is a special way of being alive. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
28:Our real journey in life is interior. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
29:When ambition ends, happiness begins. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
30:Hurry ruins saints as well as artists. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
31:Lovely morning! How lovely life can be! ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
32:For me to be a saint means to be myself. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
33:Humility is the surest sign of strength. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
34:Love winter when the plant says nothing. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
35:The only unhappiness is not to love God. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
36:It might be good to open our eyes and see. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
37:We love the things we pretend to laugh at. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
38:We put words between ourselves and things. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
39:By faith we know God without seeing Him. By ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
40:He excels in giving irrelevant information. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
41:Love is the epiphany of God in our poverty. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
42:Anxiety is the mark of spiritual insecurity. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
43:My best writing has always been in journals. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
44:The things that we love tell us what we are. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
45:If you have love you will do all things well. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
46:One bird sits still Watching the work of God: ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
47:You are made in the image of what you desire. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
48:A golden heavensings by itselfa song to nobody ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
49:Love is perfect in proportion to it's freedom. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
50:The birth of a man is the birth of his sorrow. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
51:Bonum est praestolari cum silentio salutare Dei. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
52:Get warm any way you can, and love God and pray. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
53:Infinite sharing is the law of God s inner life. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
54:Music and art and poetry attune the soul to God. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
55:Stagnation and inactivity bring spiritual death. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
56:The least of learning is done in the classrooms. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
57:Thinking prevents the unconscious from speaking. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
58:What you fear is an indication of what you seek. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
59:As soon as you are really alone you are with God. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
60:Pride makes us artificial; humility makes us real ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
61:The biggest disease in North America is busyness. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
62:When our life feeds on unreality, it must starve. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
63:To be unknown to God is entirely too much privacy. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
64:We are already ONE. We just think we are separate. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
65:The speech of God is silence. His Word is solitude. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
66:When sin becomes bitter, then Christ becomes sweet. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
67:A bad book about the love of God remains a bad book. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
68:Father,” I answered, “I want to give God everything. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
69:The fear of the Lord is the beginning of heaven. And ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
70:To be unknown to God is altogether too much privacy. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
71:Pride makes us artificial and humility makes us real. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
72:Action is the stream, and contemplation is the spring. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
73:The God of peace is never glorified by human violence. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
74:When you see God in everyone, then they see God in you. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
75:Many books have been written on Thomas Merton already. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
76:No one is so wrong as the man who knows all the answers. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
77:The least of the work of learning is done in classrooms. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
78:There is a logic of language and a logic of mathematics. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
79:All those days and nights were without romance, horrible. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
80:Life reveals itself to us only in so far as well live it. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
81:The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
82:We live as spiritual men when we live as men seeking God. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
83:A faith that is afraid of other people is no faith at all. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
84:The time will come when they will sell you even your rain. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
85:We are united to Him in darkness, because we have to hope. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
86:We become contemplatives when God discovers Himself in us. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
87:You cannot be a man of faith unless you know how to doubt. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
88:prayer is to religion what original research is to science, ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
89:The only way to make a man worthy of love is by loving him. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
90:There is, in a word, nothing comfortable about the Bible... ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
91:(“A classic is a book that remains in print”—Mark Van Doren) ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
92:A man who fails well is greater than one who succeeds badly. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
93:Had I ever read the Life of St. Bernard by Dom Ailbe Luddy?— ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
94:I can only become perfectly free by serving the will of God. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
95:My spiritual goal is to one day walk into God and disappear. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
96:Teach me to go to the country beyond words and beyond names. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
97:The biggest human temptation is... to settle for too little. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
98:To place your trust in visible things is to live in despair. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
99:No one is so wrong as the man who knows all the answers. Like ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
100:Our idea of God tells us more about ourselves than about Him. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
101:The purpose of our lives is to find the purpose of our lives. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
102:Thomas Merton said, “To be a saint means to be myself. ~ Stephen Adly Guirgis, #NFDB
103:To be grateful is to recognize the love of God in everything. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
104:effort is necessary, enlightened, well-directed and sustained. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
105:Violence is not completely fatal until it ceases to disturb us. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
106:What I wear is pants. What I do is live. How I pray is breathe. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
107:Happiness that is sought for ourselves alone can never be found. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
108:How far have I to go to find you in whom I have already arrived. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
109:I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
110:In Silence God ceases to be an object and becomes an experience. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
111:Silence is not broken by speech, but by the anxiety to be heard. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
112:The great thing, and the only thing, is to adore and praise GOD. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
113:The thing that crushed me was that I had never learned to dance. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
114:Those who are not grateful soon begin to complain of everything. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
115:I find I serve the world best by keeping my distance and freedom. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
116:The only One Who can teach me to find God is God, Himself, Alone. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
117:Both threat and promise often come from the same political source. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
118:God utters me like a word containing a partial thought of Himself. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
119:If you have never had any distractions you don't know how to pray. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
120:O God, my God, the night has values that the day never dreamed of. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
121:The problem today is that there are no deserts, only dude ranches. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
122:Those who think they 'know' from the beginning will never in fact ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
123:We stumble and fall constantly, even when we are most enlightened. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
124:What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone in the forest at night. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
125:What is the good of religion without personal spiritual direction? ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
126:Man was made for the highest activity, which is, in fact, his rest. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
127:We believe, not because we want to know, but because we want to be. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
128:Power always protects the good of some at the expense of all others. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
129:The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
130:All good meditative prayer is a conversion of our entire self to God. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
131:Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
132:But I believe that the desire to please You does in fact pleases You. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
133:Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
134:Si ascendero in coelum, tu illic es. Si descendero in infernum, ades. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
135:any fool knows that you don’t need money to get enjoyment out of life. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
136:Art enables us to find ourselves and loose ourselves at the same time. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
137:Compassion is the keen awareness of the interdependence of all things. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
138:How deluded we sometimes are by the clear notions we get out of books. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
139:If you find God with great ease, perhaps it is not God you have found. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
140:To hope is to risk frustration. Make up your mind to risk frustration. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
141:Freedom is perfect when no other love can impede our desire to love God ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
142:The man of faith who has never experienced doubt is not a man of faith. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
143:We cannot achieve greatness unless we lose all interest in being great. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
144:God, have mercy on me in the blindness in which I hope I am seeking You! ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
145:In the end, no one can seek God unless he has already begun to find him. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
146:Zen insight is not our awareness, but Being's awareness of itself in us. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
147:Discretion tells us what God wants of us and what He does not want of us. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
148:from whose womb will come the last and greatest instrument of destruction. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
149:It is a terrible thing to think of the grace that is wasted in this world, ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
150:Life is not attained by reasoning and analysis but first of all by living. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
151:The closer we are to God, the closer we are to those who are close to him. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
152:We must slow down to a human tempo and we'll begin to have time to listen. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
153:We must slow down to a human tempo and we’ll begin to have time to listen. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
154:If a man is to live, he must be all alive, body, soul, mind, heart, spirit. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
155:If you found God with great ease, perhaps it's not God that you have found. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
156:Go into the desert not to escape other men but in order to find them in God. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
157:In the end, it's the reality of personal realtionships that save everything. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
158:The imagination should be allowed a certain amount of time to browse around. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
159:Wheels of fire, cosmic, rich, full-bodied honest victories over desperation. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
160:If we seek paradise outside ourselves, we cannot have paradise in our hearts. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
161:If you yourself are at peace, then there is at least some peace in the world. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
162:Laziness and cowardice are two of the greatest enemies of the spiritual life. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
163:Meditation is one of the ways in which the spiritual man keeps himself awake. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
164:While some men see ordinary happenings, others see divine light and guidance. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
165:... but any fool knows that you don't need money to get enjoyment out of life. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
166:Do not be one of those who, rather than risk failure, never attempts anything. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
167:Every other man is a piece of myself, for I am a part and a member of mankind. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
168:IT is not we who choose to awaken ourselves, but God Who chooses to awaken us. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
169:THE MONASTERY IS A SCHOOL—A SCHOOL IN WHICH WE learn from God how to be happy. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
170:Conscience is the light by which we interpret the will of God in our own lives. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
171:Gerçek anlamda derin düşünme; psikolojik bir hile değil, teolojik bir lütuftur. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
172:The very contradictions in my life are in some ways signs of God's mercy to me. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
173:To be ordinary is not a choice: It is the usual freedom of men without visions. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
174:Tu qui sedes in tenebris spe tua gaude: orta stella matutina, sol non tardabit. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
175:Contemplation is the loving sense of this life, this presence and this eternity. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
176:Duty does not have to be dull. Love can make it beautiful and fill it with life. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
177:In the spiritual life there is no such thing as an indifference to love or hate. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
178:We cannot see things in perspective until we cease to hug them to our own bosom. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
179:Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance, order, rhythm and harmony. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
180:How free you can become if you stop worrying about things that don’t concern you! ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
181:When we are strong, we are always much greater than the things that happen to us. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
182:Here is an unspeakable secret: paradise is all around us and we do not understand. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
183:Like all life, it grows sick and dies when it is uprooted from its proper element. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
184:Charity is without fear: having given all that it has, it has nothing left to lose. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
185:Every breath we draw is a gift of God's love; every moment of existence is a grace. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
186:... He is most glorified by those in whom His mercy has produced the greatest love. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
187:It can be said, without fear of error, that our meditation is as good as our faith. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
188:If you want to study the social and political history of modern nations, study hell. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
189:Solitude is a way to defend the spirit against the murderous din of our materialism. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
190:There is no greater disaster in the spiritual life than to be immersed in unreality, ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
191:We are obliged to love one another. We are not strictly bound to "like" one another. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
192:A man searching for enlightenment is like a man sitting on an Ass in search of an Ass ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
193:But true faith must be able to go on even when everything else is taken away from us. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
194:Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
195:Our whole life is a meditation of our last decision - the only decision that matters. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
196:There are ways that seem to men to be good, the end whereof is in the depths of hell. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
197:your eyes must turn, again and again, to the House that hides the Sacramental Christ! ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
198:Christ is born to us today, in order that he may appear to the whole world through us. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
199:God Himself begins to live in me not only as my Creator but as my other and true self. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
200:I think poetry must
I think it must
Stay open all night
In beautiful cellars. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
201:Reason is in fact the path to faith, and faith takes over when reason can say no more. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
202:To worship our false selves is to worship nothing. And the worship of nothing is hell. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
203:Because of their enmity you will be left alone. They will cast you out and forsake you. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
204:Every moment and every event of every man's life on earth plants something in his soul. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
205:God has brought me to Kentucky...the precise place he has chosen for my sanctification. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
206:Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance and order and rhythm and harmony. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
207:"Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
208:In our creation, God asked a question and in our truly living; God answers the question. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
209:The meaning of life is found in openness to being and "being present" in full awareness. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
210:There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
211:True solitude is the home of the person, false solitude the refuge of the individualist. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
212:Advertising treats all products with the reverence and the seriousness due to sacraments. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
213:As a matter of fact, it is often harder to manifest the good that is in us than the evil. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
214:Be human in this most inhuman of ages; guard the image of man for it is the image of God. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
215:The whole world is charged with the glory of God and I feel fire and music under my feet. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
216:But there is greater comfort in the substance of silence than in the answer to a question. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
217:Love not only prefers the good of another to my own, but it does not even compare the two. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
218:You are certainly one of the joys of life for all who have ever come within a mile of you. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
219:Your life is shaped by the end you live for. You are made in the image of what you desire. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
220:Finally, I am coming to the conclusion that my highest ambition is to be what I already am. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
221:People have no idea what one saint can do: for sanctity is stronger than the whole of hell. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
222:Solitude and silence teach me to love my brothers for what they are, not for what they say. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
223:Finally I am coming to the conclusion that my highest ambition is to be what I already I am. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
224:If Zen has any preference it is for glass that is plain, has no color, and is "just glass." ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
225:Our ideas of God tells us more about ourselves than about Him.” —THOMAS MERTON, CHRISTIAN MYSTIC ~ Pam Grout, #NFDB
226:The deepest need of our darkness is to comprehend the light which shines in the midst of it. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
227:The love of pleasure is destined by its very nature to defeat itself and end in frustration. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
228:Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.” — Thomas Merton ~ Christopher D Wallis, #NFDB
229:By faith we know God without seeing Him. By hope we possess God without feeling His presence. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
230:Gratitude therefore takes nothing for granted, is never unresponsive, is constantly awakening ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
231:I might as well add that I have enjoyed writing this book more than any other I can remember. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
232:my desire of argument and religious discussion implied a fundamental and utter lack of faith, ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
233:My mother was informing me, by mail, that she was about to die, and would never see me again. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
234:To find love I must enter into the sanctuary where it is hidden, which is the mystery of God. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
235:We must make the choices that enable us to fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
236:[Bells] speak to us of our freedom, which responsibilities and transient cares make us forget. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
237:Grains of error planted innocently in a well-kept greenhouse can become giant poisonous trees. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
238:I will not fear, for you are ever with me and you will never leave me to face my perils alone. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
239:Let us come alive to the splendor that is all around us and see the beauty in ordinary things. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
240:Love is free; it does not depend on the desirability of its object, but loves for love's sake. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
241:The peace produced by grace is a spiritual stability too deep for violence — it is unshakeable ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
242:There is not true intimacy between souls who do not know how to respect one another's solitude. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
243:I have learned that one cannot truly know hope unless he has found out how like despair hope is. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
244:True happiness is found in unselfish Love, A love which increases in proportion as it is shared. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
245:We must make the choices that enable us
to fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
246:A Christian is committed to the belief that Love and Mercy are the most powerful forces on earth. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
247:Actions are the doors and windows of being. Unless we act, we have no way of knowing what we are. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
248:I don’t even need to know precisely what I am doing, except that I am acting for the love of God. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
249:Gratitude takes nothing for granted, is never unresponsive, is constantly awakening to new wonder. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
250:Love is my true identity. Selflessness is my true self. Love is my true character. Love is my name. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
251:The integrity of an artist lifts a man above the level of the world without delivering him from it. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
252:There is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
253:Be good, keep your feet dry, your eyes open, your heart at peace and your soul in the joy of Christ. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
254:Prayer is not so much a way to find God as a way of resting in him...who loves us, who is near to us. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
255:The degradation of the sense of symbol in modern society is one of its many signs of spiritual decay. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
256:And that is why the man who wants to see clearly, before he will believe, never starts on the journey. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
257:How do you expect to arrive at the end of your own journey if you take the road to another man's city? ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
258:O love-why can't you leave me alone? Which is a rhetorical question meaning: for heaven's sake, don't. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
259:Our destiny is to live out what we think, because unless we live what we know, we do not even know it. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
260:What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we cannot cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
261:A life that is without problems may literally be more hopeless, than one that always verges on despair. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
262:A man knows when he has found his vocation when he stops thinking about how to live and begins to live. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
263:How do you expect to arrive at the end of your journey if you take the road to another man's city?(100) ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
264:If we have not silence, God is not heard in our music. If we have no rest God, does not bless our work. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
265:Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone we find it with another. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
266:Nothing has ever been said about God that hasn't already been said better by the wind in the pine trees. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
267:Technology is not in itself opposed to spirituality and to religion. But it presents a great temptation. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
268:There should be at least a room or some corner where no one will find you and disturb you or notice you. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
269:We have what we seek, it is there all the time, and if we give it time, it will make itself known to us. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
270:As regards your chestnuts: you are going to have three measures in the morning and four in the afternoon. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
271:Prayer and love are learned in the hour when prayer becomes impossible and the heart has turned to stone. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
272:The sky is my prayer, the birds are my prayer, the wind in the trees is my prayer, for God is all in all. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
273:Good moral actions are not enough. Everything in us, from the very depths, must be cleansed and reordered. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
274:I am seen by You under the sky, and my offenses have been forgotten by You--but I have not forgotten them. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
275:Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone - we find it with another. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
276:Everything that happens to the poor, the meek, the desolate, the mourners, the despised, happens to Christ. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
277:The religious answer is not really religious if it's not fully real. Evasion is the answer of superstition. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
278:Bonum est praestolari cum silentio salutare Dei. (“It is good to wait in silence for the salvation of God.”) ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
279:If we are to love sincerely, and with simplicity, we must first of all overcome the fear of not being loved. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
280:I see no contradiction between Buddhism and Christianity ... I intend to become as good a Buddhist as I can. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
281:It is when we insist most firmly on everyone else being "reasonable" that we become ourselves, unreasonable. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
282:PRAYER and love are really learned in the hour when prayer becomes impossible and your heart turns to stone. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
283:Prayer and love are really learned in the hour when prayer becomes impossible and your heart turns to stone. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
284:the humble man takes whatever there is in the world that helps him to find God and leaves the rest aside. He ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
285:The whole of life is to spiritualize our activities by humility and faith, to silence our nature by charity. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
286:You pray best when the mirror of your soul is empty of every image except the Image of the Invisible Father. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
287:Place no hope in the feeling of assurance, in spiritual comfort. You may well have to get along without this. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
288:As soon as one is conscious of the presence of the Master, one must, in all passivity, abandon the work to Him. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
289:Before we can see that created things (especially material) are unreal, we must see clearly that they are real. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
290:There is in all visible things an invisible fecundity, a dimmed light, a meek namelessness, a hidden wholeness. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
291:For although he is right with us and in and out of us and all through us, we have to go on journeys to find Him. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
292:I have always considered you to be about the best living writer we’ve got. MERTON TO EVELYN WAUGH AUGUST 2, 1948 ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
293:It is in deep solitude and silence that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brother and sister. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
294:The real reason why so few men believe in God is that they have ceased to believe that even a God can love them. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
295:For true humility is, in a way, a very real despair: despair of myself, in order that I may hope entirely in You. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
296:The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves and not to twist them to fit our own image. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
297:The madman runs to the East and his keeper runs to the East, both are running to the East. Their purposes differ. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
298:The proud man loves his own illusion and self-sufficiency. The spiritually poor man loves his very insufficiency. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
299:The simplest and most effective way to sanctity is to disappear into the background of ordinary everyday routine. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
300:The spiritual life is first of all a life. It is not merely something to be known and studied, it is to be lived. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
301:We have what we seek. It is there all the time, and if we give it time it will make itself known to us. —Thomas Merton ~ Ram Dass, #NFDB
302:"What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves?" ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
303:Why did Christ become Man if not to save men by uniting them mystically with God through His own Sacred Humanity? ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
304:A gentle sense of humor will be alert to detect anything that savors of a pious 'act' on the part of the penitent. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
305:I shall lead you through the loneliness, the solitude you will not understand; but it is my shortcut to your soul. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
306:There must be a time of day when the man who makes plans forgets his plans, and acts as if he had no plans at all. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
307:The simplest and most effective way to sanctity is to disappear into the background of ordinary every day routine. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
308:Violence is essentially wordless. and it can begin only where thought and rational communication have broken down. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
309:Ash Wednesday is full of joy...The source of all sorrow is the illusion that of ourselves we are anything but dust. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
310:May God prevent us from becoming "right-thinking men"-that is to say men who agree perfectly with their own police. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
311:People are in a hurry to magnify themselves by imitating what is popular- and too lazy to think of anything better. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
312:The center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
313:The light of truth burns without a flicker in the depths of a house that is shaken with storms of passion and fear. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
314:For although God is right with us and in us and out of us and all through us, we have to go on journeys to find him. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
315:Instead of worshipping God through His creation we are always trying to worship ourselves by means of creatures. But ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
316:The geographical pilgrimage is the symbolic acting out of an inner journey. THOMAS MERTON, Mystics and Zen Masters ~ Ian Morgan Cron, #NFDB
317:There is a subtle but inescapable connection between the "sacred" attitude and the acceptance of one's in most self. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
318:The truth never becomes clear as long as we assume that each one of us, individually, is the center of the universe. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
319:Finally I am coming to the conclusion that my highest ambition is to be what I already am. —Journal of Thomas Merton ~ Gretchen Rubin, #NFDB
320:Into this world, this demented inn
in which there is absolutely no room for him at all,
Christ comes uninvited. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
321:The mercy of God demands to be known and recognized and set apart from everything else and praised and adored in joy. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
322:If you want to have a spiritual life you must unify your life. A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
323:It is in the ordinary duties and labors of life that the Christian can and should develop his spiritual union with God. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
324:It takes heroic charity and humility to let others sustain us when we are absolutely incapable of sustaining ourselves. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
325:The greatest need of our time is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
326:When you reread your journal you find out that your newest discovery is something you already found out five years ago. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
327:How can I be sincere if I am constantly changing my mind to conform with the shadow of what I think others expect of me? ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
328:humble realization of our mysterious being as persons in whom God dwells, with infinite sweetness and inalienable power. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
329:I will never be able to find myself if I isolate myself from the rest of mankind as if I were a different kind of being. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
330:The grateful person knows that God is good, not by hearsay but by experience. And that is what makes all the difference. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
331:The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the other.... The whole purpose of life is to live by love. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
332:We have to have a deep, patient compassion for the fears of others and irrational mania of those who hate or condemn us. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
333:He who hopes in God trusts God, Whom he never sees, to bring him to the possession of things that are beyond imagination. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
334:In meditative prayer, one thinks and speaks not only with his mind and lips, but in a certain sense with his whole being. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
335:Thomas Merton puts it this way: “Life is shaped by the end you live for. You are made in the image of what you desire.”2 ~ David G Benner, #NFDB
336:Hence, too, the man who sins in spite of himself but does not love his sin, is not a sinner in the full sense of the word. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
337:I myself am part of the weather and part of the climate and part of the place … It is certainly part of my life of prayer. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
338:In our present attitude the natural world remains a commodity to be bought and sold, not a sacred reality to be venerated. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
339:It is when we love the other, the enemy, that we obtain from God the key to an understanding of who He is, and who we are. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
340:Only a man who works purely for God can at the same time do a very good job and leave the results of the job to God alone. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
341:our material riches unfortunately imply a spiritual, cultural, and moral poverty that are perhaps far greater than we see. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
342:The sacred attitude is, then, one of deep and fundamental respect for the real in whatever new form it may present itself. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
343:No one can find God without having first been found by Him. A monk is a man who seeks God because he has been found by God. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
344:The Christian life, and especially the contemplative life, is a continual discovery of Christ in new and unexpected places. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
345:The solution of the problem of life is life itself. Life is not attained by reason and analysis but first of all by living. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
346:In the devil's theology, the important thing is to be absolutely right and to prove that everybody else is absolutely wrong. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
347:MANY poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
348:Our happiness consists in sharing the happiness of God, the perfection of His unlimited freedom, the perfection of His love. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
349:Our knowledge of God is perfected by gratiitude: we are thankful and rejoice in the experience of the truth that He is love. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
350:Fear narrows the little entrance of our heart. It shrinks up our capacity to love. It freezes up our power to give ourselves. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
351:The Holy Spirit is the most perfect gift of the Father to men, and yet He is the one gift which the Father gives most easily. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
352:For perfect hope is achieved on the brink of despair, when instead of falling over the edge, we find ourselves walking on air. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
353:Prayer is an expression of who we are...We are a living incompleteness. We are a gap, an emptiness that calls for fulfillment. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
354:Spread abroad the name of Jesus in humility and with a meek heart; show him your feebleness, and he will become your strength. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
355:When you expect the world to end at any moment, you know there is no need to hurry. You take your time, you do your work well. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
356:For our duties and our needs, in all the fundamental things for which we were created, come down in practice to the same thing. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
357:For the ones who are called saints by human opinion on earth may very well be devils, and their light may very well be darkness ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
358:May we all grow in grace and peace and not neglect the silence that is printed in the center of our being. It will not fail us. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
359:The deepest of level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless ... beyond speech ... beyond concept. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
360:To be an acorn is to have a taste for being an oak tree. Habitual grace brings with it all the Christian virtues in their seed. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
361:To consider persons and events and situations only in the light of their effect upon myself is to live on the doorstep of hell. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
362:Contemplative living is living in true relationship with oneself, God, others and nature, free of the illusions of separateness. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
363:Just remaining quietly in the presence of God, listening to Him, being attentive to Him, requires a lot of courage and know-how. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
364:Real self-conquest is the conquest of ourselves not by ourselves but by the Holy Spirit. Self-conquest is really self-surrender. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
365:Art is not an end in itself. It introduces the soul into a higher spiritual order, which it expresses and in some sense explains. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
366:It often happens, as a matter of fact, that so called “pious souls” take their “spiritual life” with a wrong kind of seriousness. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
367:...love triumphs, at least in this life, not by eliminating evil once for all, but by resisting and overcoming it anew every day. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
368:Without courage we can never attain to true simplicity. Cowardice keeps us “double minded” —hesitating between the world and God. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
369:Hope deprives us of everything that is not God, in order that all things may serve their true purpose as means to bring us to God. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
370:Love is my true identity. Selflessness is my true self. Love is my true character. Love is my name. ~ Thomas Merton, Seeds of Contemplation (1949), #NFDB
371:One might say I have decided to marry the silence of the forest. The sweet dark warmth of the whole world will have to be my wife. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
372:The truth that many people never understand until it is too late is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
373:Each individual Christian and each new age of the Church has to make this rediscovery, this return to the source of Christian life. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
374:The climate of this prayer is, then, one of awareness, gratitude and a totally obedient love which seeks nothing but to please God. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
375:The real hope is not in something we think we can do, but in God, who is making something good out of it in some way we cannot see. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
376:Today the artist has inherited the combined functions of hermit, pilgrim, prophet, priest, shaman, sorcerer, soothsayer, alchemist. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
377:We only know Him in so far as we are known by Him, and our contemplation of Him is a participation in His contemplation of Himself. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
378:How crazy it is to be “yourself” by trying to live up to an image of yourself you have unconsciously created in the minds of others. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
379:Perhaps the book of life, in the end, is the book of what one has lived and if one has lived nothing, he is not in the book of life. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
380:We do not want to be beginners. But let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything else but beginners, all our life! ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
381:Show us your Christ, Lady, after this our exile, yes: but show Him to us also now, show Him to us here, while we are still wanderers. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
382:Sincerity must be bought at a price: the humility to recognize our innumerable errors, and fidelity in tirelessly setting them right. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
383:We refuse love, and reject society, in so far as it seems, in our own perverse imagination, to imply some obscure kind of humiliation ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
384:Ask me not where I live or what I like to eat . . . Ask me what I am living for and what I think is keeping me from living fully that. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
385:The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
386:Those who imagine that they can discover special gimmicks and put them to work for themselves usually ignore God’s will and his grace. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
387:For he who knows does not speak, He who speaks does not know” (12) And “The Wise Man gives instruction Without the use of speech.” (13) ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
388:Our minds are like crows. They pick up everything that glitters, no matter how uncomfortable our nests get with all that metal in them. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
389:God utters me like a word containing a partial thought of Himself. A word will never be able to comprehend the voice that utters it. But ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
390:Thomas Merton. A Year with Thomas Merton: Daily Meditations from His Journals, Thomas Merton, Jonathan Montaldo. HarperCollins: New York, ~ Stephen Cope, #NFDB
391:We have what we seek. We don't have to rush after it. It was there all the time, and if we give it time it will make itself known to us. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
392:Zen is consciousness unstructured by particular form or particular system, a trans-cultural, trans-religious, transformed consciousness. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
393:The fact remains that we are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the wind, and join in the general Dance. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
394:True simplicity implies love and trust—it does not expect to be derided and rejected, any more than it expects to be admired and praised. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
395:For each one of us, there is only one thing necessary: to fulfill our own destiny, according to God's will, to be what God wants us to be. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
396:Humility sets us free to do what is really good, by showing us our illusions and withdrawing our will from what was only an apparent good. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
397:I will no longer wound myself with the thoughts and questions that have surrounded me like thorns: that is a penance You do not ask of me. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
398:I cannot make the universe obey me. I cannot make other people conform to my own whims and fancies. I cannot make even my own body obey me. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
399:Ultimately the only way that I can be myself is to become identified with Him in Whom is hidden the reason and fulfillment of my existence. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
400:We do not want to be beginners [at prayer]. but let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything but beginners, all our life! ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
401:They knew a good building would praise God better than a bad one, even if the bad one were covered all over with official symbols of praise. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
402:Jesus lived and died in vain if He did not teach us to regulate the whole of life by the eternal law of love. Gandhi, quoted in Merton, p. 38 ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
403:The only right way: to love and serve the man of the modern world, but not simply to succumb, with him, to all his illusions about the world. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
404:they are still satisfied with the old clichés about “life-denying Buddhism,” “selfish navel-gazing,” and Nirvana as a sort of drugged trance. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
405:First, the desert is the country of madness. Second, it is the refuge of the devil, thrown out into the “wilderness of upper Egypt” to “wander ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
406:Above all, enter into the Church’s liturgy and make the liturgical cycle part of your life—let its rhythm work its way into your body and soul. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
407:But if you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I think I am living for. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
408:No writing on the solitary, meditative dimensions of life can say anything that has not already been said better by the wind in the pine trees. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
409:On Pride: This sickness is most dangerous when it succeeds in looking like humility. When a proud man thinks he is humble his case is hopeless. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
410:The artistic experience, at its highest, was actually a natural analogue of mystical experience. It produced a kind of intuitive of perception. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
411:In humility is the greatest freedom. As long as you have to defend the imaginary self that you think is important, you lose your peace of heart. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
412:Love is not a mere emotion or sentiment. It is the lucid and ardent responses of the whole person to a value that is revealed to him as perfect. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
413:Make ready for the Christ, whose smile like lightning, sets free the song of everlasting glory that now sleeps—in your paper flesh. Thomas Merton ~ Richard Rohr, #NFDB
414:The Breviary was hard to learn, and every step was labor and confusion, not to mention the mistakes and perplexities I got myself into. However, ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
415:The peculiar grace of a Shaker chair is due to the fact that it was made by someone capable of believing that an angel might come and sit on it. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
416:The peculiar grace of a shaker chair is due to the fact that it was made by someone capable of believing that an angel might come and sit on it. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
417:The truth that many people never understand until it is too late is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer. — Thomas Merton ~ Joanna Macy, #NFDB
418:Where self-interest is the bond, The friendship is dissolved When calamity comes. Where Tao is the bond, Friendship is made perfect By calamity. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
419:All theology is a kind of birthday
Each one who is born
Comes into the world as a question
For which old answers
Are not sufficient… ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
420:Every man has a vocation to be someone: but he must understand clearly that in order to fulfill this vocation he can only be one person: himself. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
421:It is by desiring to grow in love that we receive the Holy Spirit, and the thirst for more charity is the effect of this more abundant reception. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
422:The man who sweats under his mask, whose role makes him itch with discomfort, who hates the division in himself, is already beginning to be free. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
423:To see how seriously men take things and yet how little their seriousness profits them. Their tragedy makes our mediocrity all the more terrible. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
424:The greatest temptations are not those that solicit our consent to obvious sin, but those that offer us great evils masking as the greatest goods. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
425:To praise the contemplative life is not to reject every other form of life, but to seek a solid foundation for every other human striving. Without ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
426:And men are so poor in intellect that a few cold chills down their spine will be enough to keep them from ever finding out the truth about anything ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
427:IF you want to renounce resentment you have to renounce the shadow self that feels itself menaced by the confusion without which it cannot subsist. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
428:Life is not accomplishing some special work but attaining to a degree of consciousness and inner freedom which is beyond all works and attainments. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
429:The humble man begs for a share in what everybody else has received. He too desires to be filled to overflowing with the kindness and mercy of God. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
430:The truly sacred attitude toward life is in no sense an escape from the sense of nothingness that assails us when we are left alone with ourselves. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
431:My life is a listening, His is a speaking. My salvation is to hear and respond. For this, my life must be silent. Hence, my silence is my salvation. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
432:We are not converted only once in our lives but many times and this endless series of conversions and inner revolutions leads to our transformation. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
433:But the pride of those who live as if they believed they were better than anyone else is rooted in a secret failure to believe in their own goodness. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
434:Great though books may be, friends though they may be to us, they are no substitute for persons, they are only means of contact with great persons... ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
435:Man is not at peace with his fellow man because he is not at peace with himself. He is not at peace with himself because he is not at peace with God. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
436:Others can give you a name or a number, but they can never tell you who you really are. That is something you yourself can only discover from within. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
437:Our sorry idiot life, our idiot existence, idiot not because it has to be but because it is not what it could be with a little more courage and care. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
438:When solitude was a problem, I had no solitude. When it ceased to be a problem I found I already possessed it, and could have possessed it all along. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
439:Be still: There is no longer any need of comment. It was a lucky wind That blew away his halo with his cares, A lucky sea that drowned his reputation. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
440:If there was no other proof of the infinite patience of God, a very good one could be found in His toleration of the pictures that are painted of Him. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
441:I have only one desire, and that is the desire for solitude-to disappear into God, to be submerged in His peace, to be lost in the secret of His Face. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
442:In all spiritualities there is a contrast between the affective or13 devotional (bhakti) and the intellectual, anoetic type of experience (raja yoga). ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
443:must become convinced and penetrated by the realization that without my love for them they may perhaps not achieve the things God has willed for them. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
444:Stop asking yourself questions that have no meaning. Or if they have, you'll find out when you need to -- find out both the questions and the answers. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
445:The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men! ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
446:We stumble and fall constantly even when we are most enlightened. But when we are in true spiritual darkness, we do not even know that we have fallen. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
447:He was a very good gardener, understood flowers, and knew how to make things grow. What is more, he liked this kind of work almost as much as painting. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
448:I am earth, earth My heart's love Bursts with hay and flowers. I am a lake of blue air In which my own appointed place Field and valley Stand reflected ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
449:I think it was Thomas Merton who said that the easiest way to rid yourself of neurosis is to surround yourself with nature, or more specifically trees. ~ Joan Anderson, #NFDB
450:We are not at peace with others because we are not at peace with ourselves, and we are not at peace with ourselves because we are not at peace with God ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
451:In reality the monk abandons the world only in order to listen more intently to the deepest and most neglected voices that proceed from its inner depth. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
452:It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes many terrible mistakes. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
453:Now anxiety is the mark of spiritual insecurity. It is the fruit of unanswered questions. But questions cannot go unanswered unless they first be asked. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
454:Self-conquest is really self-surrender. Yet before we can surrender ourselves we must become ourselves. For no one can give up what he does not possess. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
455:A happiness that is sought for ourselves alone can never be found: for a happiness that is diminished by being shared is not big enough to make us happy. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
456:In a world of noise, confusion and conflict it is necessary that there be places of silence, inner discipline and peace. In such places love can blossom. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
457:Nevertheless, every day love corners me somewhere and surrounds me with peace without my having to look very far or very hard or do anything special. God ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
458:One opens the inner doors of one's heart to the infinite silences of the Spirit, out of whose abysses love wells up without fail and gives itself to all. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
459:This time is given to me by God that I may live in it. It is not given to make something out of it, but given me to be stored away in eternity as my own. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
460:We cannot possess the truth fully until it has entered into the very substance of our life by good habits, and by a certain perfection of moral activity. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
461:What we venerate in the Saints, beyond and above all that we know is this secret; the mystery of an innocence and of an identity perfectly hidden in God. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
462:But if we love God for something less than Himself, we cherish a desire that can fail us. We run the risk of hating Him if we do not get what we hope for. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
463:I am happy that I can at least want to love God. Perhaps that is all I’ve got, but it is already all that is essential. And He will take care of the rest. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
464:Love in fact is the spiritual life, and without it all the other exercises of the spirit, however lofty, are emptied of content and become mere illusions. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
465:To be grateful is to recognize the love of God in everything He has given us — and He has given us everything. Every breath we draw is a gift of His love. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
466:By “prayer of the heart” we seek God himself present in the depths of our being and meet him there by invoking the name of Jesus in faith, wonder and love. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
467:Even the darkest moments of the liturgy are filled with joy, and Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the lenten fast, is a day of happiness, a Christian feast. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
468:I must become convinced and penetrated by the realization that without my love for them they may perhaps not achieve the things God has willed for them. My ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
469:It is not possible to be intimate with more than very few, because there are only very few in the world with whom we have practically everything in common. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
470:People may spend their whole lives climbing the ladder of success only to find, once they reach the top, that the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
471:This, then, is our desert: to live facing despair, but not to consent. To trample it down under hope in the Cross. To wage war against despair unceasingly. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
472:Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, wrote that nothing can be expressed about solitude "that has not already been said better by the wind in the pine trees. ~ Michael Finkel, #NFDB
473:Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, wrote that nothing can be expressed about solitude “that has not already been said better by the wind in the pine trees. ~ Michael Finkel, #NFDB
474:Frenzy destroys our inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
475:It is true that we are called to create a better world. But we are first of all called to a more immediate and exalted task: that of creating our own lives. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
476:The humble person receives praise the way a clean window takes the light of the sun. The truer and more intense the light is, the less you see of the glass. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
477:To love blindly is to love selfishly, because the goal of such love is not the real advantage of the beloved but only the exercise of love in our own souls. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
478:by which the devil uses our philosophies to turn our whole nature inside out, and eviscerate all our capacities for good, turning them against ourselves. All ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
479:A tree gives glory to God by being a tree. For in being what God means it to be it is obeying Him.... The more a tree is like itself, the more it is like Him. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
480:Everybody has an instinctive desire to do good things and avoid evil. But that desire is sterile as long as we have no experience of what it means to be good. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
481:For it seems to me that the first responsibility of a man of faith is to make his faith really part of his own life, not by rationalizing it but by living it. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
482:Possibly, what is required of some of us, and chiefly of me, is a solitary and personal response in the form of nonacquiescence, but quiet, definite and pure. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
483:The cause of liberty becomes a mockery if the price to be paid is the wholesale destruction of those who are to enjoy liberty. Ghandi, quoted in Merton, p. 68 ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
484:There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist fighting for peace by nonviolent methods most easily succumbs; activism and overwork. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
485:To love our nothingness we must love everything in us that the proud man loves when he loves himself. But we must love it all for exactly the opposite reason. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
486:Love seeks one thing only: the good of the one loved. It leaves all the other secondary effects to take care of themselves. Love, therefore, is its own reward. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
487:One of the strange laws of the contemplative life is that in it you do not sit down and solve problems: you bear with them until they somehow solve themselves. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
488:The surest sign that we have received a spiritual understanding of God’s love for us is the appreciation of our own poverty in the light of His infinite mercy. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
489:What is the use of praying if at the very moment of prayer, we have so little confidence in God that we are busy planning our own kind of answer to our prayer? ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
490:Music is pleasing not only because of the sound but because of the silence that is in it: without the alternation of sound and silence there would be no rhythm. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
491:Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false Self. We are not very good at recognizing illusions, least of all the ones we cherish about ourselves. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
492:I can depend less and less on my own power and sense of direction...It is so strange to advance backwards and get where you are going in a totally unexpected way ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
493:Modern man believes he is fruitful and productive when his ego is aggressively affirmed, when he is visibly active, and when his action produces obvious results. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
494:That is God's call to us - simply to be people who are content to live close to him and to renew the kind of life in which the closeness is felt and experienced. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
495:The whole aim of Zen is not to make foolproof statements about experience, but to come to direct grips with reality without the mediation of logical verbalizing. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
496:This is the crucifixion of Christ: in which He dies again and again in the individuals who were made to share the joy and freedom of His grace, and who deny Him. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
497:A humble man is not afraid of failure. In fact, he is not afraid of anything, even himself, since perfect humility implies perfect confidence in the power of God. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
498:A man becomes a saint not by conviction that he is better than sinners but by the realization that he is one of them, and that all together need the mercy of God! ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
499:And the deepest level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless. it is beyond words, and it is beyond speech, and it is beyond concept. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
500:Be still:
There is no longer any need of comment.
It was a lucky wind
That blew away his halo with his cares,
A lucky sea that drowned his reputation. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
501:For love does not seek a joy that follows from its effect: its joy is in the effect itself, which is the good of the beloved...love, therefore, is its own reward. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
502:Monastic prayer begins not so much with “considerations” as with a “return to the heart,” finding one’s deepest center, awakening the profound depths of our being ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
503:One came out of the church with a kind of comfortable and satisfied feeling that something had been done that needed to be done, and that was all I knew about it. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
504:The reality of a person is a deep and hidden thing, buried not only in the invisible recesses of man’s own metaphysical secrecy but in the secrecy of God Himself. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
505:To really know our 'nothingness' we must also love it. And we cannot love it unless we see that it is good. And we cannot see that it is good unless we accept it. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
506:To really know our “nothingness” we must also love it. And we cannot love it unless we see that it is good. And we cannot see that it is good unless we accept it. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
507:We must be true inside, true to ourselves, before we can know a truth that is outside us. But we make ourselves true inside by manifesting the truth as we see it. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
508:We will to separate ourselves from that love. We reject it entirely and absolutely, and will not acknowledge it, simply because it does not please us to be loved. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
509:Before we can realize who we really are, we must become conscious of the fact that the person we think we are, here and now, is at best an impostor and a stranger. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
510:October is a fine and dangerous season in America. a wonderful time to begin anything at all. You go to college, and every course in the catalogue looks wonderful. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
511:There is in every intellect a natural exigency for a true concept of God: we are born with the thirst to know and to see Him, and therefore it cannot be otherwise. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
512:they should learn to love Him in the wilderness and that they should always look back upon the time in the desert as the idyllic time of their life with Him alone. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
513:The evil in the world is all of our own making, and it proceeds entirely from our ruthless, senseless, wasteful, destructive, and suicidal neglect of our own being. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
514:This implies that all truly serious and spiritual forms of religion aspire at least implicitly to a contemplative awakening both of the individual and of the group. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
515:Our vocation is not simply to be, but to work together with God in the creation of our own life, our own identity, our own destiny.… To work out our identity in God. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
516:We enter into possession of God when He invades all our faculties with His light and His infinite fire. We do not “possess” Him until He takes full possession of us. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
517:My dear brothers and sisters, we are already one. But we imagine that we are not. So what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
518:My God, I pray better to you by breathing and walking than by talking, just as in choir I sing best when I am thinking about something else, or better still, praying. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
519:Our vocation is not simply to be, but to work together with God in the creation of our own life, our own identity, our own destiny....To work out our identity in God. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
520:Solitude is not something you must hope for in the future. Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present you will never find it. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
521:At Cincinnati, where we arrived about dawn, I asked the Traveller’s Aid girl the name of some Catholic churches, and got in a taxi to go to St. Francis Xavier’s, where ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
522:Hope deprives us of everything that is not God, in order that all things may serve their true purpose as means to bring us to God. Hope is proportionate to detachment. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
523:They went into the desert not to study speculative truth, but to wrestle with practical evil; not to perfect their analytical intelligence, but to purify their hearts. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
524:For me to be a saint means to be myself. Therefore the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and of discovering my true self. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
525:I will give them a heart to understand that I am Yahweh, and they shall be my people and I will be their God when they return to me with all their heart. —JEREMIAH 24:7 ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
526:We cannot love ourselves unless we love others, and we cannot love others unless we love ourselves. But a selfish love of ourselves makes us incapable of loving others. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
527:I am earth, earth
My heart's love
Bursts with hay and flowers.
I am a lake of blue air
In which my own appointed place
Field and valley
Stand reflected ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
528:Saints are what they are not because their sanctity makes them admirable to others, but because the gift of sainthood makes it possible for them to admire everyone else. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
529:Christians are now wide open to Asian religions, ready, in the words of Vatican II, to “acknowledge, preserve and promote the spiritual and moral goods” found among them. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
530:How deluded we sometimes are by the clear notions we get out of books. They make us think that we really understand things of which we have no practical knowledge at all. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
531:The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
532:The first step toward finding God--who is truth--is to discover the truth about myself; and if I have been in error, this first step to truth is the discovery of my error ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
533:The more we are content with our own poverty, the closer we are to God, for then we accept our poverty in peace, expecting nothing from ourselves and everything from God. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
534:Books that speak like God speak with too much authority to entertain us. Those that speak like good men hold us by their human charm; we grow by finding ourselves in them. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
535:Indeed, it is a kind of quintessence of pride to hate and fear even the kind and legitimate approval of those who love us! I mean, to resent it as a humiliating patronage. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
536:It is my belief, that we should not be too sure of having found Christ in ourselves until we have found him also in that part of humanity that is most remote from our own. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
537:The first step toward finding God, Who is Truth, is to discover the truth about myself: and if I have been in error, this first step to truth is the discovery of my error. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
538:If we enter into ourselves, find our true self, and then pass beyond the inner "I", we sail forth into the immense darkness in which we confront the "I AM" of the Almighty. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
539:Hence the sacred attitude is one which does not recoil from our own inner emptiness, but rather penetrates into it with awe and reverence, and with the awareness of mystery. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
540:True contemplation is not a psychological trick but a theological grace. It can come to us ONLY as a gift, and not as a result of our own clever use of spiritual techniques. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
541:We are not capable of union with one another on the deepest level until the inner self in each one of us is sufficiently awakened to confront the inmost spirit of the other. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
542:For if I am to love truly and freely, I must be able to give something that is truly my own to another. If my heart does not first belong to me, how can I give it to another? ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
543:One of the moral diseases we communicate to one another in society comes from huddling together in the pale light of an insufficient answer to a question we are afraid to ask. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
544:True happiness is not found in any other reward than that of being united with God. If I seek some other reward besides God Himself, I may get my reward but I cannot be happy. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
545:A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all. No man can serve two masters. Your life is shaped by the end you live for. You are made in the image of what you desire. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
546:Our five sense are dulled by inordinate pleasure. Penance makes them keen, gives them back their natural vitality, and more. Penance clears the eye of conscience and of reason. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
547:The life of the spirit, by integrating us in the real order established by God, puts us in the fullest possible contact with reality--not as we imagine it, but as it really is. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
548:The man who lives in division is living in death. He cannot find himself because he is lost; he has ceased to be a reality. The person he believes himself to be is a bad dream. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
549:The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another, and all involved in one another. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
550:Not all of us are called to be hermits, but all of us need enough silence and solitude in our lives to enable the deeper voice of our own self to be heard at least occasionally. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
551:Nu putem fi în relații de pace cu alţii pentru că nu suntem în relaţii de pace cu noi înşine, şi nu putem fi în relaţii de pace cu noi înşine pentru că nu avem pace cu Dumnezeu. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
552:St. Augustine adds that God has taught us to praise Him, in the Psalms, not in order that He may get something out of this praise, but in order that we may be made better by it. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
553:These too are integral elements in personality and therefore in sanctity—because a saint is one whom God’s love has fully developed into a person in the likeness of his Creator. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
554:We live on the brink of disaster because we do not know how to let life alone. We do not respect the living and fruitful contradictions and paradoxes of which true life is full. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
555:The art of our time, sacred art included, will necessarily be characterized by a certain poverty, grimness and roughness which correspond to the violent realities of a cruel age. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
556:The pale flowers of the dogwood outside this window are saints. The little yellow flowers that nobody notices on the edge of that road are saints looking up into the face of God. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
557:There were only a few shepherds at the first Bethlehem. The ox and the donkey understood more of the first Christmas than the high priests in Jerusalem. And it is the same today. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
558:To Serve the God of Love one must be free, one must face the terrible responsibility of the decision to love in spite of all unworthiness whether in oneself or in one's neighbor. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
559:To serve the God of Love one must be free, one must face the terrible responsibility of the decision to love in spite of all unworthiness whether in oneself or in one’s neighbor. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
560:What every man looks for in life is his own salvation and the salvation of the men he lives with. By salvation I mean first of all the full discovery of who he himself really is. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
561:All temperaments can serve as the material for ruin or for salvation. We must learn to see that our temperament is a gift of God, a talent with which we must trade until He comes. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
562:If these seeds would take root in my liberty, and if His will would grow from my freedom, I would become the love that He is, and my harvest would be His glory and my own joy. And ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
563:It is as if in creating us God asked a question, and in awakening us to contemplation He answered the question, so that the contemplative is at the same time, question and answer. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
564:Let me rest in Your will and be silent. Then the light of Your joy will warm my life. Its fire will burn in my heart and shine for Your glory. This is what I live for. Amen, amen. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
565:The selfishness of an age that has devoted itself to the mere cult of pleasure has tainted the whole human race with an error that makes all our acts more or less lies against God. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
566:To give my freedom blindly to a being equal to or inferior to myself is to degrade myself and throw away my freedom. I can only become perfectly free by serving the will of God. If ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
567:When I pray for peace, I pray not only that the enemies of my own country may cease to want war, but above all that my country will cease to do the things that make war inevitable. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
568:Discipline is most important, and without it no serious meditation will ever be possible. But it should be one’s own discipline, not a routine mechanically imposed from the outside. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
569:Grace is not a strange, magic substance which is subtly filtered into our souls to act as a kind of spiritual penicillin. Grace is unity, oneness within ourselves, oneness with God. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
570:Life is this simple: we are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and the divine is shining through it all the time. This is not just a nice story or a fable, it is true. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
571:Some men turn away from all this cheap emotion with a kind of heroic despair…But this too can be an error. For if our emotions really die in the desert, our humanity dies with them. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
572:We know by fresh discovery, the deep reality that is our concrete existence here and now and in the depths of that reality we receive from the Father light, truth, wisdom and peace. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
573:But precisely this illusion that everything is "clear" is what is blinding us all. It is a serious temptation, and it is a subtle form of pride and worldly love of power and revenge. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
574:The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
575:The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise, we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
576:Power is made perfect in infirmity, and our very helplessness is all the more potent a claim on that Divine Mercy Who calls to Himself the poor, the little ones, the heavily burdened. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
577:Souls are like athletes, that need opponents worthy of them, if they are to be tried and extended and pushed to the full use of their powers, and rewarded according to their capacity. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
578:This, then, is our desert: to live facing despair, but not to consent. To trample it down under hope in the Cross. To wage war against despair unceasingly. That war is our wilderness. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
579:Oh, America, how I began to love your country! What miles of silences God has made in you for contemplation! If only people realized what all your mountains and forests are really for! ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
580:say all sin is a punishment for ingratitude. For as St. Paul says (Romans 1:21), the Gentiles, who “knew” God, did not know Him because they were not grateful for the knowledge of Him. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
581:Contemplation is the awareness and realization, even in some sense experience, of what each Christian obscurely believes: “It is now no longer I that live but Christ lives in me.” Hence ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
582:The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to... fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
583:The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another and all involved in one another. —THOMAS MERTON ~ Jon Katz, #NFDB
584:There is no greater disaster in the spiritual life than to be immersed in unreality, for life is maintained and nourished in us by our vital relation with realities outside and above us. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
585:We are not meant to resolve all contradictions but to live with them and rise above them and see them in the light of exterior and objective values which make them trivial by comparison. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
586:I could recognize that those who thought about God had a good way of considering Him, and that those who believed in Him really believed in someone, and their faith was more than a dream. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
587:If we want to be spiritual, then, let us first of all live our lives. Let us not fear the responsibilities and the inevitable distractions of the work appointed for us by the will of God. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
588:I will have more joy in heaven and in the contemplation of God, if you are also there to share it with me; and the more of us there will be to share it the greater will be the joy of all. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
589:Ours is a time of anxiety because we have willed it to be so. Our anxiety is not imposed on us by force from outside. We impose it on our world and upon one another from within ourselves. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
590:So the man who wanders into the desert to be himself must take care that he does not go mad and become the servant of the one who dwells there in a sterile paradise of emptiness and rage. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
591:To be alone by being part of the universe-fitting in completely to an environment of woods and silence and peace. Everything you do becomes a unity and a prayer. Unity within and without. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
592:The distinctive characteristic of religious meditation is that it is a search for truth which springs from love and which seeks to possess the truth not only by knowledge but also by love. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
593:Ultimately faith is the only key to the universe. The final meaning of human existence, and the answers to the questions on which all our happiness depends cannot be found in any other way. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
594:In an age where there is much talk about "being yourself," I reserve to myself the right to forget about being myself, since in any case there is very little chance of my being anybody else. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
595:Love is not a matter of getting what you want. Quite the contrary. The insistence on always having what you want, on always being satisfied, on always being fulfilled, makes love impossible. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
596:ON THE LAST DAY OF JANUARY 1915, UNDER THE SIGN OF the Water Bearer, in a year of a great war, and down in the shadow of some French mountains on the borders of Spain, I came into the world. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
597:So much depends on our idea of God! Yet no idea of Him, however pure and perfect, is adequate to express Him as He really is. Our idea of God tells us more about ourselves than about Him. We ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
598:The humble man also loves himself, and seeks to be loved and honored, not because love and honor are due to him but because they are not due to him. He seeks to be loved by the mercy of God. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
599:To be grateful is to recognize the Love of God in everything He has given us—and He has given us everything. Every breath we draw is a gift of His love, every moment of existence is a grace, ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
600:What do you want to want to be, anyway?" "I don't know; I guess what I want to be is a good Catholic." "What you should say"--he told me--"what you should say is that you want to be a saint. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
601:Misplaced effort in the spiritual life often consists in stubbornly insisting upon compulsive routines which seem to us to be necessary because they accord with our own short-sighted notions. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
602:something to be attained by special virtuous techniques, the less real it becomes. As it becomes less real, it recedes further into the distance of abstraction, futurity, unattainability. The ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
603:To become attached to the experience of peace is to threaten the true and essential and vital union of our soul with God above sense and experience in the darkness of a pure and perfect love. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
604:You and I and all men were made to find our identity in the One Mystical Christ, in Whom we all complete one another “unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the age of the fulness of Christ. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
605:And I tell you there is a power that goes forth from that Sacrament, a power of light and truth, even into the hearts of those who have heard nothing of Him and seem to be incapable of belief. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
606:For pride, which is the inordinate attribution of goods and values and glories to one's own contingent self, cannot exist where there is no contingent self to which anything can be attributed. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
607:It was because the saints were absorbed in God that they were truly capable of seeing and appreciating created things and it was because they loved Him alone that they alone loved everybody. S ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
608:Life is this simple: we are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and the divine is shining through it all the time. This is not just a nice story or a fable, it is true. THOMAS MERTON ~ Adyashanti, #NFDB
609:Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actuallly doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
610:Thomas Merton wrote, “For me to be a saint means to be myself. Therefore the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and of discovering my true self. ~ Ian Morgan Cron, #NFDB
611:When a hideous man becomes a father And a son is born to him In the middle of the night He trembles and lights a lamp And runs to look in anguish On that child’s face To see whom he resembles. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
612:Do not be too quick to condemn the man who no longer believes in God: for it is perhaps your own coldness and avarice and mediocrity and materialism and selfishness that have chilled his faith. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
613:He who is controlled by objects Loses possession of his inner self: If he no longer values himself, How can he value others? If he no longer values others, He is abandoned. He has nothing left! ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
614:Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
615:The greatest politeness Is free of all formality. Perfect conduct Is free of concern. Perfect wisdom Is unplanned. Perfect love Is without demonstrations. Perfect sincerity offers No guarantee. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
616:Death is someone you see very clearly with eyes in the center of your heart: eyes that see not by reacting to light, but by reacting to a kind of a chill from within the marrow of your own life. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
617:It is God’s love that speaks to me in the birds and streams; but also behind the clamor of the city God speaks to me in His judgments, and all these things are seeds sent to me from His will. If ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
618:One of the strange laws of the contemplative life is that in it you do not sit down and solve problems: you bear with them until they somehow solve themselves. Or until life solves them for you. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
619:The only influence that can really upset the injustice and iniquity of men is the power that breathes in the Christian tradition, renewing our participation in the Life that is the Light of men. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
620:One of the first things to learn if you want to be a contemplative is to mind your own business. Nothing is more suspicious, in a man who seems holy, than an impatient desire to reform other men. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
621:Since I know only a few Chinese characters, I obviously am not a translator. These “readings” are then not attempts at faithful reproduction but ventures in personal and spiritual interpretation. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
622:The logic of the poet - that is, the logic of language or the experience itself - develops the way a living organism grows: it spreads out towards what it loves, and is heliotropic, like a plant. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
623:The man who is able to hate strongly and with a quiet conscience is one who is complacently blind to all unworthiness in himself and serenely capable of seeing all his own wrongs in someone else. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
624:We do not see God in contemplation - we know Him by love: for his pure love and when we taste the experience of loving God for his own sake alone, we know by experience who and what he is. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
625:ANOTHER characteristic of the devil’s moral theology is the exaggeration of all distinctions between this and that, good and evil, right and wrong. These distinctions become irreducible divisions. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
626:Despair is the absolute extreme of self-love. It is reached when a person deliberately turns his back on all help from anyone else in order to taste the rotten luxury of knowing himself to be lost ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
627:If we do not respond to human affection we cannot be loved by God in the way in which He has willed to love us—with the Heart of the Man, Jesus Who is God, the Son of God, and the anointed Christ. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
628:The artist should preach nothing-not even his own autonomy. His art should speak its own truth, and in so doing it will be in harmony with every other kind of truth- moral, metaphysical, mystical. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
629:Thomas Merton, the American monk, pointed out that we may spend our whole life climbing the ladder of success, only to find when we get to the top that our ladder is leaning against the wrong wall. ~ Richard Rohr, #NFDB
630:What do you want to want to be, anyway?"
"I don't know; I guess what I want to be is a good Catholic."
"What you should say"--he told me--"what you should say is that you want to be a saint. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
631:All things are yours and you are Christ’s—and Christ is God’s. If we live, we live unto God. If we die, we die unto God—whether we live or die, we are God’s possession.” What more could anyone ask? ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
632:In meditative prayer, one thinks and speaks not only with the mind and lips, but in a certain sense with one's whole being... All good meditative prayer is a conversation of our entire self to God. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
633:But if we love ourselves in the wrong way, we become incapable of loving anybody else. And indeed when we love ourselves wrongly we hate ourselves; if we hate ourselves we cannot help hating others. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
634:But the love that ends with either suffering or death is not worth the trouble it gives us. And if it must dread death and all suffering, it will inevitably bring us little joy and very much sorrow. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
635:His vision was religious and clean, and therefore his paintings were without decoration or superfluous comment, since a religious man respects the power of God's creation to bear witness for itself. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
636:One has to be alone, under the sky, Before everything falls into place and one finds his or her own place in the midst of it all. We have to have the humility to realize ourselves as part of nature. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
637:The true contemplative is one who has discovered the art of finding leisure even in the midst of his work, by working with such a spirit of detachment and recollection that even his work is a prayer ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
638:We are so obsessed with doing that we have no time and no imagination left for being. As a result, men are valued not for what they are but for what they do or what they have - for their usefulness. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
639:Good Shepherd, You have a wild and crazy sheep in love with thorns and brambles. But please don't get tired of looking for me! I know You won't. For You have found me. All I have to do is stay found. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
640:Heaven and earth come together in the Unbegun, And all is foolishness, all is unknown, all is like The lights of an idiot, all is without mind! To obey is to close the beak and fall into Unbeginning. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
641:He's not a safe safe or a tame God, securely lodged behind the bars of a distant Heaven; He has the most annoying manner of showing up when we least want Him; of confronting us in the strangest ways. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
642:I refuse to be misled by any kind of a mirage about any alleged success of what I write. Those things are too easily exaggerated, and even when they are true, they always mean less than they seem to. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
643:mistake to suppose that mere good will is, by itself, a sufficient guarantee that all our efforts will finally attain to a good result. Serious mistakes can be made, even with the greatest good will. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
644:There is only one problem on which all my existence, my peace, my happiness depend: to discover myself in discovering God. If I find Him I will find myself and if I find my true self I will find Him. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
645:A man becomes a solitary at the moment when, no matter what may be his external surroundings, he is suddenly aware of his own inalienable solitude and sees that he will never be anything but solitary. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
646:Coercion from outside, strong temperamental inclinations and passions within ourselves, do nothing to effect the essence of our freedom. They simply define its action by imposing certain limits on it. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
647:The whole world has risen in Christ... If God is 'all in all,' then everything is in fact paradise, because it is filled with the glory and presence of God, and nothing is any more separated from God. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
648:This is the greatest stumbling block in our spiritual discipline, which, in actuality, consists not in getting rid of the self but in realizing the fact that there is no such existence from the first. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
649:Do not look for rest in any pleasure, because you were not created for pleasure: you were created for joy. And if you do not know the difference between pleasure and joy you have not yet begun to live. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
650:Thomas Merton, the American monk, pointed out that we may spend our whole life climbing the ladder of success, only to find when we get to the top that our ladder is leaning against the wrong wall. Most ~ Richard Rohr, #NFDB
651:CII ABBOT PASTOR said: Just as bees are driven out by smoke, and their honey is taken away from them, so a life of ease drives out the fear of the Lord from man’s soul and takes away all his good works. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
652:Pardon all runners, All speechless, alien winds, All mad waters. Pardon their impulses, Their wild attitudes, Their young flights, their reticence. When a message has no clothes on How can it be spoken. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
653:We must return from the desert like Jesus or St. John, with our capacity for feeling expanded and deepened, strengthened against the appeals of falsity, warned against temptation, great, noble and pure. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
654:What would have been the good of my being plunged into a lot of naked suffering and emotional crisis without any prayer, any Sacrament to stabilize and order it, and make some kind of meaning out of it? ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
655:....it is of the very essence of Christianity to face suffering and death not because they are good, not because they have meaning, but because the resurrection of Jesus has robbed them of their meaning. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
656:The most awful tyranny is that of the proximate Utopia where the last sins are currently being eliminated and where, tomorrow, there will be no more sins because all the sinners will have been wiped out. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
657:As long as I am content to know that He is infinitely greater than I, and that I cannot know Him unless He shows himself to me, I will have Peace, and He will be near me and in me, and I will rest in Him. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
658:My life is ... a mystery which I do not attempt to really understand, as though 1 were led by the hand in a night where I see nothing, but can fully depend on the love and protection of Him who guides me. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
659:That is the trouble with all introverts: not that they look within but that they are obsessed with “looking within” and afraid to do anything else. Afraid that if they stop looking they will disintegrate. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
660:When we are alone on a starlit night, when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
661:I suppose what makes me most glad is that we all recognize each other in this metaphysical space of silence and happening, and get some sense, for a moment, that we are full of paradise without knowing it. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
662:But nevertheless, no man who seeks liberation and light in solitude, no man who seeks spiritual freedom, can afford to yield passively to all the appeals of a society of salesmen, advertisers and consumers. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
663:If I penetrate to the depths of my existence, the indefinable, am, that is myself in its deepest roots, then through this deep center I pass into the infinite I am, which is the very nature of the Almighty. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
664:IF you write for God you will reach many men and bring them joy. If you write for men—you may make some money and you may give someone a little joy and you may make a noise in the world, for a little while. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
665:Until all titles are taken away
Events are finally obscure forever
You wake and wonder
Whose case history you composed
As your confessions are filed
In the dialect
Of bureaux and electrons ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
666:Living is the constant adjustment of thought to life and life to thought in such a way that we are always growing, always experiencing new things in the old and old things in the new. Thus life is always new. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
667:No matter how ruined man and his world may seem to be, and no matter how terrible man's despair may become, as long as he continues to be a man his very humanity continues to tell him that life has a meaning. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
668:It would be a sin to place any limit upon our hope in God. We must love Him without measure. All sin is rooted in the failure of love. All sin is a withdrawal of love from God, in order to love something else. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
669:The most awful tyranny is that of the proximate Utopia where the last sins are currently being eliminated and where, tomorrow, there will be no more sins because all the sinners will have been wiped out. p. 22 ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
670:The true inner self must be drawn up like a jewel from the bottom of the sea, rescued from confusion, from indistinction, from immersion in the common, the nondescript, the trivial, the sordid, the evanescent. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
671:We have the choice of two identities: the external mask which seems to be real … and the hidden, inner person who seems to us to be nothing, but who can give himself eternally to the truth in whom he subsists. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
672:And in a sense, this terrible situation is the pattern and prototype of all sin: the deliberate and formal will to reject disinterested love for us for the purely arbitrary reason that we simply do not want it. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
673:To say that I am made in the image of God is to say that love is the reason for my existence, for God is love. Love is my true identity. Selflessness is my true self. Love is my true character. Love is my name. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
674:If we examine ourselves carefully we shall see most of us have an enormous amount of unfinished business...We have to be free so that we can just step across the line and that's it. That is what real freedom is. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
675:It is lawful to love all things and to seek them, once they become means to the love of God. There is nothing we cannot ask of Him if we desire it in order that He may be more loved by ourselves or by other men. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
676:The life of the soul is not knowledge, it is love, since love is the act of the supreme faculty, the will, by which man is formally united to the final end of all his strivings—by which man becomes one with God. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
677:But there is nothing to prevent a layman from taking just one Psalm a day, for instance in his night prayers, and reciting it thoughtfully, pausing to meditate on the lines which have the deepest meaning for him. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
678:Many of our most cherished plans for the glory of God are only inordinate passion in disguise. And the proof of this is found in the excitement which they produce. The God of peace is never glorified by violence. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
679:Salvation is a restoration project, not an evacuation project! Or as Thomas Merton put it, “Eschatology is not an invitation to escape into a private heaven: it is a call to transfigure the evil and stricken world. ~ Brian Zahnd, #NFDB
680:Suzuki also frequently quotes a sentence of Eckhart’s: “The eye wherein I see God is the same eye wherein God sees me” (Suzuki, Mysticism: East and West, p. 50) as an exact expression of what Zen means by Prajna. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
681:Therefore there is only one problem on which all my existence, my peace and my happiness depend: to discover myself in discovering God. If I find Him I will find myself and if I find my true self I will find Him. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
682:Thomas Merton asked, “What am I?” and answered, “I am myself a word spoken by God.” How we perceive ourselves, who we think ourselves to be, determines the direction of our lives and shapes our relationships. To ~ Stuart Briscoe, #NFDB
683:Indeed, too often the weakest thing about our faith is the illusion that our faith is strong, when the “strength” we feel is only the intensity of emotion or of sentiment, which have nothing to do with real faith. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
684:It is not speaking that breaks our silence, but the anxiety to be heard. The words of the proud man impose silence on all others, so that he alone may be heard. The humble man speaks only in order to be spoken to. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
685:Solitude is so necessary both for society and for the individual that when society fails to provide sufficient solitude to develop the inner life of the persons who compose it, they rebel and seek false solitudes. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
686:Love is...like a spring coming up out of the ground of our own depths. "I am gift." All that I am is something that's given, and given freely. Being doesn't cost anything. There's no price tag, no strings attached. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
687:We have the choice of two identities: the external mask which seems to be real...and the hidden, inner person who seems to us to be nothing, but who can give himself eternally to the truth in whom he subsists. (295) ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
688:Actually I feel more sure than I ever have in my life that I am obeying the Lord and am on the way He wills for me, though at the same time I am struck and appalled (more than ever!) by the shoddiness of my response. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
689:... it may express the solitary's conviction that he is not good enough for most of the visible exercises of the community, that his own part is to carry out some hidden function, in the community's spiritual cellar. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
690:Therefore there is only one problem on which all my existence, my peace and my happiness depend: to discover myself in discovering God. If I find Him I will find myself and if I find my true self I will find Him. But ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
691:The wisdom of the flesh is a judgement that the ordinary ends of our natural appetites are the goods to which the whole of man’s life are to be ordered. Therefore it inevitably inclines the will to violate God’s law. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
692:The fruitfulness of our lives depends in large measure in our ability to doubt our own words and to question the value of our own work. The man who completely trusts his own estimate of himself is doomed to sterility. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
693:Why do we have to spend our lives striving to be something that we would never want to be, if we only knew what we wanted? Why do we waste our time doing things which... are just the opposite of what we were made for? ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
694:much of our rhetoric is less about persuading unbelievers, or maintaining the faith of believers, than about, as Thomas Merton put it a generation ago, our search for “an argument strong enough to prove us ‘right.’”9 ~ Russell D Moore, #NFDB
695:Our real journey in life is interior; It is a matter of growth, deepening, and of an ever greater surrender to the creative action of love and grace in our hearts. Never was it more necessary to respond to that action. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
696:The contemplative is not isolated in himself, but liberated from his external and egotistic self by humility and purity of heart—therefore there is no longer any serious obstacle to simple and humble love of other men. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
697:The truth that many people never understand is that the more you try to avoid suffering the more your suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things start to torture you in proportion to your fear of being hurt. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
698:The very first step to a correct understanding of the Christian theology of contemplation is to grasp clearly the unity of God and man in Christ, which of course presupposes the equally crucial unity of man in himself. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
699:They were in the world and not of it--not because they were saints, but in a different way: because they were artists. The integrity of an artist lifts a man above the level of the world without delivering him from it. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
700:but the one counsel he did give me is something that I will not easily forget: “There are many beautiful mystical books written by the Christians. You should read St. Augustine’s Confessions, and The Imitation of Christ ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
701:Do not look for rest in any pleasure, because you were not created for pleasure: you were created for spiritual joy. And if you do not know the difference between pleasure and spiritual joy you have not yet begun to live. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
702:The only trouble is that in the spiritual life there are no tricks and no shortcuts. Those who imagine that they can discover spiritual gimmicks and put them to work for themselves usually ignore God's will and his grace. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
703:The world as pure object is something that is not there. It is not a reality outside us for which we exist....It is a living and self-creating mystery of which I am myself a part, to which I am myself, my own unique door. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
704:He is heard only when we hope to hear Him, and if, thinking our hope to be fulfilled, we cease to speak, His silence ceases to be vivid and becomes dead, even though we recharge it with the echo of our own emotional noise. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
705:Hence monastic prayer, especially meditation and contemplative prayer, is not so much a way to find God as a way of resting in him whom we have found, who loves us, who is near to us, who comes to us to draw us to himself. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
706:If there is no silence beyond and within the many words of doctrine, there is no religion, only a religious ideology. For religion goes beyond words and actions, and attains to the ultimate Truth only in silence and Love. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
707:Humble people can do great things with uncommon perfection because they are no longer concerned about their own interests and their own reputation, and therefore they no longer need to waste their efforts in defending them. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
708:The geographical pilgrimage is the symbolic acting out an inner journey. The inner journey is the interpolation of the meanings and signs of the outer pilgrimage. One can have one without the other. It is best to have both. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
709:What do I mean by loving ourselves properly? I mean first of all, desiring to live, accepting life as a very great gift and a great good, not because of what it gives us, but because of what it enables us to give to others. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
710:The solitary is necessarily a man who does what he wants to do,” wrote Thomas Merton, an American Trappist monk who died in 1968. “In fact, he has nothing else to do. That is why his vocation is both dangerous and despised. ~ Michael Finkel, #NFDB
711:We should not, however, judge the value of our meditation by “how we feel.” A hard and apparently fruitless meditation may in fact be much more valuable than one that is easy, happy, enlightened and apparently a big success. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
712:Do not think that you can show your love for Christ by hating those who seem to be His enemies on earth. Suppose they really do hate Him: nevertheless He loves them, and you cannot be united with Him unless you love them too. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
713:God, Who is everywhere, never leaves us. Yet He seems sometimes to be present, sometimes to be absent. If we do not know Him well, we do not realize that He may be more present to us when He is absent than when He is present. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
714:Neither of my parents suffered from the little spooky prejudices that devour the people who know nothing but automobiles and movies and what’s in the ice-box and what’s in the papers and which neighbors are getting a divorce. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
715:The geographical pilgrimage is the symbolic acting out of an inner journey. The inner journey is the interpolation of the meanings and signs of the outer pilgrimage. One can have one without the other. It is best to have both. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
716:As long as I continue to take myself seriously, how can I consider myself a saint? How can I consider myself a contemplative? For the self I bother about does not really exist, never will, never did except in my own imagination. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
717:If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I am living for, in detail, ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
718:In the last analysis, the individual person is responsible for living his own life and for 'finding himself.' If he persists in shifting his responsibility to somebody else, he fails to find out the meaning of his own existence. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
719:It does no good to use big words to talk about Christ. Since I seem incapable of talking about him in the language of a child, I have reached the point where I can scarcely talk about him at all. All my words fill me with shame. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
720:It seems to me that the darkness that has troubled you ... comes from one very serious source. Without wanting to be in conflict with the truth and with the will of God, we are actually going against God's will and His teaching. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
721:We cannot find Him unless we know we need Him. We forget this need when we take a self-sufficient pleasure in our own good works. The poor and helpless are the first to find Him, Who came to seek and to save that which was lost. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
722:His justice is the love that gives to each one of His creatures the gifts that His mercy has previously decreed. And His mercy is His love, doing justice to its own exigencies, and renewing the gift which we had failed to accept. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
723:“One might say I had decided to marry the silence of the forest… Perhaps I have an obligation to preserve the stillness, the silence, the poverty, the virginal point of pure nothingness which is at the center of all other loves.” ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
724:EVERY one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self. This is the man that I want myself to be but who cannot exist, because God does not know anything about him. And to be unknown of God is altogether too much privacy. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
725:My true personality will be fulfilled in the Mystical Christ in this one way above all, that through me, Christ and His Spirit will be able to love you and all men and God the Father in a way that would be possible in no one else. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
726:To be truly Catholic is not merely to be correct according to an abstractly universal standard of truth, but also and above all to be able to enter into the problems and the joys of all, to understand all, to be all things to all. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
727:You do not need to know precisely what is happening, or exactly where it is all going. What you need is to recognize the possibilities and challenges offered by the present moment, and to embrace them with courage, faith and hope. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
728:Nevertheless, the liturgy of Ash Wednesday is not focussed on the sinfulness of the penitent but on the mercy of God. The question of sinfulness is raised precisely because this is a day of mercy, and the just do not need a savior. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
729:Pardon all runners,
All speechless, alien winds,
All mad waters.
Pardon their impulses,
Their wild attitudes,
Their young flights, their reticence.
When a message has no clothes on
How can it be spoken. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
730:Thinking about monastic ideals is not the same as living up to them, but at any rate such thinking has an important place in a monk's life, because you cannot begin to do anything unless you have some idea what you are trying to do. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
731:What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it all the rest are not only useless but disastrous. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
732:It is both dangerous and easy to hate man as he is because he is not what he ought to be. If we do not first respect what he is we will never suffer him to become what he ought to be: in our impatience we do away with him altogether. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
733:IT is not that someone else is preventing you from living happily; you yourself do not know what you want. Rather than admit this, you pretend that someone is keeping you from exercising your liberty. Who is this? It is you yourself. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
734:The thing that made Communism seem so plausible to me was my own lack of logic which failed to distinguish between the reality of the evils which Communism was trying to overcome and the validity of its diagnosis and the chosen cure. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
735:To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to the violence of our times. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
736:Contemplation does not arrive at reality after a process of deduction, but by an intuitive awakening in which our free and personal reality becomes fully alive to its own existential depths, which open out into the mystery of God. For ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
737:For the birds there is not a time that they tell, but the point vierge between darkness and light, between being and nonbeing. You can tell yourself the time by their waking, if you are experienced. But that is your folly, not theirs. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
738:None of our prayers should ever be petitions for our own needs: for this is only another subtle way of trying to put ourselves on the same plane as God — acting as if we had no needs, as if we were not creatures, not dependent on Him. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
739:What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it, all the rest are not only useless, but disastrous. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
740:My true personality will be fulfilled in the Mystical Christ in this one way above all, that through me, Christ and His Spirit will be able to love you and all men and God the Father in a way that would be possible in no one else. Love ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
741:One of the most important-and most neglected-elements in the beginning of the interior life is the ability to respond to reality, to see the value and the beauty in ordinary things, to come alive to the splendour that is all around us. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
742:To allow oneself to be carried away
By a multitude of conflicting concerns,
To surrender to too many demands,
...To commit oneself to too many projects,
To want to help everyone with everything
Is to succumb to violence. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
743:Yet it is in this loneliness that the deepest activities begin. It is here that you discover act without motion, labor that is profound repose, vision in obscurity, and, beyond all desire, a fulfillment whose limits extend to infinity. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
744:God does not give us graces or talents or virtues for ourselves alone. We are members one of another and everything that is given to one member is given for the whole body. I do not wash my feet to make them more beautiful than my face. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
745:If lying and fabrication are psychologically harmful even in ordinary relations with other men (a sphere where a certain amount of falsification is not uncommon) all falsity is disastrous in any relation with the ground of our own being ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
746:Love, then, must be true to the ones we love and to ourselves, and also to its own laws. I cannot be true to myself if I pretend to have more in common than I actually have with someone whom I may like for a selfish and unworthy reason. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
747:THE only true joy on earth is to escape from the prison of our own false self, and enter by love into union with the Life Who dwells and sings within the essence of every creature and in the core of our own souls. In His love we possess ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
748:We are obliged to love one another. We are not strictly bound to 'like' one another. Love governs the will: 'liking' is a matter of sense and sensibility. Nevertheless, if we really love others it will not be too hard to like them also. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
749:You will never be able to have perfect interior peace and recollection unless you are detached even from the desire of peace and recollection. You will never be able to pray perfectly until you are detached from the pleasures of prayer. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
750:Our destiny is to live out what we think, because unless we live what we know, we do not even know it. It is only by making our knowledge part of ourselves, through action, that we enter into the reality that is signified by our concepts. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
751:The gift of love is the gift of the power and capacity to love, and therefore, to give love with full effect is also to receive it. So love can only be kept by being given away, and it can only be given perfectly when it is also received. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
752:I was entering into a moral universe in which I would be related to every other rational being, and in which whole masses of us, as thick as swarming bees, would drag one another along towards some common end of good or evil, peace or war. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
753:The Hindus are not looking for us to send them men who will build schools and hospitals, although those things are good and useful in themselves--and perhaps very badly needed in India: they want to know if we have any saints to send them. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
754:The mission of Christian humility in social life is not merely to edify, but to keep minds open to many alternatives. The rigidity of a certain type of Christian thought has seriously impaired this capacity, which nonviolence must recover. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
755:If he desires what is good his temper can become the controlled instrument for fighting the evil that is in himself and helping other men to overcome the obstacles which they meet in the world. He remains free to desire either good or evil. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
756:The secret of my full identity is hidden in Him. He alone can make me who I am, or rather who I will be when at last I fully begin to be. But unless I desire this identity and work to find it with Him and in Him, the work will never be done ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
757:To desire Him to be merciful to us is to acknowledge Him as God. To seek His pity when we deserve no pity is to ask Him to be just with a justice so holy that it knows no evil and shows mercy to everyone who does not fly from Him in despair. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
758:If in the men who are supposed to be good they only see a "virtue" which is effectively less vital and less interesting than their own vices they will conclude that virtue has no meaning and will cling to what they have although they hate it. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
759:If our life is poured out in useless words, we will never hear anything, never become anything, and in the end, because we have said everything before we had anything to say, we shall be left speechless at the moment of our greatest decision. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
760:I should be able to return to solitude each time as to the place I have never described to anybody, as the place which I have never brought anyone to see, as the place whose silence has mothered an interior life known to no one but God alone. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
761:A superficial freedom to wander aimlessly here or there, to taste this or that, to make a choice of distractions, is simply a sham. It claims to be a freedom of "choice" when it has evaded the basic task of discovering who it is that chooses. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
762:This unity in love is one of the most characteristic works of the inner self, so that paradoxically the inner “I” is not only isolated but at the same time united with others on a higher plane, which is in fact the plane of spiritual solitude. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
763:Above all things have charity, which is the bond of perfection and may the peace of Christ exult in your hearts in which you are called unto one Body. And be grateful.Ӡ It seems to me that all mystical theology is contained in those two lines. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
764:a man can radically change his life and attain to a deeper meaning, a more perfect integration, a more complete fulfillment, a more total liberty of spirit than are possible in the routines of a purely active existence centered on money-making. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
765:If our life is poured out in useless words, we will never hear anything, will never become anything, and in the end, because have said everything before we had anything to say, we shall be left speechless at the moment of our greatest decision. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
766:We are warmed by the fire, not by the smoke of the fire. We are carried over the sea by a ship, not by the wake of a ship. So too, what we are is to be sought in the invisible depths of our own being, not in our outward reflection in our own acts. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
767:And when I thought there was no God and no love and no mercy, you were leading me all the while into the midst of His love and His mercy and taking me, without my knowing anything about it, to the house that would hide me in the secret of His Face. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
768:Confucious and the Madman (excerpt)
The cinnamon tree is edible: so it is cut down!
The lacquer tree is profitable: they maim it.
Every man knows how useful it is to be useful.
No one seems to know
How useful it is to be useless. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
769:Is the basic teaching of Buddhism—on ignorance, deliverance and enlightenment—really life-denying, or is it rather the same kind of life-affirming liberation that we find in the Good News of Redemption, the Gift of the Spirit, and the New Creation? ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
770:Struggle is in my heart all week. My own moral conflict never ceases. Knowing I cannot and must not simply submit to the standards imposed on me, and merely conform as "they" would like. This I am convinced is wrong - but the pressure never ceases. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
771:The great twentieth-century monk Thomas Merton encountered precisely the same spiritual exhaustion partway through his life. The chief source of this exhaustion, he writes, “is the selfish anxiety to get the most out of everything, to be a sparkling ~ Stephen Cope, #NFDB
772:We assume that others are receiving the kind of appreciation we want for ourselves, and we proceed on the assumption that since we are not loveable as we are, we must become lovable under false pretenses, as if we were something better than we are. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
773:We have been fashioned, in all our perfection, each according to his own nature, and all our natures ordered and harmonized together, that man's reason and his love might fit in this one last element, this God-given key to the meaning of the whole. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
774:Happiness consists in finding out precisely what the "one thing necessary" may be, in our lives, and in gladly relinquishing all the rest. For then, by a divine paradox, we find that everything else is given us together with the one thing we needed. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
775:LXXXI ABBOT PASTOR was asked by a certain brother: How should I conduct myself in the place where I live? The elder replied: Be as cautious as a stranger; wherever you may be, do not desire your word to have power before you, and you will have rest. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
776:The only thing that can save the world from complete moral collapse is a spiritual revolution. Christianity, by its very nature, demands such a revolution. If Christians would all live up to what they profess to believe, the revolution would happen. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
777:Faith is a light of such supreme brilliance that it dazzles the mind and darkens all its visions of other realities, but in the end when we become used to the new light, we gain a new view of all reality transfigured and elevated in the light itself. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
778:Hurry ruins saints as well as artists. They want quick success, and they are in such a hurry to get it that they cannot take time to be true to themselves. And when the madness is upon them, they argue that their very haste is a species of integrity. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
779:Indeed, the truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
780:The more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
781:Curiously, the most serious religious people, or the most concerned scholars, those who constantly read the Bible as a matter of professional or pious duty, can often manage to evade a radically involved dialogue with the book they are questioning. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
782:For the sinful self is not my real self, it is not the self YOU have wanted for me, only the self that I have wanted : And I no longer want this false self. But now, Father, I come to You in your own Son's self ... and it is He Who Presents me to You. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
783:Instead of hating the people you think are war-makers, hate the appetites and disorder in your own soul, which are the causes of war. If you love peace, then hate injustice, hate tyranny, hate greed - but hate these things in yourself, not in another. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
784:There are crimes that no one would commit as an individual which he willingly and bravely commits when acting in the name of his society, because he has been (too easily) convinced that evil is entirely different when it is done 'for the common good'. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
785:We are not responsible for more than our own action, but for this we should take complete responsibility. Then the results will follow of themselves, in a manner we may not always be able to foresee. We do not always have to foresee every possibility. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
786:If a writer is so cautious that he never writes anything that cannot be criticized, he will never be able to write anything that can be read. If you want to help other people you have got to make up your mind to write things that some men will condemn. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
787:The things I thought were so important -- because of the effort I put into them -- have turned out to be of small value. And the things I never thought about, the things I was never able to either to measure or to expect, were the things that mattered. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
788:A contemplative is not one who takes his prayer seriously, but one who takes God seriously, who is famished for truth, who seeks to live in generous simplicity, in the spirit. An ardent and sincere humility is the best protection for his life of prayer. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
789:By reading the scriptures I am so renewed that all nature seems renewed around me and with me. The sky seems to be a pure, a cooler blue, the trees a deeper green. The whole world is charged with the glory of God and I feel fire and music under my feet. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
790:Nourished by the Sacraments and formed by the prayer and teaching of the Church, we need seek nothing but the particular place willed for us by God within the Church. When we find that place, our life and our prayer both at once become extremely simple. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
791:One of the strange laws of the contemplative life," Thomas Merton, one of its sovereign explorers, pointed out, "is that in it you do not sit down and solve problems: you bear with them until they somehow solve themselves. Or until life solves them for you. ~ Pico Iyer, #NFDB
792:A man is enriched by the faith, and if you will by the hope and humility, with which he calls on the most sweet Name of Our Lord Jesus Christ; and he is enriched also by peace and love. For these are truly a three-stemmed life-giving tree planted by God. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
793:God must be allowed the right to speak unpredictably.... We must find him in our enemy, or we may lose him even in our friend. We must find him in the pagan or we will lose him in our own selves, substituting for his living presence an empty abstraction. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
794:If you persist in trying To attain what is never attained (It is Tao’s gift!) If you persist in making effort To obtain what effort cannot get; If you persist in reasoning About what cannot be understood, You will be destroyed By the very thing you seek. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
795:The monk in hiding himself from the world becomes not less than himself, not less of a person, but more of a person, more truly and perfectly himself: for his personality and individuality are perfected in their true order, the spiritual, interior order. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
796:The point where you become free not to kill, not to exploit, not to destroy, not to compete, because you are no longer afraid of death or the devil or poverty or failure. If you discover this nakedness, you’d better keep it private. People don’t like it. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
797:"To deliver oneself up, to hand oneself over, entrust oneself completely to the silence of a wide landscape of woods and hills, or sea, or desert, to sit still while the sun comes up over the land and fills its silences with light." ~ Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude, #NFDB
798:We who claim to love peace and justice must always be careful that we do not use our righteousness to provoke the violent, and in this way bring about the conflict for which we, too, like other men, are hungering in secret, and with suppressed barbarity. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
799:There is “no such thing” as God because God is neither a “what” nor a “thing” but a pure “Who.”* He is the “Thou” before whom our inmost “I” springs into awareness. He is the I Am before whom with our own most personal and inalienable voice we echo “I am. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
800:look for Him unless we have already found Him, and we cannot find Him unless he has first found us. We cannot begin to seek Him without a special gift of His grace, yet if we wait for grace to move us, before beginning to seek Him will probably never begin. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
801:Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody’s business. What we are asked to do is to love, and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbors worthy ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
802:Suppose that my "poverty" be a secret hunger for spiritual riches: suppose that by pretending to empty myself, pretending to be silent, I am really trying to cajole God into enriching me with some experience--what then? Then everything becomes a distraction. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
803:Business is not the supreme virtue, and sanctity is not measured by the amount of work we accomplish. Perfection is found in the purity of our love for God, and this pure love is a delicate plant that grows best where there is plenty of time for it to mature ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
804:Faith is the door to the full inner life of the Church, a life which includes not only access to an authoritative teaching but above all to a deep personal experience which is at once unique and yet shared by the whole Body of Christ, in the Spirit of Christ. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
805:Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody's business. What we are asked to do is to love, and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbors worthy. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
806:The only thing to seek in contemplative prayer is God; and we seek Him successfully when we realize that we cannot find Him unless He shows Himself to us, and yet at the same time that He would not have inspired us to seek Him unless we had already found Him. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
807:We do not pray for the sake of praying, but for the sake of being heard. We do not pray in order to listen to ourselves praying but in order that God may hear us and answer us. Also, we do not pray in order to receive just any answer: it must be God's answer. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
808:Every man becomes the image of the God he adores. He whose worship is directed to a dead thing becomes dead. He who loves corruption rots. He who loves a shadow becomes, himself, a shadow. He who loves things that must perish lives in dread of their perishing. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
809:The importance of detachment from things, the importance of poverty, is that we are supposed to be free from things that we might prefer to people. Wherever things have become more important than people, we are in trouble. That is the crux of the whole matter. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
810:When Knowledge Went North (excerpt)
As for us,
We came nowhere near being right,
Since we have the answers.
"For he who knows does not speak
He who speaks does not know"
And "The Wise Man gives instruction
Without the use of speech. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
811:Causes have effects, and if we lie to ourselves and to others, then we cannot expect to find truth and reality whenever we happen to want them. If we have chosen the way of falsity we must not be surprised that truth eludes us when we finally come to need it! O ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
812:It seems to me that I have greater peace and am close to God when I am not “trying to be a contemplative,” or trying to be anything special, but simply orienting my life fully and completely towards what seems to be required of a man like me at a time like this. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
813:I, who had always been anti-naturalistic in art, had been a pure naturalist in the moral order. No wonder my soul was sick and torn apart: but now the bleeding wound was drawn together by the notion of Christian virtue, ordered to the union of the soul with God. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
814:Contemplation means rest, suspension of activity, withdrawal into the mysterious interior solitude in which the soul is absorbed in the immense and fruitful silence of God and learns something of the secret of His perfections less by seeing than by fruitive love. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
815:Every moment and every event of everyman's life on earth plants something in his soul. For just as the wind carries thousands of winged seeds, so each moment brings with it germs of spiritual vitality that come to rest imperceptibly in the minds and wills of men. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
816:Finally I am coming to the conclusion that my highest ambition is to be what I already am. That I will never fulfill my obligation to surpass myself unless I first accept myself, and if I accept myself fully in the right way, I will already have surpassed myself. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
817:The desire to kill is like the desire to attack another with an ingot of red -hot iron: I have to pick up the incandescent metal and burn my own hand while burning the other. Hate itself is the seed of death in my own heart, while it seeks the death of the other. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
818:October is a fine and dangerous season in America. It is dry and cool and the land is wild with red and gold and crimson, and all the lassitudes of August have seeped out of your blood, and you are full of ambition. It is a wonderful time to begin anything at all. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
819:to put words together in a such a way that they exercise a mysterious and vital reactivity among themselves, and so release their secret content of associations to produce in the reader an experience that enriches the depths of his spirit in a manner quite unique. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
820:I seek to speak to you, in some way, as your own self. Who can tell what this may meanI myself do not know, but if you listen, things will be said that are perhaps not written in this book. And this will be due not to me but to the One who lives and speaks in both. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
821:To live by grace means to acknowledge my whole life story, the light side and the dark. In admitting my shadow side, I learn who I am and what God’s grace means. As Thomas Merton put it, “A saint is not someone who is good but who experiences the goodness of God. ~ Brennan Manning, #NFDB
822:How could this fatuous, emotional thing be without beginning and without end, the creator of all? I had taken the dead letter of Scripture at its very deadest, and it had killed me, according to the saying of St. Paul: "The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
823:True encounter with Christ liberates something in us, a power we did not know we had, a hope, a capacity for life, a resilience, an ability to bounce back when we thought we were completely defeated, a capacity to grow and change, a power of creative transformation. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
824:Your brightness is my darkness. I know nothing of You and, by myself, I cannot even imagine how to go about knowing You. If I imagine You, I am mistaken. If I understand You, I am deluded. If I am conscious and certain I know You, I am crazy. The darkness is enough. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
825:I seek to speak to you, in some way, as your own self. Who can tell what this may mean? I myself do not know, but if you listen, things will be said that are perhaps not written in this book. And this will be due not to me but to the One who lives and speaks in both. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
826:Contemplation is not and cannot be a function of this external self. There is an irreducible opposition between the deep transcendent self that awakens only in contemplation, and the superficial, external self which we commonly identify with the first person singular. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
827:The first step in identifying “heresy” is to refuse all identifications with the subjective intuitions and experience of the “heretic,” and to see his words only in an impersonal realm in which there is no dialogue - in which dialogue is denied a priori. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
828:And of course most non-Catholics imagine that the Church is immensely rich, and that all Catholic institutions make money hand over fist, and that all the money is stored away somewhere to buy gold and silver dishes for the Pope and cigars for the College of Cardinals. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
829:For language to have meaning there must be intervals of silence somewhere, to divide word from word and utterance from utterance. He who retires into silence does not necessarily hate language. Perhaps it is love and respect for language which imposes silence upon him. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
830:Thomas Merton wrote, “it is both dangerous and easy to hate man as he is because he is not ‘what he ought to be.’ If we do not first respect what he is we will never suffer him to become what he ought to be: in our impatience we will do away with him altogether.”50 ~ Eugene H Peterson, #NFDB
831:We must suffer. Our five sense are dulled by inordinate pleasure. Penance makes them keen, gives them back their natural vitality, and more. Penance clears the eye of conscience and of reason. It helps think clearly, judge sanely. It strengthens the action of our will. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
832:As a magnifying glass concentrates the rays of the sun into a little burning knot of heat that can set fire to a dry leaf or a piece of paper, so the mystery of Christ in the Gospel concentrates the rays of God's light and fire to a point to set fire to the human spirit. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
833:From the moment you put a piece of bread in your mouth you are part of the world. Who grew the wheat? Who made the bread? Where did it come from? You are in relationship with all who brought it to the table. We are least separate and most in common when we eat and drink. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
834:The things we really need come to us only as gifts, and in order to receive them as gifts we have to be open. In order to be open we have to renounce ourselves, in a sense we have to die to our image of ourselves, our autonomy, our fixation upon our self-willed identity. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
835:Concerning solitude: most of the accidents of community life need not seriously concern me—differences of opinion, other people’s ideas of the spiritual life, the kind of organ music that seems to please many. Why should I bother about all that? It is none of my business. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
836:The Lord did not create suffering. Pain and death came into the world with the fall of man. But after man had chosen suffering in preference to the joys of union with God, the Lord turned suffering itself into a way by which man could come to the perfect knowledge of God. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
837:Every man becomes the image of the God he adores.
He whose worship is directed to a dead thing becomes dead.
He who loves corruption rots.
He who loves a shadow becomes, himself, a shadow.
He who loves things that must perish lives in dread of their perishing. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
838:Hullo, Brother,” I said. He recognized me, glanced at the suitcase and said: “This time have you come to stay?” “Yes, Brother, if you’ll pray for me,” I said. Brother nodded, and raised his hand to close the window. “That’s what I’ve been doing,” he said, “praying for you. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
839:the hypostatic union, or the union of the divine and human natures in the One Person of the Word, the God-Man, Jesus Christ, was not only a truth of the greatest, most revolutionary, and most existential actuality, but it was the central truth of all being and all history. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
840:To enter into the realm of contemplation one must in a certain sense die: but this death is in fact the entrance to a higher life. It is a death for the sake of life, which leaves behind all that we can know or treasure as life, as thought, as experience, as joy, as being. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
841:...as soon as you think of yourself as teaching contemplation to others, you make another mistake. No one teaches contemplation except God, who gives it. The best you can do is write something that will serve as an occasion for someone else to realize what God wants of him. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
842:As a magnifying glass concentrates the rays of the sun into a little burning knot of heat that can set fire to a dry leaf or a piece of paper, so the mystery of Christ in the Gospel concentrates the rays of God’s light and fire to a point that sets fire to the spirit of man. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
843:To enter into the realm of contemplation one must in a certain sense die: but this death is in fact the entrance into a higher life. It is a death for the sake of life, which leaves behind all that we can know or treasure as life, as thought, as experience, as joy, as being. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
844:Too much happiness, too much unhappiness, out of due time, men are thrown off balance. What will they do next? Thought runs wild. No control. They start everything, finish nothing. Here competition begins, here the idea of excellence is born, and robbers appear in the world. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
845:I stand among you as one who offers a small message of hope. . . there are always people who dare to seek on the margin of society, who are not dependent on social acceptance, not dependent on social routine, and prefer a kind of free-floating existence under a state of risk. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
846:However, October is a fine and dangerous season in America. It is dry and cool and the land is wild with red and gold and crimson, and all the lassitudes of August have seeped out of your blood, and you are full of ambition. It is a wonderful time to begin anything at all. You ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
847:There are so many voices heard today asserting that one should "have religion" or "believe," but all they mean is that one should associate himself, "sign up" with some religious group. Stand up and be counted. As if religion were somehow primarily a matter of gregariousness... ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
848:The solution of the problem of life is life itself. Life is not attained by reasoning and analysis, but first of all by living. For until we have begun to live our prudence has no material to work on. And until we have begun to fail we have no way of working out our success. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
849:Thomas Merton, say it, as he so often does: “A door opens in the center of our being, and we seem to fall through it into immense depths, which although they are infinite—are still accessible to us. All eternity seems to have become ours in this one placid and breathless contact. ~ Richard Rohr, #NFDB
850:God makes us ask ourselves questions most often when He intends to resolve them. He gives us needs that He alone can satisfy, and awakens capacities that He means to fulfill. Any perplexity is liable to be a spiritual gestation, leading to a new birth and a mystical regeneration. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
851:To those who have no personal experience of this revolutionary aspect of Christian truth, but who see only the outer crust of dead, human conservatism that tends to form around the Church the way barnacles gather on the hull of a ship, all this talk about dynamism sounds foolish. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
852:The poorest man in a religious community is not necessarily the one who has the fewest objects assigned to him for his use. Poverty is not merely a matter of not having "things." It is an attitude which leads us to renounce some of the advantages which come from the use of things. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
853:This act of total surrender is not merely a fantastic intellectual and mystical gamble; it is something much more serious. It is an act of love for this unseen person, who, in the very gift of love by which we surrender ourselves to his reality also makes his presence known to us. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
854:To separate meditation from prayer, reading and contemplation is to falsify our picture of the monastic way of prayer. In proportion as meditation takes on a more contemplative character, we see that it is not only a means to an end, but also has something of the nature of an end. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
855:Weaknesses and deficiencies . . . play a most important part in all our lives. It is because of them that we need others and others need us. We are not all weak in the same spots, and so we supplement and complete one another, each one making up in himself for the lack in another. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
856:Cupidity...takes created things for ends in themselves, which they are not. The will that seeks rest in creatures for their own sake stops on the way to its true end, terminates in a value which does not exist, and thus frustrates all its deepest capacities for happiness and peace. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
857:If what most people take for granted were really true—if all you needed to be happy was to grab everything and see everything and investigate every experience and then talk about it, I should have been a very happy person, a spiritual millionaire, from the cradle even until now. If ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
858:In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
859:ONE of the paradoxes of the mystical life is this: that a man cannot enter into the deepest center of himself and pass through that center into God, unless he is able to pass entirely out of himself and empty himself and give himself to other people in the purity of a selfless love. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
860:If it is awakened, it communicates a new life to the intelligence in which it lives, so that it becomes a living awareness of itself: and this awareness is not so much something that we ourselves have, as something that we are. It is a new and indefinable quality of our living being. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
861:I came with the notion of perhaps saying something for monks and to monks of all religions because I am supposed to be a monk. ... My dear brothers, WE ARE ALREADY ONE. BUT WE IMAGINE THAT WE ARE NOT. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
862:If our life is poured out in useless words, we will never hear anything, never become anything, and in the end, because we have said everything before we had anything to say, we shall be left speechless at the moment of our greatest decision.”
― Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
863:If we live with possibilities we are exiles from the present which is given us by God to be our own, homeless and displaced in a future or a past which are not ours because they are always beyond our reach. The present is our right place, and we can lay hands on whatever it offers us. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
864:kind of prayer we here speak of as properly “monastic” (though it may also fit into the life of any lay person who is attracted to it) is a prayer of silence, simplicity, contemplative and meditative unity, a deep personal integration in an attentive, watchful listening of “the heart. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
865:For me—the betrayal I have to look out for is that which would consist simply in attaching myself to “a cause” that happens to be operating at this time, and getting involved, and letting myself be carried along with it, simply making appropriate noises from time to time, at a distance. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
866:If I do His will as a free act of homage and adoration paid to a wisdom that I cannot see, His will itself becomes the life and substance and reality of my worship/ But if I do His will as a perfunctory adjustment of my own will to the unavoidable, my worship is hollow and without heart. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
867:Learn how to meditate on paper. Drawing and writing are forms of meditation. Learn how to contemplate works of art. Learn how to pray in the streets or in the country. Know how to meditate not only when you have a book in your hand but when you are waiting for a bus or riding in a train. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
868:The simplicity that all this presupposes is not easy to attain. I find that my life constantly threatens to become complex and divisive. A life of prayer is basically a very simple life. This simplicity, however, is the result of asceticism and effort: it is not a spontaneous simplicity. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
869:Those who love their own noise are impatient of everything else. They constantly defile the silence of the forests and the mountains and the sea. They bore through silent nature in every direction with their machines, for fear that the calm world might accuse them of their own emptiness. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
870:The whole function of the life of prayer is, then, to enlighten and strengthen our conscience so that it not only knows and perceives the outward, written precepts of the moral and divine laws, but above all lives God's law in concrete reality by perfect and continual union with His will. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
871:For power can guarantee the interests of some men but it can never foster the good of man. Power always protects the good of some at the expense of all the others. Only love can attain and preserve the good of all. Any claim to build the security of all on force is a manifest imposture. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
872:Peace cannot be built on exclusivism, absolutism, and intolerance. But neither can it be built on vague liberal slogans and pious programs gestated in the smoke of confabulation. There can be no peace on earth without the kind of inner change that brings man back to his "right mind." p. 31 ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
873:The devil makes many disciples by preaching against sin. He convinces them that the great evil of sin, induces a crisis of guilt by which “God is satisfied," and after that he lets them spend the rest of their lives meditating on the intense sinfulness and evident reprobation of other men. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
874:It is not only our hatred of others that is dangerous but also and above all our hatred of ourselves: particularly that hatred of ourselves which is too deep and too powerful to be consciously faced. For it is this which makes us see our own evil in others and unable to see it in ourselves. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
875:Let no one hope to find in contemplation an escape from conflict, from anguish or from doubt. On the contrary, the deep inexpressible certitude of the contemplative experience awakens a tragic anguish and opens many questions in the depths of the heart like wounds that cannot stop bleeding. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
876:To consider persons and events and situations only in the light of their effect on me is to live on the doorstep of hell. Selfishness is doomed to frustration centered as it is upon a lie. To live exclusively for myself, I must make all things bend themselves to my will as if I were a god. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
877:The silence of the forest is my bride and the sweet dark warmth of the whole world is my love, and out of the heart of that dark warmth comes the secret that is heard only in silence, but it is the root of all the secrets that are whispered by all the lovers in their beds all over the world. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
878:We are not perfectly free until we live in pure hope. For when our hope is pure, it no longer trusts exclusively in human and visible means, nor rests in any visible end. He who hopes in God trusts God, Whom he never sees, to bring him to the possession of things that are beyond imagination. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
879:A theology of love cannot be allowed merely to serve the interests of the rich and powerful, justifying their wars, their violence and their bombs, while exhorting the poor and underprivileged to practice patience, meekness, long-suffering and to solve their problems, if at all, nonviolently. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
880:A spirit that is drawn to God in contemplation will soon learn the value of obedience: the hardships and anguish he has to suffer every day from the burden of his own selfishness, his clumsiness, incompetence and pride will give him a hunger to be led and advised and directed by somebody else. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
881:Because God’s love is in me, it can come to you from a different and special direction that would be closed if He did not live in me, and because His love is in you, it can come to me from a quarter from which it would not otherwise come. And because it is in both of us, God has greater glory. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
882:If we are called by God to holiness of life, and if holiness is beyond our natural power to achieve (which it certainly is) then it follows that God himself must give us the light, the strength, and the courage to fulfill the task he requires of us. He will certainly give us the grace we need. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
883:instead of becoming a strong and ardent and generous Catholic, I simply slipped into the ranks of the millions of tepid and dull and sluggish and indifferent Christians who live a life that is still half animal, and who barely put up a struggle to keep the breath of grace alive in their souls. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
884:Living is not thinking. Thought is formed and guided by objective reality outside us. Living is the constant adjustment of thought to life and life to thought in such a way that we are always growing, always experiencing new things in the old and old things in the new. Thus life is always new. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
885:God has left sin in the world in order that there may be forgiveness: not only the secret forgiveness by which He Himself cleanses our souls, but the manifest forgiveness by which we have mercy on one another and so give expression to the fact that He is living, by His mercy, in our own hearts. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
886:A tree gives glory to God by being a tree. For in being what God means it to be it is obeying [God]. It “consents,” so to speak, to [God's] creative love. It is expressing an idea which is in God and which is not distinct from the essence of God, and therefore a tree imitates God by being a tree ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
887:St. Thomas says [I-II, Q.34,a.4] that a man is good when his will takes joy in what is good, evil when his will takes joy in what is evil. He is virtuous when he finds happiness in a virtuous life, sinful when he takes pleasure in a sinful life. Hence the things that we love tell us what we are. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
888:The Christian solitary does not seek solitude merely as an atmosphere or as a setting for a special and exalted spirituality. Not doesn't he seek solitude as a favorable means for obtaining something he wants--contemplation. He seeks solitude as an expression of his total gift of himself to God. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
889:They seem too technical, and I need not literature but the living God. Sitivit anima mea. The strong living God. I burn with the desire for His peace, His stability, His silence, the power and wisdom of His direct action, liberation from my own heaviness. I carry myself around like a ton weight. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
890:I feel like, for me, reading Thomas Merton is like “Wait a minute, this is a rabbit hole. This isn’t a gateway or a ticket to anything except itself”. When you're a ways into it, you're five pages in, 20 pages in, 30 pages in, it seems like one of the more oxymoronic undertakings you could attempt. ~ Will Oldham, #NFDB
891:Imagination has the creative task of making symbols, joining things together in such a way that they throw new light on each other and on everything around them. The imagination is a discovering faculty, a faculty for seeing relationships, for seeing meanings that are special and even quite new. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
892:(Excerpt from Leaving Things Alone)
You train your eye and your vision lusts after colour. You train your ear, and you long for delightful sound. You delight in doing good, and your natural kindness is blown out of shape. You delight in righteousness, and you become righteous beyond all reason. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
893:Not only does silence give us a chance to understand ourselves better, to get a truer and more balanced perspective on our own lives in relation to the lives of others: silence makes us whole if we let it. Silence helps draw together the scattered and dissipated energies of a fragmented existence. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
894:The spiritual life is first of all a life. It is not merely something to be known and studied, it is to be lived. ... If we want to be spiritual, then, let us first of all live our lives. Let us not fear the responsibilities and the inevitable distractions of the work appointed by the will of God. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
895:If we are to pray well, we too must discover the Lord to whom we speak, and if we use the Psalms in our prayer we will stand a better chance of sharing in the discovery which lies hidden in their words for all generations. For God has willed to make Himself known to us in the mystery of the Psalms. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
896:The Mass is a memorial of Christ’s sacrifice, not in the sense of an exterior commemoration, but as a living and supremely efficacious re-presentation of that sacrifice, pouring out into our hearts the redemptive power of the Cross and the grace of the resurrection, which enables us to live in God. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
897:We cannot arrive at the perfect possession of God in this life, and that is why we are travelling and in darkness. But we already possess Him by grace, and therefore in that sense we have arrived and are dwelling in the light. But oh! How far have I to go to find You in Whom I have already arrived! ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
898:Brilliant, windy day—cold. It is fall. It is the kind of day in October that Pop used to talk about. I thought about my grandfather as I came up through the hollow, with the sun on the bare persimmon trees, and a song in my mouth. All songs are, as it were, one’s last. I have been grateful for life. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
899:As a child, and since then too, I have always tended to resist any kind of a possessive affection on the part of any other human being—there has always been this profound instinct to keep clear, to keep free. And only with truly supernatural people have I ever felt really at my ease, really at peace. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
900:The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men! A weird life it is, indeed, to be living always in somebody else's imagination, as if that were the only place in which one could at last become real! ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
901:The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men! A weird life it is, indeed, to be living always in somebody else’s imagination, as if that were the only place in which one could at last become real! ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
902:Are they moved by a sense of human need for silence, for reflection, for inner seeking? So they want to get away from the noise and tension of modern life, at least for a little while, in order to relax their minds and wills and seek a blessed healing sense of inner unity, reconciliation, integration? ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
903:In an age where there is much talk about “being yourself” I reserve to myself the right to forget about being myself, since in any case there is very little chance of my being anybody else. Rather it seems to me that when one is too intent on “being himself” he runs the risk of impersonating a shadow. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
904:We cannot arrive at the perfect possession of God in this life, and that is why we are travelling and in darkness. But we already possess Him by grace, and therefore in that sense we have arrived and are dwelling in the light.
But oh! How far have I to go to find You in Whom I have already arrived! ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
905:Over and over again I have to make small decisions here and there, in regard to one or other. Distractions and obsessions are resolved in this way. What the resolution amounts to, in the end: letting go of the imaginary and the absent and returning to the present, the real, what is in front of my nose. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
906:I am against war, against violence, against violent revolution, for peaceful settlement of differences, for nonviolent but nevertheless radical changes. Change is needed, and violence will not really change anything: at most it will only transfer power from one set of bull-headed authorities to another. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
907:The pleasure of a good act is something to be remembered - not in order to feed our complacency but in order to remind us that virtuous actions are not only possible and valuable, but that they can become easier and more delightful and more fruitful than the acts of vice which oppose and frustrate them. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
908:We thank Him less by words than by the serene happiness of silent acceptance. It is our emptiness in the presence of His reality, our silence in the presence of His infinitely rich silence, our joy in the bosom of the serene darkness in which His light holds us absorbed, it is all this that praises Him. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
909:Persons are not known by intellect alone, not by principles alone, but only by love. It is when we love the other, the enemy, that we obtain from God the key to an understanding of who he is, and who we are. It is only this realization that can open to us the real nature of our duty, and of right action. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
910:The married man and the mother of a Christian family, if they are faithful to their obligations, will fulfill a mission that is as great as it is consoling: that of bringing into the world and forming young souls capable of happiness and love, souls capable of sanctification and transformation in Christ. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
911:For every gain in deep certitude there is a corresponding growth of superficial "doubt." This doubt is by no means opposed to genuine faith, but it mercilessly examines and questions the spurious "faith" of everyday life, the human faith which is nothing but the passive acceptance of conventional opinion. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
912:We never see the one truth that would help us begin to solve our ethical and political problems: that we are all more or less wrong, that we are all at fault, all limited and obstructed by our mixed motives, our self-deception, our greed, our self-righteousness and our tendency to aggression and hypocrisy. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
913:Very well, then: why are you attached to any one book, or to the words and ways of one saint when he himself tells you to let them go and walk in simplicity? To hang on to him as if to make a method of him is to contradict him and to go in the opposite direction to the one in which he would have you travel. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
914:For the contemplative there is no cogito (“I think”) and no ergo (“therefore”) but only SUM, I AM. Not in the sense of a futile assertion of our individuality as ultimately real, but in the humble realization of our mysterious being as persons in whom God dwells, with infinite sweetness and inalienable power. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
915:To live in communion, in genuine dialogue with others is absolutely necessary if man is to remain human. But to live in the midst of others, sharing nothing with them but the common noise and the general distraction, isolates a man in the worst way, separates him from reality in a way that is almost painless. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
916:But the man who is aware of his own unworthiness and the unworthiness of his brother is tempted with a subtler and more tormenting kind of hate: the general, searing, nauseating hate of everything and everyone, because everything is tainted with unworthiness, everything is unclean, everything is foul with sin. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
917:Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person of false self. I wind my experiences around myself and cover myself with glory like bandages in order to make myself perceptible to myself and to the world as if I were an invisible body that could only become visible when something visible covered its surface. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
918:The whole purpose of spiritual direction is to penetrate beneath the surface of a man's life, to get behind the façade of conventional gestures and attitudes which he presents to the world, and to bring out his inner spiritual freedom, his inmost truth, which is what we call the likeness of Christ in his soul. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
919:Do not be too quick to assume your enemy is a savage just because he is your enemy. Perhaps he is your enemy because he thinks you are a savage. Or perhaps he is afraid of you because he feels that you are afraid of him. And perhaps if he believed you are capable of loving him he would no longer be your enemy. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
920:I was worried before I saw the play 'The Seven Storey Mountain', thinking I don't really want to see a play about Thomas Merton. He probably wouldn't have either, ideally. Then it isn't. It's more about us and it's about our relationship to what he may or may not have thought about. It's its own thing completely. ~ Will Oldham, #NFDB
921:Since no man ever can, or could, live by himself and for himself alone, the destinies of thousands of other people were bound to be affected, some remotely, but some very directly and near-at-hand, by my own choices and decisions and desires, as my own life would also be formed and modified according to theirs. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
922:Surrender your own poverty and acknowledge your nothingness to the Lord. Whether you understand it or not, God loves you, is present in you, lives in you, dwells in you, calls you, saves you and offers you an understanding and compassion which are like nothing you have ever found in a book or heard in a sermon. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
923:And yet with every wound You robbed me of a crime,
And as each blow was paid with Blood,
You paid me also each great sin with greater graces.
For even as I killed You,
You made Yourself a greater thief than any in Your company,
Stealing my sins into Your dying life,
Robbing me even of my death. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
924:The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
925:This “ground,” this “world” where I am mysteriously present at once to my own self and to the freedoms of all other men, is not a visible, objective and determined structure with fixed laws and demands. It is a living and self-creating mystery of which I am myself a part, to which I am myself my own unique door. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
926:We must learn to realize that the love of God seeks us in every situation, and seeks our good. His inscrutable love seeks our awakening. True, since this awakening implies a kind of death to our exterior self, we will dread His coming in proportion as we are identified with this exterior self and attached to it. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
927:Death is someone you see very clearly with eyes in the center of your heart; eyes that see not by reacting to light, but by reacting to a kind of a chill from within the marrow of your own life. And, with those eyes, those interior eyes, open upon that coldness, I lay half asleep and looked at the visitor, death. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
928:Each particular being, in its individuality, its concrete nature and entity, with all its own characteristics and its private qualities and its own inviolable identity, gives glory to God by being precisely what He wants it to be here and now, in the circumstances ordained for it by His Love and His infinite Art. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
929:Thus we never see the one truth that would help us begin to solve our ethical and political problems: that we are all more or less wrong, that we are all at fault, all limited and obstructed by our mixed motives, our self-deception, our greed, our self-righteousness and our tendency to aggressivity and hypocrisy. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
930:I who am without love cannot become love unless Love identifies me with Himself. But if He sends His own Love, Himself, to act and love in me and in all that I do, then I shall be transformed, I shall discover who I am and shall possess my true identity by losing myself in Him. And that is what is called sanctity. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
931:Life consists in learning to live on one's own, spontaneous, freewheeling: to do this one must recognize what is one's own-be familiar and at home with oneself. This means basically learning who one is, and learning what one has to offer to the contemporary world, and then learning how to make that offering valid. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
932:The only true liberty is in the service of that which is beyond all limits, beyond all definitions, beyond all human appreciation: that which is All, and which therefore is no limited or individual thing: The All is no-thing, for if it were to be a single thing separated from all other things, it would not be All. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
933:There are different kinds of fear. One of the most terrible is the sensation that you are likely to become, at any moment, the protagonist in a Graham Greene novel: the man who tries to be virtuous and who is, in a certain sense, holy, and yet who is overwhelmed by sin as if there were a kind of fatality about it. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
934:It is in deep solitude that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brothers. The more solitary I am, the more affection I have for them. It is pure affection, and filled with reverance for the solitude of others. Solitude and silence teach me to love my brothers for what they are, not for what they say. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
935:The time has come when we must go out of ourselves and above ourselves and find Him no longer within us but outside us and above us. This we do first by arid faith, by a hope that burns like hot coals under the ashes of our poverty. We seek Him also by humble charity, in service of our brothers. Then, when God wills, ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
936:When your tongue is silent, you can rest in the silence of the forest. When your imagination is silent, the forest speaks to you. It tells you of its unreality and of the Reality of God. But when your mind is silent, then the forest suddenly becomes magnificently real and blazes transparently with the Reality of God. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
937:The first step to unselfish love is the recognition that our love may be deluded. We must first of all purify our love by renouncing the pleasure of loving as an end in itself. As long as pleasure is our end, we will be dishonest with ourselves and with those we love. We will not seek their good, but our own pleasure. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
938:When the Love of God is in me, God is able to love you through me and you are able to love God through me. If my soul were closed to that love, God’s love for you and your love for God and God’s love for Himself in you and in me, would be denied the particular expression which it finds through me and through no other. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
939:But I think St. Peter and the twelve Apostles would have been rather surprised at the concept that Christ had been scourged and beaten by soldiers, cursed and crowned with thorns and subjected to unutterable contempt and finally nailed to the Cross and left to bleed to death in order that we might all become gentlemen. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
940:Hope is proportionate to detachment. It brings our souls into the state of the most perfect detachment. In doing so, it restores all values by setting them in their right order. Hope empties our hands in order that we may work with them. It shows us that we have something to work for, and teaches us how to work for it. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
941:It is easy enough to tell the poor to accept their poverty as Gods will when you yourself have warm clothes and plenty of food and medical care and a roof over your head and no worry about the rent. But if you want them to believe youtry to share some of their poverty and see if you can accept it as Gods will yourself! ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
942:Keeping a journal has taught me that there is not so much new in your life as you sometimes think. When you re-read your journal you find out that your latest discovery is something you already found out five years ago. Still, it is true that one penetrates deeper and deeper into the same ideas and the same experiences. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
943:Who is willing to be satisfied with a job that expresses all his limitations? He will accept such work only as a 'means of livelihood' while he waits to discover his 'true vocation'. The world is full of unsuccessful businessmen who still secretly believe they were meant to be artists or writers or actors in the movies. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
944:AN ELDER was asked by a certain soldier if God would forgive a sinner. And he said to him: Tell me, beloved, if your cloak is torn, will you throw it away? The soldier replied and said: No. I will mend it and put it back on. The elder said to him: If you take care of your cloak, will God not be merciful to His own image? ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
945:It is true that God knows Himself in all the things that exist. He sees them, and it is because He sees them that they exist. It is because He loves them that they are good. His love in them is their intrinsic goodness. The value He sees in them is their value. In so far as He sees and loves them, all things reflect Him. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
946:The lights of prayer that make us imagine we are beginning to be angels are sometimes only signs that we are finally beginning to be men. We do not have a high enough opinion of our own nature. We think we are at the gates of heaven and we are only just beginning to come into our own realm as free and intelligent beings. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
947:It is a kind of pride to insist that none of our prayers should ever be petitions for our own needs: for this is only another subtle way of trying to put ourselves on the same plane as God – acting as if we had no needs, as if we were not creatures, not dependent on Him and dependent, by His will, on material things, too. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
948:Excerpt from Cracking the Safe:
Thus what the world calls good business is only a way
To gather up the loot, pack it, make it secure
In one convenient load for the more enterprising thieves.
Who is there, among those called smart,
Who does not spend his time amassing loot
For a bigger robber than himself? ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
949:For Christianity is not merely a doctrine or a system of beliefs, it is Christ living in us and uniting men to one another in His own Life and unity. “I in them, and Thou, Father, in Me, that they may be made perfect in One…. And the glory which Thou hast given me I have given them, that they may be One as we also are One. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
950:I was not sure where I was going, and I could not see what I would do when I got [there]. But you saw further and clearer than I, and you opened the seas before my ship, whose track led me across the waters to a place I had never dreamed of, and which you were even then preparing to be my rescue and my shelter and my home. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
951:The eyes of the saint make all beauty holy and the hands of the saint consecrate everything they touch to the glory of God, and the saint is never offended by anything and judges no man’s sin because he does not know sin. He knows the mercy of God. He knows that his own mission on earth is to bring that mercy to all men. W ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
952:Therefore each particular being, in its individuality, its concrete nature and entity, with all its own characteristics and its private qualities and its own inviolable identity, gives glory to God by being precisely what He wants it to be here and now, in the circumstances ordained for it by His Love and His infinite Art. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
953:thousands of Catholics everywhere, have the consummate audacity to weep and complain because God does not hear their prayers for peace, when they have neglected not only His will, but the ordinary dictates of natural reason and prudence, and let their children grow up according to the standards of a civilization of hyenas. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
954:I had learned from my own father that it was almost blasphemy to regard the function of art as merely to reproduce some kind of a sensible pleasure or, at best, to stir up the emotions to a transitory thrill. I had always understood that art was contemplation, and that it involved the action of the highest faculties of man. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
955:In all His acts God orders all things, whether good or evil, for the good of those who know Him and seek Him and who strive to bring their own freedom under obedience to His divine purpose. All that is done by the will of God in secret is done for His glory and for the good of those whom He has chosen to share in His glory. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
956:Providence, that is the love of God, is very wise in turning away from the self-will of men, and in having nothing to do with them, and leaving them to their own devices, as long as they are intent on governing themselves, to show them to what depths of futility and sorrow their own helplessness is capable of dragging them. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
957:The devil is no fool. He can get people feeling about heaven the way they ought to feel about hell. He can make them fear the means of grace the way they do not fear sin. And he does so, not by light but by obscurity, not by realities but by shadows, not by clarity and substance but by dreams and the creatures of psychosis. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
958:We do not really know how to forgive until we know what it is to be forgiven. Therefore we should be glad that we can be forgiven by our brothers. It is our forgiveness of one another that makes the love of Jesus for us manifest in our lives, for in forgiving one another we act towards one another as He has acted towards us. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
959:In humility is the greatest freedom. As long as you have to defend the imaginary self that you think is important, you lose your piece of heart. As soon as you compare that shadow with the shadows of other people, you lose all joy, because you have begun to trade in unrealities and there is no joy in things that do not exist. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
960:they introduced me to extended communities of faith through writers I had never heard of before . . . Along with the writings of Gerald May and Thomas Keating, whom I had not known before, I was encouraged to explore or revisit a few other writers, including Richard Rohr (Adam’s Return and The Naked Now), Thomas Merton (Thoughts ~ Peter Enns, #NFDB
961:A letter arrives stamped with the slogan “The U. S. Army, key to peace.” No army is the key to peace, neither the U. S. Army nor the Soviet Army nor any other. No “great” nation has the key to anything but war. Power has nothing to do with peace. The more men build up military power, the more they violate peace and destroy it. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
962:Detachment from things does not mean setting up a contradiction between 'things' and 'God' as if God were another thing and as if creatures were His rivals. We do not detach ourselves from things in order to attach ourselves to God, but rather we become detached from ourselves in order to see and use all things in and for God. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
963:It is the will of God that we live not only as rational beings, but as "new men" regenerated by the Holy Spirit in Christ. It is His will that we reach out for our inheritance, that we answer His call to be His sons. We are born men without our consent, but the consent to be sons of God has to be elicited by our own free will. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
964:It is the will of God that we live not only as rational beings, but as 'new men' regenerated by the Holy Spirit in Christ. It is His will that we reach out for our inheritance, that we answer His call to be His sons. We are born men without our consent, but the consent to be sons of God has to be elicited by our own free will. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
965:Providence, that is the love of God, is very wise in turning away from the self-will of men, and in having nothing to do with them, and leaving them to their own devices, as long as they are intent on governing themselves, to show them to what depths of futility and sorrow their own helplessness is capable of dragging them. And ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
966:To be risen with Christ means not only that one has a choice and that one may live by a higher law - the law of grace and love - but that one must do so. The first obligation of the Christian is to maintain their freedom from all superstitions, all blind taboos and religious formalities, indeed from all empty forms of legalism. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
967:When I am liberated by silence, when I am no longer involved in the measurement of life, but in the living of it, I can discover a form of prayer in which there is effectively no distraction. My whole life becomes a prayer. My whole silence is full of prayer. The world of silence in which I am immersed contributes to my prayer. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
968:If I had a message to my contemporaries it is surely this: Be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success . . . If you are too obsessed with success, you will forget to live. If you have learned only how to be a success, your life has probably been wasted. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
969:Things that are good are good, and if one is responding to that goodness one is in contact with a truth from which one is getting something. The truth is doing us good. The truth of the sunshine, the truth of the rain, the truth of the fresh air, the truth of the wind in the trees, these are truths. And they are always accessible! ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
970:But the man who is not afraid to admit everything that he sees to be wrong with himself, and yet recognizes that he may be the object of God's love precisely because of his shortcomings, can begin to be sincere. His sincerity is based on confidence, not in his own illusions about himself, but in the endless, unfailing mercy of God. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
971:There is no neutrality between gratitude and ingratitude. Those who are not grateful soon begin to complain of everything. Those who do not love, hate. In the spiritual life there is no such thing as an indifference to love or hate. That is why tepidity (which seems to be indifferent) is so detestable. It is hate disguised as love. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
972:When society is made up of men who know no interior solitude it can no longer be held together by love: and consequently it is held together by a violent and abusive authority. But when men are violently deprived of the solitude and freedom which are their due, the society in which they live becomes putrid, it festers with servility ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
973:The ever-changing reality in the midst of which we live should awaken us to the possibility of an uninterrupted dialogue with God. By this I do not mean continuous “talk,” or a frivolously conversational form of affective prayer which is sometimes cultivated in convents, but a dialogue of love and of choice. A dialogue of deep wills. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
974:We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and God is shining through it all the time. God manifests Himself everywhere, in everything - in people and in things and in nature and in events ... The only thing is we don't see it ... I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
975:It is not humility to insist on being someone that you are not. It is as much as saying that you know better than God who you are and who you ought to be. How do you expect to arrive at the end of your own journey if you take the road to another mans city? How do you expect to reach your own perfection by leading somebody else’s life? ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
976:It was in this year, too, that the hard crust of my dry soul finally squeezed out all the last traces of religion that had ever been in it. There was no room for any God in that empty temple full of dust and rubbish which I was now so jealously to guard against all intruders, in order to devote it to the worship of my own stupid will. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
977:Father, I love You Whom I do not know, and I embrace You Whom I do not see, and I abandon myself to You Whom I have offended because You love in me Your only begotten Son. You see Him in me, You embrace Him in me, because He has willed to identify Himself completely with me by that love which brought Him to death, for me, on the Cross. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
978:It is a law of man’s nature, written into his very essence, and just as much a part of him as the desire to build houses and cultivate the land and marry and have children and read books and sing songs, that he should want to stand together with other men in order to acknowledge their common dependence on God, their Father and Creator. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
979:The man who fears to be alone will never be anything but lonely, no matter how much he may surround himself with people. But the man who learns, in solitude and recollection, to be at peace with his own loneliness, and to prefer its reality to the illusion of merely natural companionship, comes to know the invisible companionship of God ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
980:A “FAITH” that merely confirms us in opinionatedness and self-complacency may well be an expression of theological doubt. True faith is never merely a source of spiritual comfort. It may indeed bring peace, but before it does so it must involve us in struggle. A “faith” that avoids this struggle is really a temptation against true faith. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
981:God utters me like a word containing a partial thought of him. A word will never be able to comprehend the voice that utters it. But if I am true to the concept that God utters in me, if I am true to the thought of Him that I was meant to embody, I shall be full of his actuality and find him everywhere in myself, and find myself nowhere. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
982:By my monastic life and vows I am saying no to all the concentration camps, the aerial bombardments, the staged political trials, the judicial murders, the racial injustices, the economic tyrannies, and the whole socioeconomic apparatus which seems geared for nothing but global destruction in spite of all its fair words in favor of peace. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
983:Free will is not given to us merely as a firework to be shot off into the air. There are some men who seem to think their acts are freer in proportion as they are without purpose, as if a rational purpose imposed some kind of limitation upon us. That is like saying that one is richer if he throws money out the window than if he spends it. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
984:My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me...you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
985:The psychological impotence of our enraged generation must be traced to the overwhelming accusation of insincerity which every man and woman has to confront, in the depths of his own soul, when he seeks to love merely for his own pleasure.And yet the men of our time do not love with enough courage to risk even discomfort or inconvenience. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
986:THE more I become identified with God, the more will I be identified with all the others who are identified with Him. His Love will live in all of us. His Spirit will be our One Life, the Life of all of us and Life of God. And we shall love one another and God with the same Love with which He loves us and Himself. This love is God Himself. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
987:There is a dark force for destruction within us, which someone has called the “death instinct.” It is a terribly powerful thing, this force generated by our own frustrated self-love battling with itself. It is the power of a self-love that has turned into self-hatred and which, in adoring itself, adores the monster by which it is consumed. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
988:To know the Cross is not merely to know our own sufferings. For the Cross is the sign of salvation, and no man is saved by his own sufferings. To know the Cross is to know that we are saved by the sufferings of Christ; more, it is to know the love of Christ Who underwent suffering and death in order to save us. It is, then, to know Christ. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
989:Consequently, the truth of God lives in our souls more by the power of superior moral courage than by the light of an eminent intelligence. Indeed, spiritual intelligence itself depends on the fortitude and patience with which we sacrifice ourselves for the truth, as it is communicated to our lives concretely in the providential will of God ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
990:Far from ruining the purity of solitary prayer, petition guards and preserves that purity. The solitary, more than anyone else, is always aware of his needs before God. ... His prayer is an expression of his poverty. Petition, for him, can hardly become a mere formality, a concession to human custom, as if he did not need God in everything. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
991:The camera does not know what it takes; it captures materials with which you reconstruct, not so much what you saw as what you thought you saw. Hence the best photography is aware, mindful, of illusion and uses illusion, permitting and encouraging it - especially unconscious and powerful illusions that are not usually admitted on the scene. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
992:What Zen communicates is an awareness that is potentially already there but is not conscious of itself. Zen is then not Kerygma but realization, not revelation but consciousness, not news from the Father who sends His Son into this world, but awareness of the ontological ground of our own being here and now, right in the midst of the world. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
993:Our technological society has no longer any place in it for wisdom that seeks truth for its own sake, that seeks the fullness of being, that seeks to rest in an intuition of the very ground of all being. Without wisdom, the apparent opposition of action and contemplation, of work and rest, of involvement and detachment, can never be resolved. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
994:Thomas Merton who said: “The will of God is not a ‘fate’ to which we must submit, but a creative act in our life that produces something absolutely new, something hitherto unforeseen by the laws and established patterns. Our cooperation consists not solely in conforming to external laws, but in opening our wills to this mutually creative act.”5 ~ Richard Rohr, #NFDB
995:Either you look at the universe as a very poor creation out of which no one can make anything, or you look at your own life and your own part in the universe as infinitely rich, full of inexhaustible interest, opening out into the infinite further responsibilities for study and contemplation and interest and praise. Beyond all and in all is God. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
996:I am beginning to realize that "sanity" is no longer a value or an end in itself. The "sanity" of modern man is about as useful to him as the huge bulk and muscles of the dinosaur. If he were a little less sane, a little more doubtful, a little more aware of his absurdities and contradictions, perhaps there might be a possibility of his survival. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
997:The land which thou goest to possess is not like the land of Egypt from whence thou camest out...For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor your ways my ways, saith the Lord...Seek the Lord while He may be found, call upon Him while He is near...Why do you spend money for that which is not bread and your labor for that which doth not satisfy you? ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
998:All men who live only according to their five senses, and seek nothing beyond the gratification of their natural appetites for pleasure and reputation and power, cut themselves off from that charity which is the principle of all spiritual vitality and happiness because it alone saves us from the barren wilderness of our own abominable selfishness. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
999:But there is always a danger that the priest qualified to seriously direct religious will be overwhelmed by the demand for his services. His first duty, if he wants to be an effective director, is to see to his own interior life and take time for prayer and meditation, since he will never be able to give to others what he does not possess himself. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1000:It is easier to serve the hate-gods because they thrive on the worship of collective fanaticism. To serve the hate-gods, one has only to be blinded by collective passion. To serve the God of Love one must be free, one must face the terrible responsibility of the decision to love in spite of all unworthiness whether in oneself or in one’s neighbor. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1001:One of the strange laws of the contemplative life is that in it you do not sit down and solve problems: you bear with them until they somehow solve themselves. Or until life itself solves them for you. Usually the solution consists in a discovery that they only existed insofar as they were inseparably connected with your own illusory exterior self. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1002:The land which thou goest to possess is not like the land of Egypt from whence thou camest out... For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor your ways my ways, saith the Lord...Seek the Lord while He may be found, call upon Him while He is near...Why do you spend money for that which is not bread and your labor for that which doth not satisfy you? ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1003:patológica. Echando la culpa al negro es como el blanco trata de mantenerse sin dispersión. El negro está en la triste situación de ser usado para todo, hasta para la propia inseguridad psicológica del blanco. Por desgracia, una simple irrupción de violencia no hará más que dar al blanco la justificación que desea. Le convencerá de que es de verdad, ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1004:We cannot master everything, taste everything, understand everything, drain every experience to its last dregs. But if we have the courage to let almost everything else go, we will probably be able to retain the thing necessary for us-whatever it may be. If we are too eager to have everything, we will almost certainly miss even the one thing we need ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1005:Zen enriches no one. There is no body to be found. The birds may come and circle for a while in the place where it is thought to be. But they soon go elsewhere. When they are gone, the "nothing," the "no-body" that was there, suddenly appears. That is Zen. It was there all the time but the scavengers missed it, because it was not their kind of prey. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1006:Contradictions have always existed in the soul of [individuals]. But it is only when we prefer analysis to silence that they become a constant and insoluble problem. We are not meant to resolve all contradictions but to live with them and rise above them and see them in the light of exterior and objective values which make them trivial by comparison. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1007:Persons are not known by intellect alone, not by principles alone, but only by love. It is when we love the other, the enemy, that we obtain from God the key to an understanding of who he is, and who we are. It is only this realization that can open to us the real nature of our duty, and of right action. ~ Thomas Merton, in a letter to Dorothy Day (20 December 1961), #NFDB
1008:God bridges the infinite distances between Himself and the spirits created to love Him, by supernatural missions of His own life. The Father, dwelling in the depths of all things and in my own depths, communicates to me His Word and His Spirit. Receiving them I am drawn into His own life and know God in His own Love, being one with Him in His own Son. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1009:In the natural order no matter what ideals may be theoretically possible, most people more or less live for themselves and for their own interests and pleasures or for those of their own family or group, and therefore they are constantly interfering with one another's aims, and hurting one another and injuring one another, whether they mean it or not. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1010:Christianity is not stoicism. The Cross does not sanctify us by destroying human feeling. Detachment is not insensibility. Too many ascetics fail to become great saints precisely because their rules and ascetic practices have merely deadened their humanity instead of setting it free to develop richly, in all its capacities, under the influence of grace. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1011:Thank God! I am only another member of the human race, like all the rest of them... As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1012:The thing about Zen is that it pushes contradictions to their ultimate limit where one has to choose between madness and innocence. And Zen. suggests that we may be driving toward one or the other on a cosmic scale. Driving toward them because, one way or the other, as madmen or innocents, we are already there. It might be good to open our eyes and see. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1013:When society is made up of men who know no interior solitude it can no longer be held together by love: and consequently it is held together by a violent and abusive authority. But when men are violently deprived of the solitude and freedom which are their due, then society in which they live becomes putrid, it festers with servility, resentment and hate. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1014:it any wonder that there can be no peace in a world where everything possible is done to guarantee that the youth of every nation will grow up absolutely without moral and religious discipline, and without the shadow of an interior life, or of that spirituality and charity and faith which alone can safeguard the treaties and agreements made by governments? ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1015:The question of love is one that cannot be evaded. Whether or not you claim to be interested in it from the moment you are alive you are bound to be concerned with love because love is not just something that happens to you: It is a certain special way of being alive. Love is in fact an intensification of life a completeness a fullness a wholeness of life. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1016:Those of us who attempt to act and do things for others or for the world without deepening our own self-understanding, freedom, integrity, and capacity to love, will not have anything to give others. We will communicate to them nothing but the contagion of our own obsessions, our aggressivity, our ego-centered ambitions, our delusions about ends and means. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1017:Teach me to take all grace / And spring it into blades of act, / Grow spears and sheaves of charity, / While each new instant, (new eternity) / Flowering with clean and individual circumstance, / Speaks me the whisper of [God's] consecrating Spirit. / Then will obedience bring forth new Incarnations / Shining to God with the features of [the Lord's] Christ. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1018:As long as we are on earth, the love that unites us will bring us suffering by our very contact with one another, because this love is the resetting of a body of broken bones. Even saints cannot live with saints on this earth without some anguish. There are two things which men can do about the pain of disunion with other men. They can love or they can hate. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1019:One thing is certain: the humility of faith, if it is followed by the proper consequences-by the acceptance of the work and sacrifice demanded by our providential task-will do far more to launch us into the full current of historical reality than the pompous rationalizations of politicians who think they are somehow the directors and manipulators of history. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1020:Discovering vocation does not mean scrambling toward some prize just beyond my reach but accepting the treasure of true self I already possess. Vocation does not come from a voice out there calling me to be something I am not. It comes from a voice in here calling me to be the person I was born to be, to fulfill the original selfhood given me at birth by God. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1021:Is it any wonder that there can be no peace in a world where everything possible is done to guarantee that the youth of every nation will grow up absolutely without moral and religious discipline, and without the shadow of an interior life, or of that spirituality and charity and faith which alone can safeguard the treaties and agreements made by governments? ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1022:We can be, in some sense, friends to all men because there is no man on earth with whom we do not have something in common. But it would be false to treat too many men as intimate friends. It is not possible to be intimate with more than very few, because there are only very few in the world with whom we have practically everything in common. Love, then, must ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1023:Fishes are born in water Man is born in Tao. If fishes, born in water, Seek the deep shadow Of pond and pool, All their needs Are satisfied. If man, born in Tao, Sinks into the deep shadow Of non-action To forget aggression and concern, He lacks nothing His life is secure. Moral: “All the fish needs Is to get lost in water. All man needs is to get lost In Tao. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1024:IF you write for God you will reach many men and bring them joy. If you write for men—you may make some money and you may give someone a little joy and you may make a noise in the world, for a little while. If you write only for yourself you can read what you yourself have written and after ten minutes you will be so disgusted you will wish that you were dead. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1025:Follow my ways and I will lead you To golden-haired suns, Logos and music, blameless joys, Innocent of questions And beyond answers. For I, Solitude, am thine own Self: I, Nothingness, am thy All. I, Silence, am thy Amen. [1964.jpg] -- from A Thomas Merton Reader, by Thomas Merton / Edited by Thomas P. McDonnell
~ Thomas Merton, Follow my ways and I will lead you
,#NFDB
1026:If you write for God you will reach many men and bring them joy. If you write for men--you may make some money and you may give someone a little joy and you may make a noise in the world, for a little while. If you write for yourself, you can read what you yourself have written and after ten minutes you will be so disgusted that you will wish that you were dead. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1027:March 1 FIRST EMBER SATURDAY IN LENT Last night it snowed again and there is a fairly thick blanket of snow on the ground and on the trees. The sky looks like lead and seems to promise more. It is about as dark as my own mind. I see nothing, I understand nothing. I am sorry for complaining and making a disturbance. All I want is to please God and to do His will. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1028:To enter into the realm of contemplation, one must in a certain sense die: but this death is in fact the entrance into a higher life. It is a death for the sake of life, which leaves behind all that we can know or treasure as life, as thought, as experience as joy, as being. [Every form of intuition and experience] die to be born again on a higher level of life. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1029:And they were saints in that most effective and telling way: sanctified by leading ordinary lives in a completely supernatural manner, sanctified by obscurity, by usual skills, by common tasks, by routine, but skills, tasks, routine which received a supernatural form from grace within, and from the habitual union of their souls with God in deep faith and charity. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1030:Discovering vocation does not mean scrambling toward some prize just beyond my reach but accepting the treasure of true self I already possess. Vocation does not come from a voice out there calling me to be something I am not. It comes from a voice in here calling me to be the person I was born to be, to fulfill the original selfhood given me at birth by God. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1031:Only the man who has had to face despair is really convinced that he needs mercy. Those who do not want mercy never seek it. It is better to find God on the threshold of despair than to risk our lives in a complacency that has never felt the need of forgiveness. A life that is without problems may literally be more hopeless than one that always verges on despair. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1032:OUR discovery of God is, in a way, God’s discovery of us. We cannot go to heaven to find Him because we have no way of knowing where heaven is or what it is. He comes down from heaven and finds us. He looks at us from the depths of His own infinite actuality, which is everywhere, and His seeing us gives us a new being and a new mind in which we also discover Him. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1033:We must approach our meditation realizing that 'grace,' 'mercy,' and 'faith' are not permanent inalienable possessions which we gain by our efforts and retain as though by right, provided that we behave ourselves. They are CONSTANTLY RENEWED GIFTS. The life of grace in our hearts is renewed from moment to moment, directly and personally by God in his love for us. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1034:We must check the inspirations that come to us in the depths of our own conscience against the revelation that is given to us with divinely certain guaranteers by those who have inherited in our midst the place of Christ's Apostles―by those who speak to us in the Name of Christ and as it were in His own Person. Qui vos audit me audit; qui vos spernit, me spernit. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1035:Contemplation is life itself, fully awake, fully active, and fully aware that it is alive. It is spiritual wonder. It is spontaneous awe at the sacredness of life, of being. It is gratitude for life, for awareness, and for being. It is a vivid realization of the fact that life and being in us proceed from an invisible, transcendent, and infinitely abundant Source. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1036:I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1037:Silence has many dimensions. It can be a regression and an escape, a loss of self, or it can be presence, awareness, unification, self-discovery. Negative silence blurs and confuses our identity, and we lapse into daydreams or diffuse anxieties. Positive silence pulls us together and makes us realize who we are, who we might be, and the distance between these two. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1038:If it so happened that I had once written a best-seller, this was a pure accident, due to inattention and naivete, and I would take very good care never to do the same again. If I had a message for my contemporaries, I said, it was surely this: Be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1039:See, see Who God is, see the glory of God, going up to Him out of this incomprehensible and infinite Sacrifice in which all history begins and ends, all individual lives begin and end, in which every story is told, and finished, and settled for joy or for sorrow: the one point of reference for all the truths that are outside of God, their center, their focus: Love. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1040:We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible, in order to cater to them with the products of our factories and printing presses and movie studios and all the rest. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1041:There are days when I am convinced that Heaven starts already, now, in this ordinary life just as it is, in all its incompleteness, yet, this is where Heaven starts.. see within yourself, if you can find it. I walked through the field in front of the house, lots of swallows flying, everywhere! Some very near me..it was magical. "We are already one, yet we know it not. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1042:Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time. The mind that responds to the intellectual and spiritual values that lie hidden in a poem, a painting, or a piece of music, discovers a spiritual vitality that lifts it above itself, takes it out of itself, and makes it present to itself on a level of being that it did not know it could ever achieve. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1043:You can now find the most ardent Christians lined up in the most ridiculous, regressive, irrational parades. If they were concerned only with flying saucers and conversations with the departed it would not be so bad: but they are also deeply involved in racism, in quasi-Fascist nationalism, in every shade of fanatical hate cult, and in every semilunatic pressure group. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1044:It is by the Holy Spirit that we love those who are united to us in Christ. The more plentifully we have received of the Spirit of Christ, the more perfectly we are able to love them: and the more we love them the more we receive the Spirit. It is clear, however, that since we love them by the Spirit Who is given to us by Jesus, it is Jesus Himself Who loves them in us. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1045:What I need most of all is the grace to really accept God as He gives Himself to me in every situation. “He came unto His own and His own received Him not.” Good Shepherd, You have a wild and crazy sheep in love with thorns and brambles. But please don’t get tired of looking for me! I know You won’t. For You have found me. All I have to do is stay found. April 11, 1948, ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1046:When humility delivers a man from attachment to his own works and his own reputation, he discovers that perfect joy is possible only when we have completely forgotten ourselves. And it is only when we pay no more attention to our own deeds and our own reputation and our own excellence that we are at last completely free to serve God in perfection for His own sake alone. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1047:I am willing to admit that some people might live there for years, or even a lifetime, so protected that they never sense the sweet stench of corruption that is all around them - the keen, thin scent of decay that pervades everything and accuses with a terrible accusation the superficial youthfulness, the abounding undergraduate noise, that fills those ancient buildings. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1048:How deluded we sometimes are by the clear notions we get out of books. They make us think that we really understand things of which we have no practical knowledge at all. I remember how learnedly and enthusiastically I could talk for hours about mysticism and the experimental knowledge of God, and all the while I was stoking the fires of the argument with Scotch and soda. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1049:In any case, his religious teaching consisted mostly in more or less vague ethical remarks, an obscure mixture of ideals of English gentlemanliness and his favorite notions of personal hygiene. Everybody knew that his class was liable to degenerate into a demonstration of some practical points about rowing, with Buggy sitting on the table and showing us how to pull an oar. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1050:The initiation with its various tortures lasted about a week, and I cheerfully accepted penances which, if they were imposed in a monastery, for a supernatural motive, and for some real reason, instead of for no reason at all, would cause such an uproar that all religious houses would be closed and the Catholic Church would probably have a hard time staying in the country. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1051:My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following Your Will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please You does in fact please You. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1052:...only God's truth without limit, without defect, without stain. This clean light, which tastes of Paradise, is beyond all pride, beyond comment, beyond proprietorship, beyond solitude. It is in all and for all. It is the true light that shines in everyone, in "every man coming into this world." It is the light of Christ, "Who stands in the midst of us and we know Him not. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1053:The beasts and the trees will one day share with us a new creation and we will see them as God sees them and know that they are very good. Meanwhile, if we embrace them for themselves, we discover both them and ourselves as evil. This is the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil—disgust with the things we have misused and hatred of ourselves for misusing them. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1054:The deepest level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless. It is beyond words. It is beyond speech. It is beyond concept. Not that we discover a new unity, but we discover an old unity. My dear brothers and sisters, we are already one. But we imagine we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be, is what we are. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1055:Words stand between silence and silence: between the silence of things and the silence of our own being. Between the silence of the world and the silence of God. When we have really met and known the world in silence, words do not separate us from the world nor from other men, nor from God, nor from ourselves because we no longer trust entirely in language to contain reality. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1056:In all the situations of life the “will of God” comes to us not merely as an external dictate of impersonal law but above all as an interior invitation of personal love. Too often the conventional conception of “God’s will” as a sphinx-like and arbitrary force bearing down upon us with implacable hostility, leads men to lose faith in a God they cannot find it possible to love. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1057:In order to find God in ourselves, we must stop looking at ourselves, stop checking and verifying ourselves in the mirror of our own futility, and be content to be in Him and to do whatever He wills, according to our limitations, judging our acts not in the light of our own illusions, but in the light of His reality which is all around us in the things and people we live with. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1058:The danger of education, I have found, is that it so easily confuses means with ends. Worse than that, it quite easily forgets both and devotes itself merely to the mass production of uneducated gradtuates - people literaly unfit for anything except to take part in an elaborate and completely artificial charade which they and their contemporaries have conspired to call "life". ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1059:There is in us an instinct for newness, for renewal, for a liberation of creative power. We seek to awaken in ourselves a force which really changes our lives from within. And yet the same instinct tells us that this change is a recovery of that which is deepest, most original, most personal in ourselves. To be born again is not to become somebody else, but to become ourselves. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1060:TO say that I am made in the image of God is to say that love is the reason for my existence, for God is love. Love is my true identity. Selflessness is my true self. Love is my true character. Love is my name. If, therefore, I do anything or think anything or say anything or know anything that is not purely for the love of God, it cannot give me peace, or rest, or fulfillment, or ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1061:Nonviolence seeks to ‘win’ not by destroying or even by humiliating the adversary, but by convincing [the adversary] that there is a higher and more certain common good than can be attained by bombs and blood. Nonviolence, ideally speaking, does not try to overcome the adversary by winning over [them], but to turn [them] from an adversary into a collaborator by winning [them] over. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1062:I had never had an adequate notion of what Christians meant by God. I had simply taken it for granted that the God in Whom religious people believed, and to Whom they attributed the creation and government of all things, was a noisy and dramatic and passionate character, a vague, jealous, hidden being, the objectification of all their own desires and strivings and subjective ideals. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1063:I remember receiving hate mail saying, “Tell this talking Trappist who took a vow of silence to shut up!” Though silence is a traditional part of their lives, Trappists take no such vow. Maintaining silence (to increase contemplation) does not by itself rule out communication (which they do in sign language). I had an answer for the hate-mongers: “Writing is a form of contemplation. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1064:But there is no substance under the things I have gathered together about me. I am hollow, and my structure of pleasures and ambitions has no foundation. I am objectified in them. But they are all destined by their very contingency to be destroyed. And when they are gone there will be nothing left of me but my own nakedness and emptiness and hollowness, to tell me that I am a mistake. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1065:I had begun to comprehend that the Bible’s story is about the relationship of God to human beings, and of human beings to one another, and that this meant that it is our friendships, marriages, families, and even church congregations that best reveal what kind of theology we have, who our God is. Or, as Thomas Merton once put it, “because we love, God is present.” That is the story. ~ Kathleen Norris, #NFDB
1066:Solitude means withdrawal from an artificial and fictional level of being which men, divided by original sin, have fabricated in order to keep peace with concupiscence and death. But by that very fact the solitary finds himself on the level of a more perfect spiritual society—the city of those who have become real enough to confess and glorify God (that is, life) in the teeth of death. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1067:Thomas Merton says, “Discovering vocation does not mean scrambling toward some prize just beyond my reach but accepting the treasure of true self I already possess. Vocation does not come from a voice out there calling me to be something I am not. It comes from a voice in here calling me to be the person I was born to be, to fulfill the original selfhood given me at birth by God. ~ Karen Swallow Prior, #NFDB
1068:For language to have meaning, there must be intervals of silence somewhere, to divide word from word and utterance from utterance. He who retires into silence does not necessarily hate language. Perhaps it is love and respect for language which imposes silence upon him. For the mercy of God is not heard in words unless it is heard, both before and after the words are spoken, in silence. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1069:He who attempts to act and do things for others or for the world without deepening his own self-understanding, freedom, integrity and capacity to love, will not have anything to give others. He will communicate to them nothing but the contagion of his own obsessions, his aggressiveness, his ego-centered ambitions, his delusions about ends and means, his doctrinaire prejudices and ideas. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1070:Why should I want to be rich when You were poor? Why should I desire to be famous and powerful in the eyes of men when some of those who exalted the false prophet and stoned the true rejected You and nailed You to the Cross? Why should I cherish in my heart a hope that devours me--the hope for perfect happiness in this life--when such hope, doomed to frustration, is nothing but despair? ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1071:I believe we are going to have to prepare ourselves for the difficult and patient task of outgrowing rigid and intransigent nationalism, and work slowly towards a world federation of peaceful nations. How will this be possible? Don't ask me. I don't know. But unless we develop a moral, spiritual, and political wisdom that is proportionate to our technological skill, our skill may end us. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1072:Our thought should not merely be an answer to what someone else has just said. Or what someone else might have said. Our interior world must be more than an echo of the words of someone else. There is no point in being a moon to somebody else's sun, still less is there any justification for our being moons of one another, and hence darkness to one another, not one of us being a true sun. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1073:The deepest level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless. It is beyond words, and it is beyond speech, and it is beyond concept. Not that we discover a new unity. We discover an older unity. My dear Brothers [and Sisters], we are already one. But we imagine that we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1074:The soul of man, left to its own natural level, is a potentially lucid crystal left in darkness. It is perfect in its own nature, but it lacks something that it can only receive from outside and above itself. But when the light shines in it, it becomes in a manner transformed into light and seems to lose its nature in the splendor of a higher nature, the nature of the light that is in it. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1075:In order to settle down in the quiet of our own being we must learn to be detached from the results of our own activity. We must be content to live without watching ourselves live, to work with expecting immediate reward, to love without an instant satisfaction, and to exist without any special recognition. It is only when we are detached from ourselves that we can be at peace with ourselves. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1076:... Nothing resembles reality less than the photograph. Nothing resembles substance less than its shadow. To convey the meaning of something substantial you have to use not a shadow but a sign, not the limitation but the image. The image is a new and different reality, and of course it does not convey an impression of some object, but the mind of the subject; and that is something else again. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1077:It is not merely our own desire but the desire of Christ in His Spirit that drives us to grow in love. Those who seldom or never feel in their hearts the desire for the love of God and other men, and who do not thirst for the pure waters of desire which are poured out in us by the strong, living God, are usually those who have drunk from other rivers or have dug for themselves broken cisterns. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1078:The primordial blessing, 'increase and multiply', has suddenly become a hemorrhage of terror. We are numbered in billions, and massed together, marshalled, numbered, marched here and there, taxed, drilled, armed, worked to the point of insensibility, dazed by information, drugged by entertainment, surfeited with everything, nauseated with the human race and with ourselves, nauseated with life. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1079:The world of men has forgotten the joys of silence, the peace of solitude, which is necessary, to some extent, for the fullness of human living. Man cannot be happy for long unless he is in contact with the springs of spiritual life which are hidden in the depths of his own soul. If man is exiled constantly from his own home, locked out of his spiritual solitude, he ceases to be a true person. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1080:The other loan was that of a book. The Headmaster came along, one day, and gave me a little blue book of poems. I looked at the name on the back. “Gerard Manley Hopkins.” I had never heard of him. But I opened the book, and read the “Starlight Night” and the Harvest poem and the most lavish and elaborate early poems. I noticed that the man was a Catholic and a priest and, what is more, a Jesuit. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1081:The silence of the spheres is the music of a wedding feast. The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of life, the more we analyze them out into strange finalities and complex purposes of our own, the more we involve ourselves in sadness. But it does not matter much because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things, or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1082:The ultimate perfection of the contemplative life is not a heaven of separate individuals, each one viewing his own private intuition of God; it is a sea of Love which flows through the One Body of all the elect, all the angels and saints, and their contemplation would be incomplete if it were not shared, or if it were shared with fewer souls, or with spirits capable of less vision and less joy. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1083:Merely to resist evil with evil by hating those who hate us and seeking to destroy them, is actually no resistance at all. It is active and purposeful collaboration in evil that brings the Christian into direct and intimate contact with the same source of evil and hatred which inspires the acts of his enemy. It leads in practice to a denial of Christ and to the service of hatred rather than love. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1084:Some of us need to discover that we will not begin to live more fully until we have the courage to do and see and taste and experience much less than usual... And for a man who has let himself be drawn completely out of himself by his activity, nothing is more difficult than to sit still and rest, doing nothing at all. The very act of resting is the hardest and most courageous act he can perform. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1085:Each one of us has some kind of vocation. We are all called by God to share in His life and in His Kingdom. Each one of us is called to a special place in the Kingdom. If we find that place we will be happy. If we do not find it, we can never be completely happy. For each one of us, there is only one thing necessary: to fulfill our own destiny, according to God's will, to be what God wants us to be. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1086:It is good for the soul to be in solitude for a great part of the time. But if it should seek solitude for its own comfort and consolation, it will have to endure more darkness and more anguish and more trial. Pure prayer only takes possession of our hearts for good when we no longer desire any special light or grace or consolation for ourselves, and pray without any thought of our own satisfaction. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1087:Many times it was like that. And in a sense, this terrible situation is the pattern and prototype of all sin: the deliberate and formal will to reject disinterested love for us for the purely arbitrary reason that we simply do not want it. We will to separate ourselves from that love. We reject it entirely and absolutely, and will not acknowledge it, simply because it does not please us to be loved. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1088:The earthly desires men cherish are shadows. There is no true happiness in fulfilling them. Why, then, do we continue to pursue joys without substance? Because the pursuit itself has become our only substitute for joy. Unable to rest in anything we achieve, we determine to forget our discontent in a ceaseless quest for new satisfactions. In this pursuit, desire itself becomes our chief satisfaction. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1089:THE most dangerous man in the world is the contemplative who is guided by nobody. He trusts his own visions. He obeys the attractions of an interior voice but will not listen to other men. He identifies the will of God with anything that makes him feel, within his own heart, a big, warm, sweet interior glow. The sweeter and the warmer the feeling is the more he is convinced of his own infallibility. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1090:It is not possible to be intimate with nore than very few, because there are only very few in the world with whom we have practically everything in common.
There is, however, one universal basis for friendship with all men: we are all loved by God, and I should desire them all to love Him with all their power.
... the truth remains that our destiny is to love one another as Christ has loved us. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1091:Our God...is a consuming fire. And if we, by love, become transformed into Him and burn as He burns, His fire will be our everlasting joy. But if we refuse His love and remain in the coldness of sin and opposition to Him and to other men then will His fire (by our own choice rather than His) become our everlasting enemy, and Love, instead of being our joy, will become our torment and our destruction. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1092:At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our life, which is inaccessable to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1093:If the deepest ground of my being is love, then
in that very love and nowhere else will I find
myself, the world, and my brother and sister
in Christ. It is not a question of either-or but
of all-in-one. It is not a matter of exclusivity
and “purity” but of wholeness, wholeheartedness,
unity, and of Meister Eckhart’s gleichheit
(equality) which finds the same ground of love ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1094:It is true, the Zen-man’s contempt for conventional and formalistic social custom is a healthy phenomenon, but it is healthy only because it presupposes a spiritual liberty based on freedom from passion, egotism and self-delusion. A pseudo-Zen attitude which seeks to justify a complete moral collapse with a few rationalizations based on the Zen Masters is only another form of bourgeois self-deception. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1095:What does it mean to know and experience my own “nothingness?” It is not enough to turn away in disgust from my illusions and faults and mistakes, to separate myself from them as if they were not, and as if I were someone other than myself. This kind of self-annihilati on is only a worse illusion, it is a pretended humility which, by saying “I am nothing” I mean in effect “I wish I were not what I am. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1096:In general, it can be said that no contemplative life is possible without ascetic self-discipline. One must learn to survive without the habit-forming luxuries which get such a hold on men today. I do not say that to be a contemplative one absolutely has to go without smoking or without alcohol, but certainly one must be able to use these things without being dominated by an uncontrolled need for them. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1097:The inner self is “purified” by the acknowledgment of sin, not precisely because the inner self is the seat of sin, but because both our sinfulness and our interiority tend to be rejected in one and the same movement by the exterior self and relegated to the same darkness, so that when the inner self is brought back to light, sin emerges and is liquidated by the assuming of responsibility and by sorrow. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1098:Difference between a vocation and a category. Those who fulfill their vocation to sanctity--or who are fulfilling it--are by that very fact unaccountable. They do not fit into categories. If you use a category in speaking of them you have to qualify statement at once, as if they also belonged to some completely different category. In actual fact, they are in no category, they are particular themselves... ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1099:The most dangerous man in the world is the contemplative who is guided by nobody. He trusts his own visions. He obeys the attractions of an interior voice but will not listen to other men. He identifies the will of God with anything that makes him feel, within his own heart, a big, warm, sweet interior glow. The sweeter and the warmer the feeling is, the more he is convinced of his own infallibility. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1100:The real purpose of meditation is this: to teach a man how to work himself free of created things and temporal concerns, in which he finds only confusion and sorrow, and enter into a conscious and loving contact with God in which he is disposed to receive from God the help he knows he needs so badly, and to pay to God the praise and honor and thanksgiving and love which it has now become his joy to give. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1101:O God, teach me to be satisfied with my own helplessness in the spiritual life. Teach me to be content with Your grace that comes to me in darkness and that works things I cannot see. Teach me to be happy that I can depend on You. To depend on You should be enough for an eternity of joy. To depend on You by itself ought to be infinitely greater than any joy which my own intellectual appetite could desire. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1102:There is in all visible things an invisible fecundity, a dimmed light, a meek namelessness, a hidden wholeness. This mysterious Unity and Integrity is Wisdom, the Mother of all, Natura Naturans. There is in all things an inexhaustible sweetness and purity, a silence that is a fountain of action and of joy. It rises up in wordless gentleness and flows out to me from the unseen roots of all created being... ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1103:There is in all visible things an invisible fecundity, a dimmed light, a meek namelessness, a hidden wholeness. This mysterious unity and integrity is wisdom, the mother of us all, "natura naturans." There is in all things an inexhaustible sweetness and purity, a silence that is a fountain of action and joy. It rises up in wordless gentleness, and flows out to me from the unseen roots of all created being. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1104:You have got me walking up and down all day under those trees, saying to me over and over again, "Solitude, solitude." And You have turned around and thrown the world in my lap. You have told me, "Leave all things and follow me," and then You have tied half of New York to my foot like a ball and chain. You have got me kneeling behind that pillar with my mind making a noise like a bank. Is that contemplation? ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1105:Perhaps peace is not, after all, something you work for, or 'fight for.' It is indeed 'fighting for peace' that starts all the wars. What, after all, are the pretexts of all these Cold War crises, but 'fighting for peace?' Peace is something you have or do not have. If you are yourself at peace, then there is at least some peace in the world. Then share your peace with everyone, and everyone will be at peace. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1106:The “spiritual life” is then the perfectly balanced life in which the body with its passions and instincts, the mind with its reasoning and its obedience to principle and the spirit with its passive illumination by the Light and Love of God form one complete man who is in God and with God and from God and for God. One man in whom God is all in all. One man in whom God carries out His own will without obstacle. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1107:We are warmed by fire, not by the smoke of the fire. We are carried over the sea by a ship, not by the wake of a ship. So too, what we are is to be sought in the invisible depths of our own being, not in our outward reflection in our own acts. We must find our real selves not in the froth stirred up by the impact of our being upon the beings around us, but in our own soul which is the principle of all our acts. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1108:The true spiritual life is a life neither of dionysian orgy nor of apollonian clarity: it transcends both. It is a life of wisdom, a life of sophianic love. In Sophia, the highest wisdom-principle, all the greatness and majesty of the unknown that is in God and all that is rich and maternal in His creation are united inseparably, as paternal and maternal principles, the uncreated Father and created Mother-Wisdom. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1109:We are what we love. If we love God, in whose image we were created, we discover ourselves in him and we cannot help being happy: we have already achieved something of the fullness of being for which we were destined in our creation. If we love everything else but God, we contradict the image born in our very essence, and we cannot help being unhappy, because we are living a caricature of what we are meant to be. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1110:Creation was given to people as a clean window through which the light of God could shine into people's souls. Sun and moon, night and day, rain, sea, the crops, the flowering tree, all these things were transparent. They spoke to people not of themselves but only of Him who made them. Nature was symbolic. But the progressive degradation of humans led them further and further from this truth. Nature became opaque. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1111:The Bible is not primarily a written or printed text to be scrutinized in private, in a scholar's study or a contemplative cell. It is a body of oral messages, announcements, prophecies, promulgations, recitals, histories, songs of praise, lamentations, etc., which are meant either to be uttered or at least read aloud, or chanted, or sung, or recited in a community convoked for the purpose of a living celebration. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1112:There is in every weak, lost and isolated member of the human race an agony of hatred born of his own helplessness, his own isolation. Hatred is the sign and the expression of loneliness, of unworthiness, of insufficiency. And in so far as each one of us is lonely, is unworthy, each one hates himself. Some of us are aware of this self-hatred, and because of it we reproach ourselves and punish ourselves needlessly. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1113:But someone will say: “If we once recognize that we are all equally wrong, all political action will instantly be paralyzed. We can only act when we assume that we are in the right.” On the contrary, I believe the basis for valid political action can only be the recognition that the true solution to our problems is not accessible to any one isolated party or nation but that all must arrive at it by working together. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1114:It is a law of man’s nature, written into his very essence, and just as much a part of him as the desire to build houses and cultivate the land and marry and have children and read books and sing songs, that he should want to stand together with other men in order to acknowledge their common dependence on God, their Father and Creator. In fact, this desire is much more fundamental than any purely physical necessity. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1115:The requirements of a work to be done can be understood as the will of God. If I am supposed to hoe a garden or make a table, then I will be obeying God if I am true to the task I am performing. To do the work carefully and well, with love and respect for the nature of my task and with due attention to its purpose, is to unite myself to God’s will in my work. In this way I become His instrument. He works through me. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1116:He arrives at his own being as if it were an objective reality, that is to say he strives to become aware of himself as he would of some “thing” alien to himself. And he proves that the “thing” exists. He convinces himself: “I am therefore some thing.” And then he goes on to convince himself that God, the infinite, the transcendent, is also a “thing,” an “object,” like other finite and limited objects of our thought! ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1117:The Need to Win
When an archer is shooting for nothing He has all his skill.
If he shoots for a brass buckle
He is already nervous.
If he shoots for a prize of gold
He goes blind
Or sees two targets –
He is out of his mind.
His skill has not changed, But the prize
Divides him. He cares,
He thinks more of winning
Than of shooting –
And the need to win
Drains him of power. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1118:It is true to say that for me sanctity consists in being myself and for you sanctity consists of being yourself and that, in the last analysis, your sanctity will never be mine and mine will never be yours, except in the communism of charity and grace. For me to be a saint means to be myself. Therefore the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and of discovering my true self. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1119:All one night we sat, with a friend of his, in a big dark roadhouse outside of Philadelphia, arguing and arguing about mysticism, and smoking more and more cigarettes and gradually getting drunk. Eventually, filled with enthusiasm for the purity of heart which begets the vision of God, I went on with them into the city, after the closing of the bars, to a big speak-easy where we completed the work of getting plastered. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1120:A yellow flower (Light and spirit) Sings by itself For nobody. A golden spirit (Light and emptiness) Sings without a word By itself. Let no one touch this gentle sun In whose dark eye Someone is awake. (No light, no gold, no name, no color And no thought: O, wide awake!) A golden heaven Sings by itself A song to nobody. [1499.jpg] -- from Selected Poems of Thomas Merton, by Thomas Merton
~ Thomas Merton, Song for Nobody
,#NFDB
1121:Only later in life can we perhaps join with Thomas Merton, who penned one of my favorite lines, “If I had a message to my contemporaries it is surely this: Be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success If you are too obsessed with success, you will forget to live. If you have learned only how to be a success, your life has probably been wasted.”7 ~ Richard Rohr, #NFDB
1122:Your idea of me is fabricated with materials you have borrowed from other people and from yourself. What you think of me depends on what you think of yourself. Perhaps you create your idea of me out of material that you would like to eliminate from your own idea of yourself. Perhaps your idea of me is a reflection of what other people think of you. Or perhaps what you think of me is simply what you think I think of you. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1123:Contemplation, on the contrary, is the experiential grasp of reality as subjective, not so much “mine” (which would signify “belonging to the external self”) but “myself” in existential mystery. Contemplation does not arrive at reality after a process of deduction, but by an intuitive awakening in which our free and personal reality becomes fully alive to its own existential depths, which open out into the mystery of God. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1124:It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, now I realize what we all are . If only they [people] could all see themselves as they really are I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusions, a point of pure truth This little point is the pure glory of God in us. It is in everybody. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1125:One of the strange laws of the contemplative life,” Thomas Merton, one of its sovereign explorers, pointed out, “is that in it you do not sit down and solve problems: you bear with them until they somehow solve themselves. Or until life solves them for you.” Or, as Annie Dillard, who sat still for a long time at Tinker Creek—and in many other places—has it, “I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend. ~ Pico Iyer, #NFDB
1126:What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone, in the forest, at night, cherished by this wonderful, unintelligible, perfectly innocent speech, the most comforting speech in the world, the talk that rain makes by itself all over the ridges, and the talk of the watercourses everywhere in the hollows! Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it. It will talk as long as it wants this rain. As long as it talks I am going to listen. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1127:Contemplation in the age of Auschwitz and Dachau, Solovky and Karaganda is something darker and more fearsome than contemplation in the age of the Church Fathers. For that very reason, the urge to seek a path of spiritual light can be a subtle temptation to sin. It certainly is sin if it means a frank rejection of the burden of our age, an escape into unreality and spiritual illusion, so as not to share the misery of other men. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1128:Hence is it clear that genuine contemplation is incompatible with complacency and with smug acceptance of prejudiced opinions. It is not mere passive acquiescence in the status quo, as some would like to believe—for this would reduce it to the level of spiritual anesthesia. Contemplation is no pain-killer. What a holocaust takes place in this steady burning to ashes of old worn-out words, clichés, slogans, rationalizations! The ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1129:Because You have called me here not to wear a label by which I can recognize myself and place myself in some kind of a category. You do not want me to be thinking about what I am, but about what You are. Or rather, You do not even want me to be thinking about anything much: for You would raise me above the level of thought. And if I am always trying to figure out what I am and where I am and why I am, how will that work be done? ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1130:A purely mental life may be destructive if it leads us to substitute thought for life and ideas for actions. The activity proper to man is purely mental because man is not just a disembodied mind. Our destiny is to live out what we think, because unless we live what we know, we do not even know it. It is only by making our knowledge part of ourselves, through action, that we enter into the reality that is signified by our concepts. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1131:(From where I sit and write at this moment, I look out the window, across the quiet guest-house garden, with the four banana trees and the big red and yellow flowers around Our Lady’s statue. I can see the door where Dan entered and where I entered. Beyond the Porter’s Lodge is a low green hill where there was wheat this summer. And out there, yonder, I can hear the racket of the diesel tractor: I don’t know what they are ploughing.) ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1132:If we are going to love others at all, we must make up our minds to love them well. Otherwise our love is a delusion. The first step to unselfish love is the recognition that our love may be deluded. We must first of all purify our love by renouncing the pleasure of loving as an end in itself. As long as pleasure is our end, we will be dishonest with ourselves and with those we love. We will not seek their good, but our own pleasure. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1133:All of this is mystification. The city itself lives on its own myth. Instead of waking up and silently existing, the city people prefer a stubborn and fabricated dream; they do not care to be a part of the night, or to be merely of the world. They have constructed a world outside the world, against the world, a world of mechanical fictions which contemn nature and seek only to use it up, thus preventing it from renewing itself and man. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1134:Our spiritual attitude, our way of seeking peace and perfection, depends entirely on our concept of God. If we are able to believe he is truly our loving Father, if we can really accept the truth of his infinite and compassionate concern for us, if we believe that he loves us not because we are worthy but because we need his love, then we can advance with confidence. We will not be discouraged by our inevitable weaknesses and failures. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1135:The Root of War Is Fear AT the root of all war is fear: not so much the fear men have of one another as the fear they have of everything. It is not merely that they do not trust one another; they do not even trust themselves. If they are not sure when someone else may turn around and kill them, they are still less sure when they may turn around and kill themselves. They cannot trust anything, because they have ceased to believe in God. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1136:God does not give his joy to us for ourselves alone, and if we could possess him for ourselves alone we would not possess him at all. Any joy that does not overflow from our souls and help other men to rejoice in God does not come to us form God. (But do not think that you have to see how it overflows into the souls of others. In the economy of his grace, you may be sharing his gifts with someone you will never know until you get to heaven.) ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1137:If you want to identify me," he says to the British officers who are questioning him, "ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I think I am living for, in detail, and ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for. Between these two answers you can determine the identity of any person." page 25 in the book called, "The Man in the Sycamore Tree by Edward Rice ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1138:If the impulse to worship God and to adore Him in truth by the goodness and order of our own lives is nothing more than a transitory and emotional thing, that is our own fault. It is so only because we make it so, and because we take what is substantially a deep and powerful and lasting moral impetus, supernatural in its origin and in its direction, and reduce it to the level of our own weak and unstable and futile fancies and desires. Prayer ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1139: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. It is because of them that we need others and others need us. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1140:First of all, although men have a common destiny, each individual also has to work out his own personal salvation for himself in fear and trembling. We can help one another to find out the meaning of life, no doubt. But in the last analysis the individual person is responsible for living his own life and for “finding himself.” If he persists in shifting this responsibility to somebody else, he fails to find out the meaning of his own existence. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1141:In the Father the infinite Love of God is always beginning and in the Son it is always full and in the Holy Spirit it is perfect and it is renewed and never ceases to rest in its everlasting source. But if you follow Love forward and backward from Person to Person, you can never track it to a stop, you can never corner it and hold it down and fix it to one of the Persons as if He could appropriate to Himself the fruit of the love of the others. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1142:There are crimes which no one would commit as an individual which he willingly and bravely commits when acting in the name of his society, because he has been (too easily) convinced that evil is entirely different when it is done 'for the common good.'...one might point to the way in which racial hatreds and even persecution are admitted by people who consider themselves, and perhaps in some sense are, kind, tolerant, civilized and even humane. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1143:The arguments of religious men are so often insincere, and their insincerity is proportionate to their anger. Why do we get angry about what we believe? Because we do not really believe it. Or else what we pretend to be defending as the “truth” is really our own self-esteem. A man of sincerity is less interested in defending the truth than in stating it clearly, for he thinks that if the truth be clearly seen it can very well take care of itself. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1144:Solitude Is Not Separation SOME men have perhaps become hermits with the thought that sanctity could only be attained by escape from other men. But the only justification for a life of deliberate solitude is the conviction that it will help you to love not only God but also other men. If you go into the desert merely to get away from people you dislike, you will find neither peace nor solitude; you will only isolate yourself with a tribe of devils. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1145:We do not hope for what we have. Therefore, to live in hope is to live in poverty, having nothing. And yet, if we abandon ourselves to economy of Divine Providence, we have everything we hope for. By faith we know God without seeing Him. By hope we possess God without feeling His presence. If we hope in God, by hope we already possess Him, since hope is a confidence which He creates in our souls as secret evidence that He has taken possession of us. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1146:Perhaps in the end the first real step toward peace would be a realistic acceptance of the fact that our political ideals are perhaps to a great extent illusions and fictions to which we cling out of motives that are not always perfectly honest: that because of this we prevent ourselves from seeing any good or any practicability in the political ideals of our enemies—which may, of course, be in many ways even more illusory and dishonest than our own. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1147:In the end the contemplative suffers the anguish of realizing that he no longer knows what God is. He may or may not mercifully realize that, after all, this is a great gain, because “God is not a what,” not a “thing.” That is precisely one of the essential characteristics of contemplative experience. It sees that there is no “what” that can be called God. There is “no such thing” as God because God is neither a “what” nor a “thing” but a pure “Who.”* ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1148:It's a risky thing to pray and the danger is that our very prayers get between God and us. The great thing in prayer is not to pray, but to go directly to God. . . . The fact is, though, that if you descend into the depths of your own spirit and arrive somewhere near the center of what you are, you are confronted with the inescapable truth that, at the very root of your existence, you are in constant and immediate contact with the infinite power of God. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1149:Means and Ends
The purpose of a fish trap
Is to catch fish,
And when the fish are caught
The trap is forgotten.
The purpose of a rabbit snare
Is to catch rabbits.
When the rabbits are caught
The snare is forgotten.
The purpose of words
Is to convey ideas.
When the ideas are grasped
The words are forgotten.
Where can I find a man
Who has forgotten words?
He is the one I would like to talk to. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1150:Zašto bih ja trebao biti bogat kada si ti bio siromašan? Zašto bih ja želio biti slavan i moćan u očima ljudi kada su sinovi onih koji su slavili lažne proroke i kamenovali one prave tebe odbili i prikovali na križ? Zašto bih u srcu gajio nadu koja me izjeda - nadu u savršenu sreću u ovome životu - kada takva nada, osuđena na propast, nije ništa drugo doli beznađe?
Moja je nada u onome što oko ne vidje. Zato ne daj da se uzdam u vidljive nagrade. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1151:The lives of all the men we meet and know are woven into our own destiny, together with the lives of many we shall never know on earth. But certain ones, very few, are our close friends. Because we have more in common with them, we are able to love them with a special selfless perfection, since we have more to share. They are inseparable from our own destiny, and, therefore, our love for them is especially holy: it is a manifestation of God in our lives. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1152:It is true that neither the ancient wisdoms nor the modern sciences are complete in themselves. They do not stand alone. They call for one another. Wisdom without science is unable to penetrate the full sapiential meaning of the created and the material cosmos. Science without wisdom leaves man enslaved to a world of unrelated objects in which there is no way of discovering (or creating) order and deep significance in man's own pointless existence. (p. 4) ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1153:But God gives true theologians a hunger born of humility, which cannot be satisfied with formulas and arguments, and which looks for something closer to God than analogy can bring you. This serene hunger of the spirit penetrates the surface of words and goes beyond the human formulation of mysteries and seeks, in the humiliation of silence, intellectual solitude and interior poverty, the gift of a supernatural apprehension which words cannot truly signify. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1154:We usually recognize a beginning. Endings are more difficult to detect. Most often, they are realized only after reflection. Silence. We are seldom conscious when silence begins—it is only afterward that we realize what we have been a part of. In the night journeys of Canada geese, it is the silence that propels them. Thomas Merton writes, “Silence is the strength of our interior life.… If we fill our lives with silence, then we will live in hope. ~ Terry Tempest Williams, #NFDB
1155:We know when we are following our vocation when our soul is set free from preoccupation with itself and is able to seek God and even to find Him, even though it may not appear to find Him. Gratitude and confidence and freedom from ourselves: these are signs that we have found our vocation and are living up to it even though everything else may seem to have gone wrong. They give us peace in any suffering. They teach us to laugh at despair. And we may have to. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1156:Who can free himself from achievement
And from fame, descend and be lost
Amid the masses of men?
He will flow like Tao, unseen,
He will go about like Life itself
With no name and no home.
Simple is he, without distinction.
To all appearances he is a fool.
His steps leave no trace. He has no power.
He achieves nothing, has no reputation.
Since he judges no one
No one judges him.
Such is the perfect man:
His boat is empty. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1157:Thomas Merton expresses the need for this mystical imperative: The Christian’s vision of the world ought, by its very nature, to have in it something of poetic inspiration. Our faith ought to be capable of filling our hearts with a wonder and a wisdom which see beyond the surface of things and events, and grasp something of the inner and “sacred” meaning of the cosmos which, in all its movements and all its aspects, sings the praises of its Creator and Redeemer.2 ~ Ilia Delio, #NFDB
1158:The beginning of the fight against hatred, the basic Christian answer to hatred, is not the commandment to love, but what must necessarily come before in order to make the commandment bearable and comprehensible. It is a prior commandment, to believe. The root of Christian love is not the will to love, but the faith that one is loved. The faith that one is loved by God. That faith that one is loved by God although unworthy—or, rather, irrespective of one’s worth! ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1159:For at sixteen I had imagined that Blake, like the other romantics, was glorifying passion, natural energy, for their own sake. Far from it! What he was glorifying was the transfiguration of man’s natural love, his natural powers, in the refining fires of mystical experience: and that, in itself, implied an arduous and total purification, by faith and love and desire, from all the petty materialistic and commonplace and earthly ideals of his rationalistic friends. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1160:I just remember their kindness and goodness to me, and their peacefulness and their utter simplicity. They inspired real reverence, and I think, in a way, they were certainly saints. And they were saints in that most effective and telling way: sanctified by leading ordinary lives in a completely supernatural manner, sanctified by obscurity, by usual skills, by common tasks, by routine, but skills, tasks, routine which received a supernatural form from grace within. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1161:Memory is corrupted and ruined by a crowd of memories. If I am going to have a true memory, there are a thousand things that must first be forgotten. Memory is not fully itself when it reaches only into the past. A memory that is not alive to the present does not remember the here and now, does not remember its true identity, is not memory at all. He who remembers nothing but facts and past events, and is never brought back into the present, is a victim of amnesia. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1162:The fruit of solitude is increased sensitivity and compassion for others. There comes a new freedom to be with people. There is new attentiveness to their needs, new responsiveness to their hurts. Thomas Merton observes, 'It is in deep solitude that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brothers. The more solitary I am the more affection I have for them.... Solitude and silence teach me to love my brothers for what they are, not for what they say. ~ Richard J Foster, #NFDB
1163:Every moment and every event of every man’s life on earth plants something in his soul. For just as the wind carries thousands of winged seeds so each moment brings with it germs of spiritual vitality that come to rest imperceptibly in the minds and wills of men. Most of these unnumbered seeds perish and are lost, because men are not prepared to receive them: for such seeds as these cannot spring up anywhere except in the good soil of freedom, spontaneity, and love. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1164:To anyone who has full awareness of our “exile” from God, our alienation from this inmost self, and our blind wandering in the “region of unlikeness,” this claim can hardly seem believable. Yet it is nothing else but the message of Christ calling us to awake from sleep, to return from exile, and find our true selves within ourselves, in that inner sanctuary which is His temple and His heaven, and (at the end of the prodigal’s homecoming journey) the “Father’s House. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1165:After all, what is your personal identity? It is what you really are, your real self. None of us is what he thinks he is, or what other people think he is, still less what his passport says he is. And it is fortunate for most of us that we are mistaken. We do not generally know what is good for us. That is because, in St. Bernard's language, our true personality has been concealed under the 'disguise' of a false self, the ego, whom we tend to worship in place of God. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1166:The modern child may early in his or her existence have natural inclinations toward spirituality. The child may have imagination, originality, a simple and individual response to reality, and even a tendency to moments of thoughtful silence and absorption. All these tendencies, however, are soon destroyed by the dominant culture. The child becomes a yelling, brash, false little monster, brandishing a toy gun or dressed up like some character he has seen on television. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1167:If we wait for some people to become agreeable or attractive before we begin to love them, we will never begin. If we are content to give them a cold impersonal 'charity' that is merely a matter of obligation, we will not trouble to understand them or to sympathize with them at all. And in that case we will not really love them, because love implies an efficacious will not only to do good to others exteriorly but also to find some good in them to which we can respond." ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1168:It is not humility to insist on being someone that you are not. It is as much as saying that you know better than God who you are and who you ought to be. How do you expect to arrive at the end of your own journey if you take the road to another man's city? How do you expect to reach your own perfection by leading somebody else's life? His sanctity will never be yours; you must have the humility to work out your own salvation in a darkness where you are absolutely alone. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1169:The devil is no fool. He can get people feeling about heaven the way they ought to feel about hell. He can make them fear the means of grace the way they do not fear sin. And he does so, not by light but by obscurity, not by realities but by shadows; not by clarity and substance, but by dreams and the creatures of psychosis. And men are so poor in intellect that a few cold chills down their spine will be enough to keep them from ever finding out the truth about anything. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1170:What is 'grace'? It is God's own life, shared by us. God's life is love. Deus caritas est. By grace we are able to share in the infinitely selfless love of Him Who is such pure actuality that He needs nothing and therefore cannot conceivably exploit anything for selfish ends. Indeed, outside of Him there is nothing, and whatever exists exists by His free gift of its being, so that one of the notions that is absolutely contradictory to the perfection of God is selfishness. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1171:As a magnifying glass concentrates the rays of the sun into a little burning knot of heat that can set fire to a dry leaf or a piece of paper, so the mystery of Christ in the Gospel concentrates the rays of God's light and fire to a point that sets fire to the spirit of man. ... Through the glass of His Incarnation He concentrates the rays of His Divine Truth and Love upon us so that we feel the burn, and all mystical experience is communicated to men through the Man Christ. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1172:Charity must teach us that friendship is a holy thing, and that it is neither charitable nor holy to base our friendship on falsehood. We can be, in some sense, friends to all men because there is no man on earth with whom we do not have something in common. But it would be false to treat too many men as intimate friends. It is not possible to be intimate with more than very few, because there are only very few in the world with whom we have practically everything in common. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1173:customs and habits of men are not a matter for conflict. The saints do not get excited about the things that people eat and drink, wear on their bodies, or hang on the walls of their houses. To make conformity or nonconformity with others in these accidents a matter of life and death is to fill your interior life with confusion and noise. Ignoring all this as indifferent, the humble man takes whatever there is in the world that helps him to find God and leaves the rest aside. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1174:Day after day I read Freud, thinking myself to be very enlightened and scientific when, as a matter of fact, I was about as scientific as an old woman secretly poring over books about occultism, trying to tell her own fortune, and learning how to dope out the future form the lines in the palm of her hand. I don't know if I ever got very close to needing a padded cell: but if I ever had gone crazy, I think psychoanalysis would have been the one thing chiefly responsible for it. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1175:What is "grace"? It is God's own life, shared by us. God's life is love. Deus caritas est. By grace we are able to share in the infinitely selfless love of Him Who is such pure actuality that He needs nothing and therefore cannot conceivably exploit anything for selfish ends. Indeed, outside of Him there is nothing, and whatever exists exists by His free gift of its being, so that one of the notions that is absolutely contradictory to the perfection of God is selfishness. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1176:I had refused to pay any attention to the moral laws upon which all our vitality and sanity depend: and so now I was reduced to the condition of a silly old woman, worrying about a lot of imaginary rules of health, standards of food-value, and a thousand minute details of conduct that were in themselves completely ridiculous and stupid, and yet which haunted me with vague and terrific sanctions. If I eat this, I may go out of my mind. If I do not eat that, I may die in the night. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1177:The truth I love in loving my brother cannot be something merely philosophical and abstract. It must be at the same time supernatural and concrete, practical and alive. And I mean these words in no metaphorical sense. The truth I must love in my brother is God Himself, living in him. I must seek the life of the Spirit of God breathing in him. And I can only discern and follow that mysterious life by the action of the same Holy Spirit living and acting in the depths of my own heart. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1178:My chief care should not be to find pleasure or success, health or life or money or rest or even things like virtue and wisdom—still less their opposites, pain, failure, sickness, death. But in all that happens, my one desire and my one joy should be to know: “Here is the thing that God has willed for me. In this His love is found, and in accepting this I can give back His love to Him and give myself with it to Him. For in giving myself I shall find Him and He is life everlasting.” By ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1179:Now anxiety is the mark of spiritual insecurity. It is the fruit of unanswered questions. But questions cannot go unanswered unless they first be asked. And there is a far worse anxiety, a far worse insecurity, which comes from being afraid to ask the right questions—because they might turn out to have no answer. One of the moral diseases we communicate to one another in society comes from huddling together in the pale light of an insufficient answer to a question we are afraid to ask. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1180:Paradoxically, I have found peace because I have always been dissatisfied. My moments of depression and despair turn out to be renewals, new beginnings. If I were once to settle down and be satisfied with the surface of life, with its divisions and its cliches, it would be time to call in the undertaker... So, then, this dissatisfaction which sometimes used to worry me and has certainly, I know, worried others, has helped me in fact to move freely and even gaily with the stream of life. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1181:The seventeenth-century Benedictine mystic, Dom Augustine Baker, who fought a determined battle for the interior liberty of contemplative souls in an age ridden by autocratic directors, has the following to say on the subject: “The director is not to teach his own way, nor indeed any determinate way of prayer, but to instruct his disciples how they may themselves find out the way proper for them. . . . In a word, he is only God’s usher, and must lead souls in God’s way, and not his own. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1182:True gratitude and hypocrisy cannot exist together. They are totally incompatible. ... We cannot be satisified to make a mental note of things which God has done for us and then perfunctorily thank him for favors recieved. ... Gratitude therefore takes nothing for granted, is never unresponsive, is constantly awakening to new wonder and praise of the goodness of God. For the grateful man knows that God is good, not by hearsay, but by experience. And that is what makes all the difference. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1183:Seeds of Contemplation EVERY moment and every event of every man’s life on earth plants something in his soul. For just as the wind carries thousands of winged seeds, so each moment brings with it germs of spiritual vitality that come to rest imperceptibly in the minds and wills of men. Most of these unnumbered seeds perish and are lost, because men are not prepared to receive them: for such seeds as these cannot spring up anywhere except in the good soil of freedom, spontaneity and love. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1184:In a certain sense, these people have a better appreciation of the Church and of Catholicism than many Catholics have: an appreciation which is detached and intellectual and objective. But they never come into the Church. They stand and starve in the doors of the banquet -- the banquet to which they surely realize that they are invited -- while those more poor, more stupid, less gifted, less educated, sometimes even less virtuous than they, enter in and are filled at those tremendous tables. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1185:Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God's eyes. If only they could see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time, there would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed . . . I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1186:When men live huddled together without true communication, there seems to be a greater sharing, and a more genuine communion. But this is not communion, only immersion in the general meaninglessness of countless slogans and clichés repeated over and over again so that in the end one listens without hearing and responds without thinking. The constant din of empty words and machine noises, the endless booming of loudspeakers end by making true communication and true communion almost impossible... ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1187:The friends of Job appear on the scene as advisers and "consolers," offering Job the fruits of their moral scientia. But when Job insists that his sufferings have no explanation and that he cannot discover the reason for them through conventional ethical concepts, his friends turn into accusers, and curse Job as a sinner. Thus, instead of consolers, they become torturers by virtue of their very morality, and in so doing, while claiming to be advocates of God, they act as instruments of the devil. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1188:And it is in this darkness, when there is nothing left in us that can please or comfort our own minds, when we seem to be useless and worthy of all contempt, when we seem to have failed, when we seem to be destroyed and devoured, it is then that the deep and secret selfishness that is too close to us for us to identify is stripped away from our souls. It is in this darkness that we find liberty. It is in this abandonment that we are made strong. This is the night which empties us and makes us pure. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1189:Our Christian destiny is, in fact, a great one: but we cannot achieve greatness unless we lose all interest in being great. For our own idea of greatness is illusory, and if we pay too much attention to it we will be lured out of the peace and stability of the being God gave us, and seek to live in a myth we have created for ourselves. And when we are truly ourselves we lose most of the futile self-consciousness that keeps us constantly comparing ourselves with others in order to see how big we are. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1190:Everything in modern city life is calculated to keep man from entering into himself and thinking about spiritual things. Even with the best of intentions a spiritual man finds himself exhausted and deadened and debased by the constant noise of machines and loudspeakers, the dead air and the glaring lights of offices and shops, the everlasting suggestion of advertising and propaganda. The whole mechanism of modern life is geared for a flight from God and from the spirit into the wilderness of neurosis. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1191:The reality that is present to us and in us: call it being...Silence. And the simple fact that by being attentive, by learning to listen (or recovering the natural capacity to listen) we can find ourself engulfed in such happiness that it cannot be explained: the happiness of being at one with everything in that hidden ground of Love for which there can be no explanations.... May we all grow in grace and peace, and not neglect the silence that is printed in the center of our being. It will not fail us. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1192:Mọi tâm hồn chiêm niệm đích thực có chung điểm này: không phải vì họ quy tụ cách riêng biệt trong sa mạc hoặc tự giam mình trong ẩn dật, nhưng vì rằng, Ngài ở đâu, họ ở đó. Và bằng cách nào họ tìm thấy Ngài? Bằng kỹ thuật? Không kỹ thuật nào dành cho việc tìm kiếm Ngài. Họ tìm Ngài do Ý Muốn của Ngài. Và ý muốn của Ngài là đem cho họ ân sủng, sắp xếp đời sống của họ, mang họ đến đúng nơi chốn, ở đó, họ có thể tìm thấy Ngài. Cả khi đã ở đó, họ cũng không biết họ đến đó bằng cách nào và đang thực sự làm gì. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1193:Thomas Merton said: We are bodies of broken bones. I guess I’d always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we’re fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we’re shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion. We ~ Bryan Stevenson, #NFDB
1194:To be grateful is to recognize the Love of God in everything He has given us - and He has given us everything. Every breath we draw is a gift of His love, every moment of existence is a grace, for it brings with it immense graces from Him. Gratitude therefore takes nothing for granted, is never unresponsive, is constantly awakening to new wonder and to praise of the goodness of God. For the grateful person knows that God is good, not by hearsay but by experience. And that is what makes all the difference. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1195: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! ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1196:Everything in modern city life is calculated to keep man from entering into himself and thinking about spiritual things. Even with the best of intentions a spiritual man finds himself exhausted and deadened and debased by the constant noise of machines and loudspeakers, the dead air and the glaring lights of offices and shops, the everlasting suggestion of advertising and propaganda.
The whole mechanism of modern life is geared for a flight from God and from the spirit into the wilderness of neurosis. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1197:God in His Trinity of subsistent relations infinitely transcends every shadow of selfishness. For the One God does not subsist apart and alone in His Nature; He subsists as Father and as Son and as Holy Ghost. These Three Persons are one, but apart from them God does not subsist also as One. He is not Three Persons plus one nature, therefore four! He is Three Persons, but One God. He is at once infinite solitude (one nature) and perfect society (Three Persons). One Infinite Love in three subsistent relations. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1198:To be grateful is to recognize the Love of God in everything He has given us - and He has given us everything. Every breath we draw is a gift of His love, every moment of existence is a grace, for it brings with it immense graces from Him.
Gratitude therefore takes nothing for granted, is never unresponsive, is constantly awakening to new wonder and to praise of the goodness of God. For the grateful person knows that God is good, not by hearsay but by experience. And that is what makes all the difference. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1199:Then we discover what the spiritual life really is. It is not a matter of doing one good work rather than another, of living in one place or in another, of praying in one way rather than in another. It is not a matter of any special psychological effect in our own soul. If it is the silence of our whole being in compunction and adoration before God, in the habitual realization that He is everything and we are nothing, that He is the Center to which all things tend, and to Whom all our actions must be directed. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1200:There is a false and momentary happiness in self-satisfaction, but it always leads to sorrow because it narrows and deadens our spirit. True happiness is found in unselfish love, a love which increases in proportion as it is shared. There is no end to the sharing of love, and, therefore, the potential happiness of such love is without limit. Infinite sharing is the law of God’s inner life. He has made the sharing of ourselves the law of our own being, so that it is in loving others that we best love ourselves. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1201:Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1202:But it certainly is a wonderful thing to wake up suddenly in the solitude of the woods and look up at the sky and see the utter nonsense of everything including all the solemn stuff given out by professional asses about the spiritual life; and simply to burst out laughing, and laugh and laugh, with the sky and the trees because God is not in words, and not in systems, and not in liturgical movements, and not in "contemplation" with a big "C," or in asceticism or in anything like that, not even in the apostolate. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1203:Cracking the safe (excerpt)
A poor man must swing
For stealing a belt buckle
But if a rich man steals a whole state
He is acclaimed
As statesmen of the year . . .
Moral: the more you pile up ethical principles
And duties and obligations
To bring everyone in line
The more you gather loot
For a thief like Khang.
By ethical argument
And moral principle
The greatest crimes are eventually shown
To have been necessary, and, in fact,
A signal benefit
To mankind. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1204:You go to college, and every course in the catalogue looks wonderful. The names of the subjects all seem to lay open the way to a new world. Your arms are full of new, clean notebooks, waiting to be filled. You pass through the doors of the library, and the smell of thousands of well-kept books makes your head swim with a clean and subtle pleasure. You have a new hat, a new sweater perhaps, or a whole new suit. Even the nickels and the quarters in your pocket feel new, and the buildings shine in the glorious sun. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1205:Let me say this before rain becomes a utility that they can plan and distribute for money. By "they" I mean the people who cannot understand that rain is a festival, who do not appreciate its gratuity, who think that what has no price has no value, that what cannot be sold is not real, so that the only way to make something actual is to place it on the market. The time will come when they will sell you even your rain. At the moment it is still free, and I am in it. I celebrate its gratuity and its meaninglessness. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1206:First, the desert is the country of madness. Second, it is the refuge of the devil, thrown out into the "wilderness of upper Egypt" to "wander in dry places." Thirst drives man mad, and the devil himself is mad with a kind of thirst for his own lost excellence--lost because he has immured himself in it and closed out everything else. So the man who wanders into the desert to be himself must take care that he does not go mad and become the servant of the one who dwells there in a sterile paradise of emptiness and rage. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1207:There should be at least a room, or some corner where no one will find you and disturb you or notice you. You should be able to untether yourself from the world and set yourself free, loosing all the fine strings and strands of tension that bind you, by sight, by sound, by thought, to the presence of other men. Once you have found such a place, be content with it, and do not be disturbed if a good reason takes you out of it. Love it, and return to it as soon as you can, and do not be too quick to change it for another. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1208:On the last day of January 1915, under the sign of the Water Bearer, in a year of a great war, and down in the shadow of some French mountains on the borders of Spain, I came into the world. Free by nature, in the image of God, I was nevertheless the prisoner of my own violence and my own selfishness, in the image of the world into which I was born. That world was the picture of Hell, full of men like myself, loving God and yet hating Him; born to love Him, living instead in fear and hopeless self-contradictory hungers. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1209:Unnatural, frantic, anxious work, work done under pressure of greed or fear or any other inordinate passion, cannot properly speaking be dedicated to God, because God never wills such work directly. He may permit that through no fault of our own we may have to work madly and distractedly, due to our sins, and to the sins of the society in which we live. In that case we must tolerate it and make the best of what we cannot avoid. But let us not be blind to the distinction between sound, healthy work and unnatural toil. In ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1210:One has either got to be a Jew or stop reading the Bible. The Bible cannot make sense to anyone who is not “spiritually a Semite.” The spiritual sense of the Old Testament is not and cannot be a simple emptying out of its Israelite content. Quite the contrary! The New Testament is the fulfillment of that spiritual content, the fulfillment of the promise made to Abraham, the promise that Abraham believed in. It is never therefore a denial of Judaism, but its affirmation. Those who consider it a denial have not understood it. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1211:What are they? The birthplace of a new and terrible creation, the testing-ground of the power by which man seeks to un-create what God has blessed. Today, in the century of man’s greatest technological achievement, the wilderness at last comes into its own. Man no longer needs God, and he can live in the desert on his own resources. He can build there his fantastic, protected cities of withdrawal and experimentation and vice. The glittering towns that spring up overnight in the desert are no longer images of the City of God, ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1212:Businesses are, in reality, quasi-religious sects. When you go to work in one you embrace a new faith. And if they are really big businesses, you progress from faith to a kind of mystique. Belief in the product, preaching the product, in the end the product becomes the focus of a transcendental experience. Through “the product” one communes with the vast forces of life, nature, and history that are expressed in business. Why not face it? Advertising treats all products with the reverence and the seriousness due to sacraments. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1213:We must learn to realize that the love of God seeks us in every situation, and seeks our good. His inscrutable love seeks our awakening. True, since this awakening implies a kind of death to our exterior self, we will dread His coming in proportion as we are identified with this exterior self and attached to it. But when we understand the dialectic of life and death we will learn to take the risks implied by faith, to make the choices that deliver us from our routine self and open to us the door of a new being, a new reality. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1214:Therefore, doing the Stations of the Cross was still more laborious than consoling, and required a sacrifice. It was much the same with all my devotions. They did not come easily or spontaneously, and they very seldom brought with them any strong sensible satisfaction. Nevertheless the work of performing them ended in a profound and fortifying peace: a peace that was scarcely perceptible, but which deepened and which, as my passions subsided, became more and more real, more and more sure, and finally stayed with me permanently. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1215:When we are alone on a starlit night; when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children; when we know love in our own hearts; or when, like the Japanese poet Bashō we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash—at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the “newness,” the emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves evident, provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1216:If nothing that can be seen can either be God or represent Him to us as He is, then to find God we must pass beyond everything that can be seen and enter into darkness. Since nothing that can be heard is God, to find Him we must enter into silence. Since God cannot be imagined, anything our imagination tells us about Him is ultimately a lie and therefore we cannot know Him as He really is unless we pass beyond everything that can be imagined and enter into an obscurity without images and without the likeness of any created thing. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1217:No matter how much the original Rule of St. Francis has changed, I think his spirit and his inspiration are still the fundamental thing in Franciscan life. And it is an inspiration rooted in joy, because it is guided by the prudence and wisdom which are revealed only to the little ones - the glad wisdom of those who have had the grace and the madness to throw away everything in one uncompromising rush, and to walk around barefooted in the simple confidence that if they get into trouble, God will come and get them out of it again. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1218:Prayer does not blind us to the world, but it transforms our vision of the world, and makes us see it, all men, and all the history of mankind, in the light of God. To pray 'in spirit and in truth' enables us to enter into contact with that infinite love, that inscrutable freedom which is at work behind the complexities and the intricacies of human existence. This does not mean fabricating for ourselves pious rationalizations to explain everything that happens. It involves no surreptitious manipulation of the hard truths of life. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1219:The illusion that mechanical progress means human improvement ... alienates us from our own being and our own reality. It is precisely because we are convinced that our life, as such, is better if we have a better car, a better TV set, better toothpaste, etc., that we condemn and destroy our own reality and the reality of our natural resources. Technology was made for man, not man for technology. In losing touch with being and thus with God, we have fallen into a senseless idolatry of production and consumption for their own sakes. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1220:The true character of wu wei is not mere inactivity but perfect action-because it is act without activity. In other words, it is action not carried out independently of heaven and earth and in conflict with the dynamism of the whole, but in perfect harmony with the whole. It is not mere passivity, but it is action that seems both effortless and spontaneous because performed "rightly," in perfect accordance with our nature and with our place in the scheme of things. It is completely free because there is in it no force and no violence. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1221:The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of contemporary violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of our activity neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1222:We must be willing to accept the bitter truth that, in the end, we may have to become a burden to those who love us. But it is necessary that we face this also. The full acceptance of our abjection and uselessness is the virtue that can make us and others rich in the grace of God. It takes heroic charity and humility to let others sustain us when we are absolutely incapable of sustaining ourselves. We cannot suffer well unless we see Christ everywhere, both in suffering and in the charity of those who come to the aid of our affliction. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1223:But give me the strength that waits upon You in silence and peace. Give me humility in which alone is rest, and deliver me from pride which is the heaviest of burdens. And possess my whole heart and soul with the simplicity of love. Occupy my whole life with the one thought and the one desire of love, that I may love not for the sake of merit, not for the sake of perfection, not for the sake of virtue, not for the sake of sanctity, but for You alone. For there is only one thing that can satisfy love and reward it, and that is You alone. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1224:But when the creek dries up Nothing grows in the valley. When the mound is levelled The hollow next to it is filled. And when the statesmen and lawyers And preachers of duty disappear There are no more robberies either And the world is at peace. Moral: the more you pile up ethical principles And duties and obligations To bring everyone in line The more you gather loot For a thief like Khang. By ethical argument And moral principle The greatest crimes are eventually shown To have been necessary, and, in fact, A signal benefit To mankind. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1225:I got to a state where phrases like "the Good, the True, and the Beautiful" filled me with a kind of suppressed indignation, because they stood for the big sin of Platonism: the reduction of all reality to the level of pure abstraction, as if concrete, individual substances had no essential reality of their own, but were only shadows of some remote, universal, ideal essence filed away in a big card-index somewhere in heaven, while the demi-urges milled around the Logos piping their excitement in high, fluted, English intellectual tones. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1226:Such a view of the divine will drives human weakness to despair and one wonders if it is not, itself, often the expression of a despair too intolerable to be admitted to conscious consideration. These arbitrary “dictates” of a domineering and insensible Father are more often seeds of hatred than of love. If that is our concept of the will of God, we cannot possibly seek the obscure and intimate mystery of the encounter that takes place in contemplation. We will desire only to fly as far as possible from Him and hide from His Face forever. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1227:There was nothing to which they had to “conform” except the secret, hidden, inscrutable will of God which might differ very notably from one cell to another! It is very significant that one of the first of these Verba (Number 3) is one in which the authority of St. Anthony is adduced for what is the basic principle of desert life: that God is the authority and that apart from His manifest will there are few or no principles: “Therefore, whatever you see your soul to desire according to God, do that thing, and you shall keep your heart safe. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1228:When we are alone on a starlit night, when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children, when we know love in our own hearts; or when, like the Japanese poet, Basho, we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash - at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the "newness," the emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves evident, all these provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1229:Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves. They never get around to being the particular poet or the particular monk they are intended to be by God. They never become the man or the artist who is called for by all the circumstances of their individual lives. They waste their years in vain efforts to be some other poet, some other saint...They wear out their minds and bodies in a hopeless endeavor to have somebody else's experiences or write somebody else's poems. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1230:To some men peace merely means the liberty to exploit other people without fear of retaliation or interference. To others peace means the freedom to rob others without interruption. To still others it means the leisure to devour the goods of the earth without being compelled to interrupt their pleasures to feed those whom their greed is starving. And to practically everybody peace simply means the absence of any physical violence that might cast a shadow over lives devoted to the satisfaction of their animal appetites for comfort and pleasure. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1231:My own personal task is not simply that of poet and writer (still less commentator, pseudo-prophet); it is basically to praise God out of an inner center of silence, gratitude, and 'awareness.' This can be realized in a life that apparently accomplishes nothing. Without centering on accomplishment or nonaccomplishment, my task is simply the breathing of this gratitude from day to day, in simplicity, and for the rest turning my hand to whatever comes, work being part of praise, whether splitting logs or writing poems, or best of all simple notes. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1232:The sin of bad theology has been precisely this - to set Christ up against man, and to regard all flesh and blood men as “not-Christ.” Indeed to assume that many men, whole classes of men, nations, races, are in fact “anti-Christ.” To divide men arbitrarily according to their conformity to our own limited disincarnate mental Christ, and to decide on this basis that most men are “anti-Christ” - this shows up our theology. At such a moment, we have to question not mankind, but our theology. A theology that ends in lovelessness cannot be Christian. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1233:Since no man ever can, or could, live by himself and for himself alone, the destinies of thousands of other people were bound to be affected, some remotely, but some very directly and near-at-hand, by my own choices and decisions and desires, as my own life would also be formed and modified according to theirs. I was entering into a moral universe in which I would be related to every other rational being, and in which whole masses of us, as thick as swarming bees, would drag one another along towards some common end of good or evil, peace or war. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1234:When we see crime in others, we try to correct it by destroying them or at least putting them out of sight. It is easy to identify the sin with the sinner when he is someone other than our own self. In ourselves, it is the other way round; we see the sin, but we have great difficulty in shouldering responsibility for it. We find it very hard to identify our sin with our own will and our own malice. On the contrary, we naturally tend to interpret our immoral act as an involuntary mistake, or as the malice of a spirit in us that is other than ourself. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1235:Contemplation is precisely the awareness that this “I” is really “not I” and the awakening of the unknown “I” that is beyond observation and reflection and is incapable of commenting upon itself. It cannot even say “I” with the assurance and the impertinence of the other one, for its very nature is to be hidden, unnamed, unidentified in the society where men talk about themselves and about one another. In such a world the true “I” remains both inarticulate and invisible, because it has altogether too much to say—not one word of which is about itself. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1236:The fruitfulness of our life depends in large measure on our ability to doubt our own words and to question the value of our own work. The man who completely trusts his own estimate of himself is doomed to sterility. All he asks of any act he performs is that it be his act. If it is performed by him, it must be good. All words spoken by him must be infallible. The car he has just bought is the best for its price, for no other reason than that he is the one who has bought it. He seeks no other fruit than this, and therefore he generally gets no other. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1237:For now, oh my God, it is to You alone that I can talk, because nobody else will understand. I cannot bring any other man on this earth into the cloud where I dwell in Your light, that is, Your darkness, where I am lost and abashed. I cannot explain to any other man the anguish which is Your joy nor the loss which is the Possession of You, nor the distance from all things which is the arrival in You, nor the death which is the birth in You because I do not know anything about it myself and all I know is that I wish it were over - I wish it were begun. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1238:You must realize that it is the ordinary way of God's dealings with us that our ideas do not work out speedily and efficiently as we would like them to. The reason for this is not only the loving wisdom of God, but also the fact that our acts have to fit into a great complex pattern that we cannot possibly understand. I have learned over the years that Providence is always a whole lot wiser than any of us, and that there are always not only good reasons, but the very best reasons for the delays and blocks that often seem to us so frustrating and absurd. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1239:In actual fact it would seem that during the Cold War, if not during World War II, this country has become frankly a warfare state built on affluence, a power structure in which the interests of big business, the obsessions of the military, and the phobias of political extremists both dominate and dictate our national policy. It also seems that the people of the country are by and large reduced to passivity, confusion, resentment, frustration, thoughtlessness and ignorance, so that they blindly follow any line that is unraveled for them by the mass media. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1240:Perceptive and valuable personal explorations of time alone include A Book of Silence by Sara Maitland, Party of One by Anneli Rufus, Migrations to Solitude by Sue Halpern, Journal of a Solitude by May Sarton, The Point of Vanishing by Howard Axelrod, Solitude by Robert Kull, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby, A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit, The Story of My Heart by Richard Jefferies, Thoughts in Solitude by Thomas Merton, and the incomparable Walden by Henry David Thoreau. ~ Michael Finkel, #NFDB
1241:The wise man has struggled to find You in his wisdom, and he has failed. The just man has striven to grasp You in his own justice, and he has gone astray.
But the sinner, suddenly struck by the lightning of mercy that ought to have been justice, falls down in adoration of Your holiness: for he had seen what kings desired to see and never saw, what prophets foretold and never gazed upon, what the men of ancient times grew weary of expecting when they died. He has seen that Your love is so infinitely good that it cannot be the object of a human bargain. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1242: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 of balance and order and rhythm and harmony.
Music is pleasing not only because of the sound but because of the silence that is 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, productive by turning all life’s leisure into work, and real by turning all our being into doing, we will only succeed in producing a hell on earth. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1243:It is a strange thing that we should have thought nothing of it, when if anyone had suggested sleeping on the floor as a penance, for the love of God, we would have felt that he was trying to insult our intelligence and dignity as men! What a barbarous notion! Making yourself uncomfortable as a penance! And yet we somehow seemed to think it quite logical to sleep that way as part of an evening dedicated to pleasure. It shows how far the wisdom of the world will go in contradicting itself. “From him that hath not, it shall be taken away even that which he hath. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1244:Do not desire chiefly to be cherished and consoled by God; desire above all to love Him.
Do not anxiously desire to have others find consolation in God, but rather help them to love God.
Do not seek consolation in talking about God, but speak of Him in order that He may be glorified.
If you truly love Him, nothing can console you but His glory. And if you seek His glory before everything else, then you will also be humble enough to receive consolation from His hand: accepting it chiefly because, in showing His mercy to us, He is glorified in our souls. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1245:I have my own way to walk and for some reason or other Zen is right in the middle of it wherever I go. So there it is, with all its beautiful purposelessness, and it has become very familiar to me though I do not know "what it is." Or even if it is an "it." Not to be foolish and multiply words, I'll say simply that it seems to me that Zen is the very atmosphere of the Gospels, and the Gospels are bursting with it. It is the proper climate for any monk, no matter what kind of monk he may be. If I could not breathe Zen I would probably die of spiritual asphyxiation. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1246:I would call the attention of the reader to the difference between "reason" and "reasoning." Reason is a light, reasoning a process. Reason is a faculty, reasoning an exercise of that faculty. Reasoning proceeds from one truth to another by means of argumentation. This generally involves the whole mind in labor and complexity. But reason does not exist merely in order to engage in reasoning. The process is a means to an end. The true fulfillment of reason as a faculty is found when it can embrace the truth simply and without labor in the light of single intuition. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1247:My eyes opened and took all this in. And for the first time in my life I realized that I no longer cared whether I preserved my place in all this or lost it: whether I stayed here or went to the army. All that no longer mattered. It was in the hands of One Who loved me far better than I could ever love myself: and my heart was filled with peace.
It was a peace that did not depend on houses, or jobs, or places, or times, or external conditions. It was a peace that time and material-created situations could never give. It was peace that the world could not give. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1248:The basic problem is not political, it is apolitical and human. One of the most important things to do is to keep cutting deliberately through political lines and barriers and emphasizing the fact that these are largely fabrications and that there is another dimension, a genuine reality, totally opposed to the fictions of politics: the human dimension which politics pretend to arrogate entirely to themselves. This is the necessary first step along the long way toward the perhaps impossible task of purifying, humanizing and somehow illuminating politics themselves. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1249:Here the highest knowledge Is unbounded. That which gives things Their thusness cannot be delimited by things. So when we speak of ‘limits,’ we remain confined To limited things. The limit of the unlimited is called ‘fullness.’ The limitlessness of the limited is called ‘emptiness.’ Tao is the source of both. But it is itself Neither fullness nor emptiness. Tao produces both renewal and decay, But is neither renewal or decay. It causes being and non-being But is neither being nor non-being. Tao assembles and it destroys, But it is neither the Totality nor the Void. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1250:How many people there are in the world of today who have “lost their faith” along with the vain hopes and illusions of their childhood. What they called “faith” was just one among all the other illusions. They placed all their hope in a certain sense of spiritual peace, of comfort, of interior equilibrium, of self-respect. Then when they began to struggle with the real difficulties and burdens of mature life, when they became aware of their own weakness, they lost their peace, they let go of their precious self-respect, and it became impossible for them to “believe. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1251:Leaving Things Alone (excerpt)
Too much pleasure? Yang has too much influence. Too much suffering? Yin has too much influence. When one of these outweighs the other, it is as if the seasons came at the wrong times. The balance of cold and heat is destroyed; the body of man suffers.
Too much happiness, too much unhappiness, out of due time, men are thrown off balance. What will they do next? Thought runs wild. No control. They start everything, finish nothing. Here competition begins, here the idea of excellence is born, and robbers appear in the world. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1252:Perhaps you will not be able completely to identify this presence and this continuous action going on within you unless it happens to be taking place formally on the altar before you: but at least then, obscurely, you will recognize in the breaking of the Bread the Stranger Who was your companion yesterday and the day before. And like the disciples of Emmaus, you will realize how fitting it was that your heart should burn within you when the incidents of your day’s work spoke to you of the Christ Who lived and worked and offered His sacrifice within you all the time. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1253:That year I had signed up for a course in French Medieval Literature. My mind was turning back, in a way, to the things I remembered from the old days in Saint Antonin. The deep, naive, rich simplicity of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was beginning to speak to me again. I had written a paper on a legend of a 'Jongleur de Notre Dame,' compared with a story from the Fathers of the Desert, in Migne's Latin Patrology. I was being drawn back into the Catholic atmosphere, and I could feel the health of it, even in the merely natural order, working already within me. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1254:The mark of the "Noble Minded Man" is that he does not do things simply because they are pleasing or profitable to himself, but because they flow from an unconditional moral imperative. They are things that he sees to be right and good in themselves. Hence, anyone who is guided by the profit motive, even though it be for the profit of the society to which he belongs, is not capable of living a genuinely moral life. Even when his acts do not conflict with the moral law, they remain amoral because they are motivated by the desire of profit and not for the love of good. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1255:First of all, although men have a common destiny, each individual also has to work out his own personal salvation for himself in fear and trembling. We can help one another to find the meaning of life no doubt. But in the last analysis, the individual person is responsible for living his own life and for "finding himself." If he persists in shifting his responsibility to somebody else, he fails to find out the meaning of his own existence. You cannot tell me who I am and I cannot tell you who you are. If you do not know your own identity, who is going to identify you? ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1256:There is an irreducible opposition between the deep transcendent self that awakens only in contemplation, and the superficial, external self which we commonly identify with the first person singular. We must remember that this superficial “I” is not our real self. It is our “individuality” and our “empirical self” but it is not truly the hidden and mysterious person in whom we subsist before the eyes of God. The “I” that works in the world, thinks about itself, observes its own reactions and talks about itself is not the true “I” that has been united to God in Christ. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1257:The man who fears to be alone will never be anything but lonely, no matter how much he may surround himself with people. But the man who learns, in solitude and recollection, to be at peace with his own loneliness, and to prefer its reality to the illusion of merely natural companionship, comes to know the invisible companionship of God. Such a one is alone with God in all places, and he alone truly enjoys the companionship of other men, because he loves them in God in Whom their presence is not tiresome, and because of Whom his own love for them can never know satiety. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1258:We too often forget that faith is a matter of questioning and struggle before it becomes one of certitude and peace. You have to doubt and reject everything else in order to believe firmly in Christ, and after you have begun to believe, your faith itself must be tested and purified. Christianity is not merely a set of forgone conclusions. Faith tends to be defeated by the burning presence of God in mystery, and seeks refuge from him, flying to comfortable social forms and safe convictions in which purification is no longer an inner battle but a matter of outward gesture. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1259:Once you have grace," I said to him, "you are free. Without it, you cannot help doing the things you know you should not do, and that you know you don't really want to do. But once you have grace, you are free. When you are baptized, there is no power in existence that can force you to commit a sin-nothing that will be able to drive you to it against your own conscience. And if you merely will it, you will be free forever, because the strength will be given you, as much as you need, and as often as you ask, and as soon as you ask, and generally long before you ask for it, too. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1260:Once you have grace," I said to him, "you are free. Without it, you cannot help doing the things you know you should not do, and that you know you don't really want to do. But once you have grace, you are free. When you are baptized, there is no power in existence that can force you to commit a sin--nothing that will be able to drive you to it against your own conscience. And if you merely will it, you will be free forever, because the strength will be given you, as much as you need, and as often as you ask, and as soon as you ask, and generally long before you ask for it, too. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1261:I once thought that would be the consummation of all joy—to be united by a bond of love—to be lost in His presence there as if nothing else mattered.
"And now—there is much more. Instead of myself and my Christ and my love and my prayer, there is the might of a prayer stronger than thunder and milder than the flight of doves rising up from the Priest who is the Center of every priest, shaking the foundations of the universe and lifting up—me, Host, altar, sanctuary, people, church, abbey, forest, cities, continents, seas and worlds to God and plunging everything into Him. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1262:Place no hope in the feeling of assurance, in spiritual comfort. You may well have to get along without this. Place no hope in the inspirational preachers of Christian sunshine, who are able to pick you up and set you back on your feet and make you feel good for three or four days-until you fold up and collapse into despair. Self-confidence is a precious natural gift, a sign of health. But it is not the same thing as faith. Faith is much deeper, and it must be deep enough to subsist when we are weak, when we are sick, when our self-confidence is gone, when our self-respect is gone. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1263:The truth is, that the concept of God which I had always entertained, and which I had accused Christians of teaching to the world, was a concept of a being who was simply impossible. He was infinite and yet finite; perfect and imperfect; eternal and yet changing - subject to all the variations of emotion, love, sorrow, hate, revenge, that men are prey to....
What a relief it was for me, now, to discover not only that no idea of ours, let alone any image, could adequately represent God, but also that we should not allow ourselves to be satisfied with any such knowledge of Him. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1264:Discernment and detachment (Jurists and apatheia) are two characters of the mature Christian soul. They are not yet the mark of a mystic, but they bear witness that one is traveling the right way to mystical contemplation, and that the stage of beginners is passed. The presence of discernment and detachment is manifested by a spontaneous thirst for what is good—charity, union with the will of God—and an equally spontaneous repugnance for what is evil. The man who has this virtue no longer needs to be exhorted by promises to do what is right, or deterred from evil by threat of punishment. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1265:Now there is a spiritual selfishness which even poisons the good act of giving to another. Spiritual goods are greater than the material, and it is possible for me to love selfishly in the very act of depriving myself of material things for the benefit of another. If my gift is intended to bind him to me, to put him under an obligation, to exercise a kind of hidden moral tyranny over his soul, then in loving him I am really loving myself. And this is a greater and more insidious selfishness, since it traffics not in flesh and blood but in other persons’ souls. Natural asceticism presents ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1266:There is a false and momentary happiness in self-satisfaction, but it always leads to sorrow because it narrows and deadens our spirit. True happiness is found in unselfish love, a love which increases in proportion as it is shared. There is no end to the sharing of love, and, therefore, the potential happiness of such love is without limit. Infinite sharing is the law of God’s inner life. He has made the sharing of ourselves the law of our own being, so that it is in loving others that we best love ourselves. In disinterested activity we best fulfill our own capacities to act and to be. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1267:There are many other escapes from the empirical, external self, which might seem to be, but are not, contemplation. For instance, the experience of being seized and taken out of oneself by collective enthusiasm, in a totalitarian parade: the self-righteous upsurge of party loyalty that blots out conscience and absolves every criminal tendency in the name of Class, Nation, Party, Race or Sect. The danger and the attraction of these false mystiques of Nation and of Class is precisely that they seduce and pretend to satisfy those who are no longer aware of any deep or genuine spiritual need. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1268:To live exclusively for myself, I must make all things bend themselves to my will as if I were a god. But this is impossible. Is there any more cogent indication of my creaturehood than the insufficiency of my own will? For I cannot make the universe obey me. I cannot make other people conform to my own whims and fancies. I cannot make even my own body obey me. When I give it pleasure, it deceives my expectation and makes me suffer pain. When I give myself what I conceive to be freedom, I deceive myself and find that I am the prisoner of my own blindness and selfishness and insufficiency. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1269:Hard as it is to convey in human language, there is a very real and recognizable (but almost entirely undefinable) Presence of God, in which we confront Him in prayer knowing Him by Whom we are known, aware of Him Who is aware of us, loving Him by Whom we know ourselves to be loved. Present to ourselves in the fullness of our own personality, we are present to Him Who is infinite in His Being, His Otherness, His Self-hood. It is not a vision face to face, but a certain presence self to Self in which, with the reverent attention of our Whole being, we know Him in Whom all things have being. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1270:It is almost impossible to overestimate the value of true humility and its power in the spiritual life. For the beginning of humility is the beginning of blessedness and the consummation of humility is the perfection of all joy. Humility contains in itself the answer to all the great problems of the life of the soul. It is the only key to faith, with which the spiritual life begins: for faith and humility are inseparable. In perfect humility all selfishness disappears and your soul no longer lives for itself or in itself for God: and it is lost and submerged in Him and transformed into Him. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1271:Man is divided against himself and against God by his own selfishness, which divides him against his brother. This division cannot be healed by a love that places itself only on one side of the rift. Love must reach over to both sides and draw them together. We cannot love ourselves unless we love others, and we cannot love others unless we love ourselves. But a selfish love of ourselves makes us incapable of loving others. The difficulty of this commandment lies in the paradox that it would have us love ourselves unselfishly, because even our love of ourselves is something we owe to others. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1272:Let no one hope to find in contemplation an escape from conflict, from anguish or from doubt. On the contrary, the deep, inexpressible certitude of the contemplative experience awakens a tragic anguish and opens many questions in the depths of the heart like wounds that cannot stop bleeding. For every gain in deep certitude there is a corresponding growth of superficial “doubt.” This doubt is by no means opposed to genuine faith, but it mercilessly examines and questions the spurious “faith” of everyday life, the human faith which is nothing but the passive acceptance of conventional opinion. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1273:The life of contemplation implies two levels of awareness: first, awareness of the question, and, second, awareness of the answer. Though these are two distinct and enormously different levels, yet they are in fact an awareness of the same thing. The question is, itself, the answer. And we ourselves are both. But we cannot know this until we have moved into the second kind of awareness. We awaken, not to find an answer absolutely distinct from the question, but to realize that the question is its own answer. And all is summed up in one awareness - not a proposition, but an experience: "I AM". ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1274:The Christ we find in ourselves is not identified with what we vainly seek to admire and idolize in ourselves—on the contrary, he has identified himself with what we resent in ourselves, for he has taken upon himself our wretchedness and our misery, our poverty and our sins…. We will never find peace if we listen to the voice of our own fatuous self-deception that tells us the conflict has ceased to exist. We will find peace when we can listen to the ‘death dance’ in our blood, not only with equanimity but with exultation because we hear within it the echoes of the victory of the Risen Savior. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1275:It is useless to try to make peace with ourselves by being pleased with everything we have done. In order to settle down in the quiet of our own being we must learn to be detached from the results of our own activity. We must withdraw ourselves, to some extent, from the effects that are beyond our control and be content with the good will and the work that are the quiet expression of our inner life. We must be content to live without watching ourselves live, to work without expecting any immediate reward, to love without an instantaneous satisfaction, and to exist without any special recognition. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1276:Yet another temptation goes to the other extreme. With Sartre, it says: “L’enfer, c’est les autres!” (“Other people—that’s hell!”). In that case, love itself becomes the great temptation and the great sin. Because it is an inescapable sin, it is also hell. But this too is only a disguised form of Eros—Eros in solitude. It is the love that is mortally wounded by its own incapacity to love another, and flies from others in order not to have to give itself to them. Even in its solitude this Eros is most tortured by its inescapable need of another, not for the other’s sake but for its own fulfillment! ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1277:See Who God is! Realize what this Mass is! See Christ here, on the Cross! See His wounds, see His torn hands, see how the King of Glory is crowned with thorns! Do you know what Love is? Here is Love, Here on this Cross, here is Love, suffering these nails, these thorns, that scourge loaded with lead, smashed to pieces, bleeding to death because of your sins and bleeding to death because of people that will never know Him, and never think of Him and will never remember His Sacrifice. Learn from Him how to love God and how to love men! Learn of this Cross, this Love, how to give your life away to Him. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1278:BUT as long as you pretend to live in pure autonomy, as your own master, without even a god to rule you, you will inevitably live as the servant of another man or as the alienated member of an organization. Paradoxically it is the acceptance of God that makes you free and delivers you from human tyranny, for when you serve Him you are no longer permitted to alienate your spirit in human servitude. God did not invite the Children of Israel to leave the slavery of Egypt: He commanded them to do so. THE poet enters into himself in order to create. The contemplative enters into God in order to be created. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1279:One of the effects of original sin is an instinctive prejudice in favour of our own selfish desires. We see things as they are not, because we see them centered on ourselves. Fear, anxiety, greed, ambition and our hopeless need for pleasure all distort the image of reality that is reflected in our minds. Grace does not completely correct this distortion all at once: but it gives us a means of recognizing and allowing for it. And it tells us what we must do to correct it. Sincerity must be bought at a price: the humility to recognize our innumerable errors, and fidelity in tirelessly setting them right. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1280:Strong hate, the hate that takes joy in hating, is strong because it does not believe itself to be unworthy and alone. It feels the support of a justifying God, of an idol of war, an avenging and destroying spirit. From such blood-drinking gods the human race was once liberated, with great toil and terrible sorrow, by the death of a God Who delivered Himself to the Cross and suffered the pathological cruelty of His own creatures out of pity for them. In conquering death He opened their eyes to the reality of a love which asks no questions about worthiness, a love which overcomes hatred and destroys death. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1281:In the end the contemplative suffers the anguish of realizing that he no longer knows what God is. He may or may not mercifully realize that, after all, this is a great gain, because “God is not a what,” not a “thing.” That is precisely one of the essential characteristics of contemplative experience. It sees that there is no “what” that can be called God. There is “no such thing” as God because God is neither a “what” nor a “thing” but a pure “Who.”* He is the “Thou” before whom our inmost “I” springs into awareness. He is the I Am before whom with our own most personal and inalienable voice we echo “I am. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1282:Whether you teach or live in the cloister or nurse the sick, whether you are in religion or out of it, married or single, no matter who you are or what you are, you are called to the summit of perfection: you are called to a deep interior life perhaps even to mystical prayer, and to pass the fruits of your contemplation on to others. And if you cannot do so by word, then by example.
Yet if this sublime fire of infused love burns in your soul, it will inevitably send forth throughout the Church and the world an influence more tremendous than could be estimated by the radius reached by words or by example. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1283:I was still without any formal spiritual direction, but I went frequently to confession, especially at St. Francis’ Church, where the Friars were more inclined to give me advice than secular priests had been. And it was in one of the confessionals at St. Francis’ that a good priest one day told me, very insistently: “Go to Communion every day, every day.” By that time, I had already become a daily communicant, but his words comforted and strengthened me, and his emphasis made me glad. And indeed I had reason to be, for it was those daily Communions that were transforming my life almost visibly, from day to day. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1284:Nothing could be more alien to contemplation than the cogito ergo sum of Descartes. “I think, therefore I am.” This is the declaration of an alienated being, in exile from his own spiritual depths, compelled to seek some comfort in a proof for his own existence(!) based on the observation that he ‘“thinks.” If his thought is necessary as a medium through which he arrives at the concept of his existence, then he is in fact only moving further away from his true being. He is reducing himself to a concept. He is making it impossible for himself to experience, directly and immediately, the mystery of his own being. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1285:...The more I think of them, the more I realize that I must certainly owe the Privats for more than butter and milk and good nourishing food for my body. I am indebted to them for much more than the kindness and care they showed me, the goodness and the delicate solicitude with which they treated me as their own child, yet without any assertive or natural familiarity....
That was why I was glad of the love the Privats showed me, and was ready to love them in return. It did not burn you, it did not hold you, it did not try to imprison you in demonstrations, or trap your feet in the snares of its interest. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1286:What a revelation it was, to discover so many ordinary people in a place together, more conscious of God than of one another: not there to show off their hats or their clothes, but to pray, or at least to fulfill a religious obligation, not a human one. For even those who might have been there for no better motive than that they were obliged to be, were at least free from any of the self-conscious and human constraint which is never absent from a Protestant church where people are definitely gathered together as people, as neighbors, and always have at least half an eye for one another, if not all of both eyes. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1287:In the use of force, one simplifies the situation by assuming that the evil to be overcome is clear-cut, definite, and irreversible. Hence there remains but one thing: to eliminate it. Any dialogue with the sinner, any question of the irreversibility of his act, only means faltering and failure. Failure to eliminate evil is itself a defeat. Anything that even remotely risks such defeat is in itself capitulation to evil. The irreversibility of evil then reaches out to contaminate even the tolerant thought of the hesitant crusader who, momentarily, doubts the total evil of the enemy he is about to eliminate. p. 21 ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1288:The peace the world pretends to desire is really no peace at all. To some men, peace merely means the liberty to exploit other people without fear of retaliation or interference. To others, peace means the freedom to rob brothers without interruption. To still others, it means the leisure to devour the goods of the earth without being compelled to interrupt their pleasures to feed those whom their greed is starving. And to practically everybody, peace simply means the absence of any physical violence that might cast a shadow over lives devoted to the satisfaction of their animal appetites for comfort and pleasure. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1289:Is it even worth the obvious comment that in all this I was stamping the last remains of spiritual vitality out of my own soul, and trying with all my might to crush and obliterate the image of the divine liberty that had been implanted in me by God? With every nerve and fibre of my being I was laboring to enslave myself in the bonds of my own intolerable disgust. There is nothing new or strange about the process. But what people do not realize is that this is the crucifixion of Christ: in which He dies again and again in the individuals who were made to share the joy and the freedom of His grace, and who deny Him. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1290:Indeed, the truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers the most: and his suffering comes to him from things so little and so trivial that one can say that it is no longer objective at all. It is his own existence, his own being, that is at once the subject and the source of his pain, and his very existence and consciousness is his greatest torture. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1291:Nirvana is the extinction of desire and the full awakening that results from this extinction. It is not simply the dissolution of all ego-limits, a quasi-infinite expansion of the ego into an ocean of self-satisfaction and annihilation. This is the last and worst illusion of the ascetic who, having “crossed to the other shore,” says to himself with satisfaction: “I have at last crossed to the other shore.” He has, of course, crossed nothing. He is still where he was, as broken as ever. He is in the darkness of Avidya. He has only managed to find a pill that produces a spurious light and deadens a little of the pain. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1292:Mere living alone does not isolate a man, mere living together does not bring men into communion. The common life can either make one more of a person or less of a person, depending whether it is truly common life or merely life in a crowd. To live in communion, in genuine dialogue with others is absolutely necessary if man is to remain human. But to live in the midst of others, sharing nothing with them but the common noise and the general distraction, isolates a man in the worst way, separates him from reality in a way that is almost painless. It divides him off and separates him from other men and from his true self. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1293:Be poor, go down into the far end of society, take the last place among men, live with those who are despised, love other men and serve them instead of making them serve you. Do not fight them when they push you around, but pray for those that hurt you. Do not look for pleasure, but turn away from things that satisfy your senses and your mind and look for God in hunger and thirst and darkness, through deserts of the spirit in which it seems to be madness to travel. Take upon yourself the burden of Christ’s Cross, that is, Christ’s humility and poverty and obedience and renunciation, and you will find peace for your souls. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1294:The truth we must, love in loving our brothers is the concrete destiny and sanctity that are willed for them by the love of God. One who really loves another is not merely moved by the desire to see him contented and healthy and prosperous in this world. Love cannot be satisfied with anything so incomplete. If I am to love my brother, I must somehow enter deep into the mystery of God’s love for him. I must be moved not only by human sympathy but by that divine sympathy which is revealed to us in Jesus and which enriches our own lives by the outpouring of the Holy Spirit in our hearts. The truth I love in loving my brother ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1295:Life is simple: We are living in a word that is absolutely transparent and God is shining through it all the time. This is not just a fable or a nice story. It is true. If we abandon ourselves to God and forget ourselves, we see it sometimes, and we see it maybe frequently. God manifests Himself everywhere, in everything--in people and in things and in nature and in events. It becomes very obvious that He is everywhere and in everything and we cannot be without Him. You cannot be without God. It's impossible. It's simple impossible. The only thing is that we don't see it. What is it that makes the world opaque? It is care. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1296:On A Theme By Thomas Merton
"Adam, where are you?"
God's
hands
palpate darkness, the void
that is Adam's inattention,
his confused attention to everything,
impassioned by multiplicity, his despair.
Multiplicity, his despair;
God's
hands
enacting blindness. Like a child
at a barbaric fairgrounds -noise, lights, the violent odors -Adam fragments himself. The whirling rides!
Fragmented Adam stares.
God's
hands
unseen, the whirling rides
dazzle, the lights blind him. Fragmented,
he is not present to himself. God
suffers the void that is his absence.
~ Denise Levertov,#NFDB
1297:Next comes the temptation to destroy ourselves for love of the other. The only value is love of the other. Self-sacrifice is an absolute value in itself. And the desire of the other is also absolute in itself. No matter what the lover desires, we will give up our life or even our soul to please him. This is the asceticism of Eros, which makes it a point of honor to follow the beloved even into hell. For what greater sacrifice could man offer on the altar of love than the sacrifice of his own immortal soul? Heroism in this sacrifice is measured precisely by madness: it is all the greater when it is offered for a more trivial motive. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1298:For it is God’s love that warms me in the sun and God’s love that sends the cold rain. It is God’s love that feeds me in the bread I eat and God that feeds me also by hunger and fasting. It is the love of God that sends the winter days when I am cold and sick, and the hot summer when I labor and my clothes are full of sweat: but it is God Who breathes on me with light winds off the river and in the breezes out of the wood. His love spreads the shade of the sycamore over my head and sends the water-boy along the edge of the wheat field with a bucket from the spring, while the laborers are resting and the mules stand under the tree. It ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1299:Technology has its own ethic of expediency and efficiency. What can be done efficiently must be done in the most efficient way—even if what is done happens, for example, to be genocide or the devastation of a country by total war. Even the long-term interests of society, or the basic needs of man himself, are not considered when they get in the way of technology. We waste natural resources, as well as those of undeveloped countries, iron, oil, etc., in order to fill our cities and roads with a congestion of traffic that is in fact largely useless, and is a symptom of the meaningless and futile agitation of our own minds. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1300:And nowhere, except perhaps in the analogous society of pagan Rome, has there ever been such a flowering of cheap and petty and disgusting lusts and vanities as in the world of capitalism, where there is no evil that is not fostered and encouraged for the sake of making money. We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible, in order to cater to them with the products of our factories and printing presses and movie studios and all the rest. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1301:As soon as man is fully disposed to be alone with God, he is alone with God no matter where he may be--in the country, in the monastery, in the woods or in the city. The lightning flashes from east to west, illuminating the whole horizon and striking where it pleases and at that same instant the infinite liberty of God flashes in the depths of that man's soul, and is illumined. At that moment he sees though he seems to be in the middle of his journey, he has already arrived at the end. For the life of grace on earth is the beginning of the life of glory. Although he is a traveler in time, he has opened his eyes, for a moment, in eternity. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1302:What was standing in my way was my own self-awareness. If I can begin this fasting of the heart, self-awareness will vanish. Then I will be free from limitation and preoccupation I Is that what you mean?” “Yes,” said Confucius, “that’s it! If you can do this, you will be able to go among men in their world without upsetting them. You will not enter into conflict with their ideal image of themselves. If they will listen, sing them a song. If not, keep silent. Don’t try to break down their door. Don’t try out new medicines on them. Just be there among them, because there is nothing else for you to be but one of them. Then you may have success! ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1303:There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1304:Like the prophet Jonas, whom God ordered to go to Nineveh, I found myself with an almost uncontrollable desire to go in the opposite direction. God pointed one way and all my "ideals" pointed in the other. It was when Jonas was traveling as fast as he could away from Nineveh, toward Tharsis, that he was thrown overboard, and swallowed by a whale who took him where God wanted him to go...But I feel that my own life is especially sealed with this great sign, which baptism and monastic profession and priestly ordination have burned into the roots of my being, because like Jonas himself I find myself traveling toward my destiny in the belly of a paradox. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1305:For Chuang Tzu, the truly great man is therefore not the man who has, by a lifetime of study and practice, accumulated a great fund of virtue and merit, but the man in whom “Tao acts without impediment,” the “man of Tao.” Several of the texts in this present book describe the “man of Tao.” Others tell us what he is not. One of the most instructive, in this respect, is the long and delightful story of the anxiety-ridden, perfectionistic disciple of Keng Sang Chu, who is sent to Lao Tzu to learn the “elements.” He is told that “if you persist in trying to attain what is never attained … in reasoning about what cannot be understood, you will be destroyed. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1306:Indeed, the truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most: and his suffering comes to him from things so little and so trivial that one can say that it is no longer objective at all. It is his own existence, his own being, that is at once the subject and the source of his pain, and his very existence and consciousness is his greatest torture. This is another of the great perversions ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1307:We must try to accept ourselves, whether individually or collectively, not only as perfectly good or perfectly bad, but in our mysterious, unaccountable mixture of good and evil. We have to stand by the modicum of good that is in us without exaggerating it. We have to defend our real rights, because unless we respect our own rights we will certainly not respect the rights of others. But at the same time we have to recognize that we have willfully or otherwise trespassed on the rights of others. We must be able to admit this not only as the result of self-examination, but when it is pointed out unexpectedly, and perhaps not too gently, by somebody else. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1308:Paul Farmer, the renowned physician who has spent his life trying to cure the world's sickest and poorest people, once quoted me something that the writer Thomas Merton said: We are bodies of broken bones. I guess I'd always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we're fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we're shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis of our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion. ~ Bryan Stevenson, #NFDB
1309:Paul Farmer, the renowned physician who has spent his life trying to cure the world’s sickest and poorest people, once quoted me something that the writer Thomas Merton said: We are bodies of broken bones. I guess I’d always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we’re fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we’re shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion. We ~ Bryan Stevenson, #NFDB
1310:WHAT about the men who run about the countryside painting signs that say “Jesus saves” and “Prepare to meet God!” Have you ever seen one of them? I have not, but I often try to imagine them, and I wonder what goes on in their minds. Strangely, their signs do not make me think of Jesus, but of them. Or perhaps it is “their Jesus” who gets in the way and makes all thought of Jesus impossible. They wish to force their Jesus upon us, and He is perhaps only a projection of themselves. They seem to be at times threatening the world with judgment and at other times promising it mercy. But are they asking simply to be loved and recognized and valued, for themselves? ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1311:What every man looks for in life is his own salvation and the salvation of the men he lives with. By salvation I mean first of all the full discovery of who he himself really is. Then I mean something of the fulfillment of his own God-given powers, in the love of others and of God. I mean also the discovery that he cannot find himself in himself alone, but that he must find himself in and through others. Ultimately, these propositions are summed up in two lines of the Gospel: “If any man would save his life, he must lose it,” and, “Love one another as I have loved you.” It is also contained in another saying from St. Paul: “We are all members one of another. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1312:Quoting from Thomas Merton
Dialogues With Silence
The true contemplative is not one who prepares his mind for a particular message that he wants or expects to hear, but is one who remains empty because he knows that he can never expect to anticipate the words that will transform his darkness into light. He does not even anticipate a special kind of transformation. He does not demand light instead of darkness. He waits on the Word of God in silence, and, when he is answered it is not so much by a word that bursts into his silence. It is by his silence itself, suddenly, inexplicably revealing itself to him as a word of great power, full of the voice of God. (17) ~ Stephen Cope,#NFDB
1313:When we do not desire the things of this world for their own sake, we become able to see them as they are. We see at once their goodness and their purpose, and we become able to appreciate them as we never have before. As soon as we are free of them, they begin to please us. As soon as we cease to rely on them alone, they are able to serve us. Since we depend neither on the pleasure nor on the assistance we get from them, they offer us both pleasure and assistance, at the command of God. For Jesus has said: “Seek first the kingdom of God, and His justice and all these things [that is all that you need for your life on earth] will be given to you besides” (Matthew 6:33). ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1314:Everyone of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self..We are not very good at recognizing illusions, least of all the ones we cherish about ourselves. (34) Contemplation is not and cannot be a function of this external self. There is an irreducible opposition between the deep transcendent self that awakens only in contemplation, and the superficial, external self which we commonly identify with the first person singular.(7) Our reality, our true self, is hidden in what appears to us to be nothingness....We can rise above this unreality and recover our hidden reality....(281) God Himself begins to live in me not only as my Creator but as my other and true self. (41) ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1315:Buddhist philosophy is an interpretation of ordinary human experience, but an interpretation which is not revealed by God nor discovered in the access of inspiration nor seen in a mystical light. Basically, Buddhist metaphysics is a very simple and natural elaboration of the implications of Buddha’s own experience of enlightenment. Buddhism does not seek primarily to understand or to “believe in” the enlightenment of Buddha as the solution to all human problems, but seeks an existential and empirical participation in that enlightenment experience. It is conceivable that one might have the “enlightenment” without being aware of any discursive philosophical implications at all. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1316:And sooner or later, if we follow Christ we have to risk everything in order to gain everything. We have to gamble on the invisible and risk all that we can see and taste and feel. But we know the risk is worth it, because there is nothing more insecure than the transient world. For this world as we see it is passing away (1 Corinthians 7:31). Without courage we can never attain to true simplicity. Cowardice keeps us “double minded” —hesitating between the world and God. In this hesitation, there is no true faith—faith remains an opinion. We are never certain, because we never quite give in to the authority of an invisible God. This hesitation is the death of hope. We never let go of ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1317:Hui Tzu said to Chuang Tzu: “All your teaching is centered on what has no use.” Chuang replied: “If you have no appreciation for what has no use You cannot begin to talk about what can be used. The earth, for example, is broad and vast But of all this expanse a man uses only a few inches Upon which he happens to be standing. Now suppose you suddenly take away All that he is not actually using So that, all around his feet a gulf Yawns, and he stands in the Void, With nowhere solid except right under each foot: How long will he be able to use what he is using?” Hui Tzu said: “It would cease to serve any purpose.” Chuang Tzu concluded: “This shows The absolute necessity Of what has ‘no use. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1318:Después del latín, me parece que no hay lengua tan apropiada para la oración y para hablar de Dios como el español, pues es una lengua a la vez fuerte y ágil, tiene su precisión, tiene en sí la cualidad del acero, que le da la exactitud que necesita el verdadero misticismo y, empero, es suave, también, gentil y flexible, lo que requiere la devoción, es cortés, suplicante y galante; se presta, de modo sorprendente, muy poco a la sentimentalidad. Tiene algo de la intelectualidad del francés, pero no la frialdad que la intelectualidad toma en el francés; nunca desborda en las melodías femeninas del italiano. El español no es nunca un idioma débil, nunca flojo, aun en los labios de una mujer. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1319:Thomas Merton writes, "No despair of ours can alter the reality of things, or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there...We are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the winds and join in the general dance." The cosmic dance is simply always happening, and you'll want to be there when it happens. For it is there in the birth of your first child, in roundhouse bagging, in watching your crew eat, in an owl's surprising appearance, and in a "digested" frog. Rascally inventions of holiness abounding--today, awaiting the attention of our delight. Yes, yes, yes. God so love the world that He thought we'd find the poetry in it. Music. Nothing playing. ~ Gregory Boyle, #NFDB
1320:Justify my soul, O God, but also from Your fountains fill my will with fire. Shine in my mind, although perhaps this means “be darkness to my experience,” but occupy my heart with Your tremendous Life. Let my eyes see nothing in the world but Your glory, and let my hands touch nothing that is not for Your service. Let my tongue taste no bread that does not strengthen me to praise Your great mercy. I will hear Your voice and I will hear all harmonies You have created, singing Your hymns. Sheep’s wool and cotton from the field shall warm me enough that I may live in Your service; I will give the rest to Your poor. Let me use all things for one sole reason: to find my joy in giving You glory. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1321:At the same time [the contemplative] most earnestly wants everybody else to share his peace and his joy. His contemplation gives him a new outlook on the world of men. He looks about him with a secret and tranquil surmise which he perhaps admits to no one; hoping to find in the faces of other men or to hear in their voices some sign of vocation and potentiality for the same deep happiness and wisdom. He finds himself speaking of God to the men in whom he hopes he has recognized the light of his own peace, the awakening of his own secret: or if he cannot speak to them, he writes for them, and his contemplative life is still imperfect without sharing, without companionship, without communion. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1322:No matter how ruined man and his world may seem to be, and no matter how terrible man's despair may become, as long as he continues to be a man his very humanity continues to tell him that life has a meaning."
...
"Our life, as individual persons and as members of a perplexed and struggling race, provokes us with the evidence that it must have meaning. Part of the meaning still escapes us. Yet our purpose in life is to discover this meaning, and live according to it. We have, therefore, something to live for. The process of living, of growing up, and becoming a person, is precisely the gradually increasing awareness of what that something is. This is a difficult task, for many reasons. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1323:A Christian society? Such a society is not one that is run by priests, not even necessarily one in which everybody has to go to Church: it is one in which work is for production and not for profit, and production is not for its own sake, not merely for the sake of those who own the means of production, but for all who contribute in a constructive way to the process of production. A Christian society is one in which men give their share of labor and intelligence and receive their share of the fruits of the labor of all, and in which all this is seen in relation to a transcendental purpose, the “history of salvation,” the Kingdom of God, a society centered upon the divine truth and the divine mercy. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1324:For it had become evident to me that I was a great rebel. I fancied that I had suddenly risen above all the errors and stupidities and mistakes of modern society--there are enough of them to rise above, I admit--and that I had taken my place in the ranks of those who held up their heads and squared their shoulders and marched into the future. In the modern world, people are always holding up their heads and marching into the future, although they haven't the slightest idea what they think the "future" is or could possibly mean. The only future we seem to walk into, in actual fact, is full of bigger and more terrible wars, wars well calculated to knock our upraised heads off those squared shoulders. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1325:The complacency of the individual who admires his own excellence is bad enough, but it is more respectable than the complacency of the man who has no self-esteem because he has not even a superficial self which he can esteem. He is not a person, not an individual, only an atom. This atomized existence is sometimes praised as humility or as self-sacrifice, some-times it is called obedience, sometimes it is devotion to the dialectic of class war. It produces a kind of peace which is not peace, but only the escape from an immediately urgent sense of conflict. It is the peace not of love but of anesthesia. It is the peace not of self-realization and self-dedication, but of flight into irresponsibility. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1326:LXXXVII IT WAS said of one of the elders that he persevered in a fast of seventy weeks, eating only once a week. This elder asked God to reveal to him the meaning of a certain Scripture text, and God would not reveal it to him. So he said to himself: Look at all the work I have done without getting anywhere! I will go to one of the brothers and ask him. When he had gone out and closed the door and was starting on his way an angel of the Lord was sent to him, saying: The seventy weeks you fasted did not bring you any closer to God, but now that you have humbled yourself and set out to ask your brother, I am sent to reveal the meaning of that text. And opening to him the meaning which he sought, he went away. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1327:We are obliged to love one another. We are not strictly bound to 'like' one another. Love governs the will: 'liking' is a matter of sense and sensibility. Nevertheless, if we really love others it will not be too hard to like them also.
If we wait for some people to become agreeable or attractive before we begin to love them, we will never begin. If we are content to give them a cold impersonal 'charity' that is merely a matter of obligation, we will not trouble to understand them or to sympathize with them at all. And in that case we will not really love them, because love implies an efficacious will not only to do good to others exteriorly but also to find some good in them to which we can respond. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1328:When Life was Full
In the age when life on earth was full, no one paid any special attention to worthy men, nor did they single out the man of ability. Rulers were simply the highest branches on the tree, and the people were like deer in the woods. They were honest and righteous without realizing that they were “doing their duty.” They loved each other and did not know that this was “love of neighbor.” They deceived no one yet they did not know that they were “men to be trusted.” They were reliable and did not know that this was “good faith.” They lived freely together giving and taking, and did not know that they were generous. For this reason their deeds have not been narrated. They made no history. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1329:HOW DID IT EVER HAPPEN THAT, WHEN THE DREGS OF the world had collected in western Europe, when Goth and Frank and Norman and Lombard had mingled with the rot of old Rome to form a patchwork of hybrid races, all of them notable for ferocity, hatred, stupidity, craftiness, lust, and brutality—how did it happen that, from all this, there should come Gregorian chant, monasteries and cathedrals, the poems of Prudentius, the commentaries and histories of Bede, the Moralia of Gregory the Great, St. Augustine’s City of God, and his Trinity, the writings of St. Anselm, St. Bernard’s sermons on the Canticles, the poetry of Caedmon and Cynewulf and Langland and Dante, St. Thomas’ Summa, and the Oxoniense of Duns Scotus? ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1330:In other words, I have tried to learn in my writing a monastic lesson I could probably not have learned otherwise: to let go of my idea of myself, to take myself with more than one grain of salt... In religious terms, this is simply a matter of accepting life, and everything in life as a gift, and clinging to none of it, as far as you are able. You give some of it to others, if you can. Yet one should be able to share things with others without bothering too much about how they like it, either, or how they accept it. Assume they will accept it, if they need it. And if they don’t need it, why should they accept it? That is their business. Let me accept what is mine and give them all their share, and go my way. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1331:There are many other escapes from the empirical, external self, which might seem to be, but are not, contemplation. For instance, the experience of being seized and taken out of oneself by collective enthusiasm, in a totalitarian parade: the self-righteous upsurge of party loyalty that blots out conscience and absolves every criminal tendency in the name of Class, Nation, Party, Race or Sect. .. Yet it is precisely these ersatz forms of enthusiasm that are "opium" for the people, deadening their awareness of their deepest and most personal needs, alienating them from their true selves, putting conscience and personality to sleep and turning free, reasonable men into passive instruments of the power politician. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1332:My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1333:My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1334: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. It is because of them that we need others and others need us. We are not all weak in the same spots, and so we supplement and complete one another, each one making up in himself for the lack in another. Only when we see ourselves in our true human context, as members of a race which is intended to be one organism and "one body," will we begin to understand the positive importance not only of the successes but of the failures and accidents in our lives. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1335:I found a place that I hoped would be obscure, over on one side, in the back, and went to it without genuflecting, and knelt down. As I knelt, the first thing I noticed was a young girl, very pretty too, perhaps fifteen or sixteen, kneeling straight up and praying quite seriously. I was very much impressed to see that someone who was young and beautiful could with such simplicity make prayer the real and serious and principal reason for going to church. She was clearly kneeling that way because she meant it, not in order to show off, and she was praying with an absorption which, though not the deep recollection of a saint, was serious enough to show that she was not thinking at all about the other people who were there. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1336:WHEN LIFE WAS FULL THERE WAS NO HISTORY In the age when life on earth was full, no one paid any special attention to worthy men, nor did they single out the man of ability. Rulers were simply the highest branches on the tree, and the people were like deer in the woods. They were honest and righteous without realizing that they were “doing their duty.” They loved each other and did not know that this was “love of neighbor.” They deceived no one yet they did not know that they were “men to be trusted.” They were reliable and did not know that this was “good faith.” They lived freely together giving and taking, and did not know that they were generous. For this reason their deeds have not been narrated. They made no history. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1337:The reason why Catholic tradition is a tradition,” writes Thomas Merton, “is because there is only one living doctrine in Christianity: there is nothing new to be discovered.” A little bit of death from a thinker who brought the world so much life. Nothing new to be discovered? The minute any human or human institution arrogates to itself a singular knowledge of God, there comes into that knowledge a kind of strychnine pride, and it is as if the most animated and vital creature were instantaneously transformed into a corpse. Any belief that does not recognize and adapt to its own erosions rots from within. Only when doctrine itself is understood to be provisional does doctrine begin to take on a more than provisional significance. ~ Christian Wiman, #NFDB
1338:This false “faith” which is what we often live by and which we even come to confuse with our “religion” is subjected to inexorable questioning. This torment is a kind of trial by fire in which we are compelled, by the very light of invisible truth which has reached us in the dark ray of contemplation, to examine, to doubt and finally to reject all the prejudices and conventions that we have hitherto accepted as if they were dogmas. Hence is it clear that genuine contemplation is incompatible with complacency and with smug acceptance of prejudiced opinions. It is not mere passive acquiescence in the status quo, as some would like to believe—for this would reduce it to the level of spiritual anesthesia. Contemplation is no pain-killer. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1339:As a matter of face, Zen is at present most fashionable in America among those who are least concerned with moral discipline. Zen has, indeed, become for us a symbol of moral revolt. It is true, the Zen-man's contempt for conventional and formalistic social custom is a healthy phenomenon, but it is healthy only because it presupposes a spiritual liberty based on freedom from passion, egotism and self-delusion. A pseudo-Zen attitude which seeks to justify a complete moral collapse with a few rationalizations based on the Zen Masters is only another form of bourgeois self-deception. It is not an expression of healthy revolt, but only another aspect of the same lifeless and inert conventionalism against which it appears to be protesting. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1340:...the spiritual life is the life of man's real self, the life of that interior self whose flame is so often allowed to be smothered under the ashes of anxiety and futile concern. The spiritual life is oriented toward God, rather than toward the immediate satisfaction of the material needs of life, but it is not, for all that, a life of unreality or a life of dreams. On the contrary, without a life of the spirit, our whole existence becomes unsubstantial and illusory. The life of the spirit, by integrating us in the real order established by God, puts us in the fullest possible contact with reality--not as we imagine it, but as it really is. It does so by making us aware of our own real selves, and placing them in the presence of God. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1341:Whoever you are, the land to which God has brought you is not like the land of Egypt from which you came out. You can no longer live here as you lived there. Your old life and your former ways are crucified now, and you must not seek to live any more for your own gratification, but give up your own judgement into the hands of a wise director, and sacrifice your pleasures and comforts for the love of God and give the money you no longer spend on those things, to the poor. Above all, eat your daily Bread without which you cannot live, and come to know Christ Whose Life feeds you in the Host, and He will give you a taste of joys and delights that transcend anything you have ever experienced before, and which will make the transition easy. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1342:THE GROUND OF EXPERIENCE It is necessary to die in order to be reborn. As soon as you experience impermanence, non-self, and interbeing, you are born again. But if the plant does not become dormant in the winter, it cannot be reborn in the spring. Jesus said that unless you are reborn as a child, you cannot enter the Kingdom of God. Thomas Merton wrote, “The living experience of divine love and the Holy Spirit … is a true awareness that one has died and risen in Christ. It is an experience of mystical renewal, an inner transformation brought about entirely by the power of God’s merciful love, implying the ‘death’ of the self-centered and self-sufficient ego and the appearance of a new and liberated self who lives and acts in the Spirit. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, #NFDB
1343:If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I am living for, in detail, ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for . . . To be grateful is to recognize the Love of God in everything He has given us - and He has given us everything. Every breath we draw is a gift of His love, every moment of existence is a grace, for it brings with it immense graces from Him.
Gratitude therefore takes nothing for granted, is never unresponsive, is constantly awakening to new wonder and to praise of the goodness of God. For the grateful person knows that God is good, not by hearsay but by experience. And that is what makes all the difference. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1344:The Kingly Man
My master said:
That which acts on all and meddles in none - is heaven . . .
The Kingly Man realizes this, hides it in his heart,
Grows boundless, wide-minded, draws all to himself.
And so he lets the gold lie hidden in the mountain,
Leaves the pearl lying in the deep.
Goods and possessions are no gain in his eyes,
He stays far from wealth and honour.
Long life is no ground for joy, nor early death for sorrow
Success is not for him to be proud of, failure is no shame.
Had he all the world's power he would not hold it as his own,
If he conquered everything he would not take it to himself.
His glory is in knowing that all things come together in One
And life and death are equal. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1345:When the angel spoke, God awoke in the heart of this girl of Nazareth and moved within her like a giant. He stirred and opened His eyes and her soul and saw that in containing Him she contained the world besides. The Annunciation was not so much a vision as an earthquake in which God moved the universe and unsettled the spheres, and the beginning and end of all things came before her in her deepest heart. And far beneath the movement of this silent cataclysm she slept in the infinite tranquility of God, and God was a child curled up who slept in her and her veins were flooded with His wisdom which is night, which is starlight, which is silence. And her whole being was embraced in Him whom she embraced and they became tremendous silence." -Thomas Merton ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1346:The wise man, then, when he must govern, knows how to do nothing. Letting things alone, he rests in his original nature. He who will govern will respect the governed no more than he respects himself. If he loves his own person enough to let it rest in its original truth, he will govern others without hurting them. Let him keep the deep drives in his own guts from going into action. Let him keep still, not looking, not hearing. Let him sit like a corpse, with the dragon power alive all around him. In complete silence, his voice will be like thunder. His movements will be invisible, like those of a spirit, but the powers of heaven will go with them. Unconcerned, doing nothing, he will see all things grow ripe around him. Where will he find time to govern? ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1347:To believe in suffering is pride: but to suffer, believing in God, is humility. For pride may tell us that we are strong enough to suffer, that suffering is good for us because we are good. Humility tells us that suffering is an evil which we must always expect to find in our lives because of the evil that is in ourselves. But faith also knows that the mercy of God is given to those who seek Him in suffering, and that by His grace we can overcome evil with good. Suffering, then, becomes good by accident, by the good that it enables us to receive more abundantly from the mercy of God. It does not make us good by itself, but it enables us to make ourselves better than we are. Thus, what we consecrate to God in suffering is not our suffering but our selves. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1348: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 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. It is because of them that we need others and others need us. We are not all weak in the same spots, and so we supplement and complete one another, each one making up in himself for the lack in another. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1349:There is something in the depths of our being that hungers for wholeness and finality. Because we are made for eternal life, we are made for an act that gathers up all the powers and capacities of our being and offers them simultaneously and forever to God. The blind spiritual instinct that tells us obscurely that our owns lives have a particular importance and purpose, and which urges us to find out our vocation, seeks in so doing to bring us to a decision that will dedicate our lives irrevocably to their true purpose. The man who loses this sense of his own personal destiny, and who renounces all hope of having any kind of vocation in life has either lost all hope of happiness or else has entered upon some mysterious vocation that God alone can understand. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1350:Action and Non-Action
The non-action of the wise man is not inaction.
It is not studied. It is not shaken by anything.
The sage is quiet because he is not moved,
Not because he wills to be quiet . . .
From emptiness comes the unconditioned,
From this the conditioned, the individual things.
So from the sage's emptiness, stillness arises;
From stillness, action. From action, attainment.
From their stillness comes their non-action, which is also action
And is, therefore, their attainment.
For stillness is joy. Joy is free from care
Fruitful in long years.
Joy does all things without concern:
For emptiness, stillness, tranquility, tastelessness,
Silence, and non-action
Are the root of all things. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1351:Useless
Hui Tzu said to Chuang Tzu:
“All your teaching is centred on what has no use.”
Chuang Tzu replied:
“If you have no appreciation for what has no use,
You cannot begin to talk about what can be used.
The earth for example, is broad and vast,
But of all this expanse a man uses only a few inches
Upon which he happens to be standing.
Now suppose you suddenly take away
All that he actually is not using,
So that all around his feet a gulf
Yawns, and he stands in the Void
With nowhere solid except under each foot.
How long will he be able to use what he is using?
Hui Tzu said: “It would cease to serve any purpose.”
Chuang Tzu concluded:
“This showsThe absolute necessity
Of what has ' no use. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1352:The Desert Fathers believed that the wilderness had been created supremely valuable in the eyes of God precisely because it had no value to men. The wasteland was the land that could never be wasted by men because it offered them nothing. There was nothing to attract them. There was nothing to exploit. The desert was the region in which the Chosen People had wandered for forty years, cared for by God alone. They could have reached the Promised Land in a few months if they had traveled directly to it. God's plan was that they should learn to love Him in the wilderness and that they should always look back on the time in the desert as the idyllic time of their life with Him alone. The desert was created simply to be itself, not to be transformed by men into something else. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1353:If what God says is the truest thing about us, then it makes sense to follow him and accept our As-Is condition as the starting point. Thomas Merton said, 'The reason we never enter into the deepest reality of our relationship with God is that we so seldom acknowledge our utter nothingness before him.' If we confess the truth about ourselves, there's every reason to fear God will say, 'Yeah, that's right; and anotherthing...' and we're fairly sure there will be another thing. We are like people afraid to tell the doctor where we really hurt because we fear we may be sicker than we think.
We are sicker than we think. We're dying and, crazily, running from the healer because we're ashamed, because we hate ourselves for all we are and all we're not. ~ Brennan Manning,#NFDB
1354:I did not even know who Christ was, that He was God. I had not the faintest idea that there existed such a thing as the Blessed Sacrament. I thought churches were simply places where people got together and sang a few hymns. And yet now I tell you, you who are now what I once was, unbelievers, it is that Sacrament, and that alone, the Christ living in our midst, and sacrificed by us, and for us and with us, in the clean and perpetual Sacrifice, it is He alone Who holds our world together, and keeps us all from being poured headlong and immediately into the pit of our eternal destruction. And I tell you there is a power that goes forth from that Sacrament, a power of light and truth, even into the hearts of those who have heard nothing of Him and seem to be incapable of belief. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1355:I had another reason for seeking Him, for trying to espy His face, a professional one. God and literature are conflated in my mind. Why this is, I’m not sure. Perhaps because great books seem heavensent. Perhaps because I know that each nove is a puny but very valiant attempt at godlike behavior. Perhaps because there is no difference between the finest poetry and most transcendent mysticism. Perhaps because writers like Thomas Merton, who are able to enter the realm of the spirit and come away with fine, lucid prose. Perhaps because of more secular writers, like John Steinbeck, whose every passage, it seems to me, peals with religiousity and faith. It once occured to me that literature — all art really — is either talking to people about God, or talking to God about people. ~ Paul Quarrington, #NFDB
1356:Wind and a bobwhite And the afternoon sun. By ceasing to question the sun I have become light, Bird and wind. My leaves sing. I am earth, earth All these lighted things Grow from my heart. A tall, spare pine Stands like the initial of my first Name when I had one. When I had a spirit, When I was on fire When this valley was Made out of fresh air You spoke my name In naming Your silence: O sweet, irrational worship! I am earth, earth My heart's love Bursts with hay and flowers. I am a lake of blue air In which my own appointed place Field and valley Stand reflected. I am earth, earth Out of my grass heart Rises the bobwhite. Out of my nameless weeds His foolish worship. [1499.jpg] -- from Selected Poems of Thomas Merton, by Thomas Merton
~ Thomas Merton, O Sweet Irrational Worship
,#NFDB
1357:For whatever is demanded by truth, by justice, by mercy, or by love must surely be taken to be willed by God. To consent to His will is, then, to consent to be true, or to speak truth, or at least to seek it. To obey Him is to respond to His will expressed in the need of another person, or at least to respect the rights of others. For the right of another man is the expression of God’s love and God’s will. In demanding that I respect the rights of another God is not merely asking me to conform to some abstract, arbitrary law: He is enabling me to share, as His son, in His own care for my brother. No man who ignores the rights and needs of others can hope to walk in the light of contemplation, because his way has turned aside from truth, from compassion and therefore from God. The ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1358:To consider persons and events and situations only in the light of their effect upon myself is to live on the doorstep of hell. Selfishness is doomed to frustration, centered as it is upon a lie. To live exclusively for myself, I must make all things bend themselves to my will as if I were a god. But this is impossible. Is there any more cogent indication of my creaturehood than the insufficiency of my own will? For I cannot make the universe obey me. I cannot make other people conform to my own whims and fancies. I cannot make even my own body obey me. When I give it pleasure, it deceives my expectation and makes me suffer pain. When I give myself what I conceive to be freedom, I deceive myself and find that I am the prisoner of my own blindness and selfishness and insufficiency. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1359:I am forced to reexamine. Thomas Merton’s words about the Bible in general apply to the Old Testament in particular: There is, in a word, nothing comfortable about the Bible—until we manage to get so used to it that we make it comfortable for ourselves… Have we ceased to question the book and be questioned by it? Have we ceased to fight it? Then perhaps our reading is no longer serious. For most people, the understanding of the Bible is, and should be, a struggle: not merely to find meanings that can be looked up in books of reference, but to come to terms personally with the stark scandal and contradiction in the Bible itself… Let us not be too sure we know the Bible just because we have learned not to be astonished at it, just because we have learned not to have problems with it. ~ Philip Yancey, #NFDB
1360:Thomas Merton, of course, constitutes a special threat to Christians, because he presents himself as a contemplative Christian monk, and his work has already affected the vitals of Roman Catholicism, its monasticism. Shortly before his death, Father Merton wrote an appreciative introduction to a new translation of the Bhagavad Gita, which is the spiritual manual or “Bible” of all Hindus, and one of the foundation blocks of monism or Advaita Vedanta. The Gita, it must be remembered, opposes almost every important teaching of Christianity. His book on the Zen Masters, published posthumously, is also noteworthy, because the entire work is based on a treacherous mistake: the assumption that all the so-called “mystical experiences” in every religion are true. He should have known better. ~ Seraphim Rose, #NFDB
1361:Those who refuse His mercy satisfy His justice in another way. Without His mercy, they cannot love Him. Without love for Him they cannot be 'justified' or 'made just'. That is to say: they cannot conform to Him Who is love. Those who have not received His mercy are in a state of injustice with regard to Him. It is their own injustice that is condemned by His justice. And in what does their injustice consist? In the refusal of His mercy. We come, in the end, to this basic paradox: that we owe it to God to receive from Him the mercy that is offered to us in Christ, and that to refuse this mercy is the summation of our 'injustice'. Clearly, then, only the mercy of God can make us just, in this supernatural sense, since the primary demand of God's justice upon us is that we receive His mercy. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1362:There was to be nothing special about it, nothing that savored of a religious Order, no special rule, no distinctive habit. She, and those who joined her, would simply be poor--there was no choice on that score, for they were that already--but they would embrace their poverty, and the life of the proletariat in all its misery and insecurity and dead, drab monotony. They would live and work in the slums, lose themselves, in the huge anonymous mass of the forgotten and the derelict, for the only purpose of living the complete, integral Christian life in that environment--loving those around them, sacrificing themselves for those around them, and spreading the Gospel and the truth of Christ most of all by being saints, by living in union with Him, by being full of His Holy Ghost, His charity. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1363:THE theology of the devil is really not theology but magic. “Faith” in this theology is really not the acceptance of a God Who reveals Himself as mercy. It is a psychological, subjective “force” which applies a kind of violence to reality in order to change it according to one’s own whims. Faith is a kind of supereffective wishing: a mastery that comes from a special, mysteriously dynamic will power that is generated by “profound convictions.” By virtue of this wonderful energy one can exert a persuasive force even on God Himself and bend His will to one’s own will. By this astounding new dynamic soul force of faith (which any quack can develop in you for an appropriate remuneration) you can turn God into a means to your own ends. We become civilized medicine men, and God becomes our servant. Though ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1364:Leaving Things Alone (excerpt)
The wise man, then, when he must govern, knows how to do nothing. Letting things alone, he rests in his original nature. He who will govern will respect the governed no more than he respects himself. If he loves his own person enough to let it rest in its original truth, he will govern others without hurting them.
Let him keep the deep drives in his own guts from going into action. Let him keep still, not looking, not hearing. Let him sit like a corpse, with the dragon power alive all around him. In complete silence, his voice will be like thunder. His movements will be invisible, like those of the spirit, but the powers of heaven will go with them. Unconcerned, doing nothing, he will see all things grow ripe around him. Where will he find time to govern? ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1365:As long as this “brokenness” of existence continues, there is no way out of the inner contradictions that it imposes upon us. If a man has a broken leg and continues to try to walk on it, he cannot help suffering. If desire itself is a kind of fracture, every movement of desire inevitably results in pain. But even the desire to end the pain of desire is a movement, and therefore causes pain. The desire to remain immobile is a movement. The desire to escape is a movement. The desire for Nirvana is a movement. The desire for extinction is a movement. Yet there is no way for us to be still by “imposing stillness” on the desires. In a word, desire cannot stop itself from desiring, and it must continue to move and hence to cause pain even when it seeks liberation from itself and desires its own extinction. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1366:Indeed, the truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most: and his suffering comes to him from things so little and so trivial that one can say that it is no longer objective at all. It is his own existence, his own being, that is at once the subject and the source of his pain, and his very existence and consciousness is his greatest torture. This is another of the great perversions by which the devil uses our philosophies to turn our whole nature inside out, and eviscerate all our capacities for good, turning them against ourselves. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1367:Because there is happiness only where there is coordination with the Truth, the Reality, the Act that underlies and directs all things to their essential and accidental perfections: and that is the will of God. There is only one happiness: to please Him. Only one sorrow, to be displeasing to Him, to refuse Him something, to turn away from Him, even in the slightest thing, even in thought, in a half-willed movement of appetite: in these things and these alone, is sorrow, in so far as they imply separation, or the beginning, the possibility of separation from Him Who is our life and all our joy. And since God is a Spirit, and infinitely above all matter and all creation, the only complete union possible, between ourselves and Him, is in the order of intention: a union of wills and intellects, in love, charity. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1368:When in the soul of the serene disciple With no more Fathers to imitate Poverty is a success, It is a small thing to say the roof is gone: He has not even a house. Stars, as well as friends, Are angry with the noble ruin. Saints depart in several directions. Be still: There is no longer any need of comment. It was a lucky wind That blew away his halo with his cares, A lucky sea that drowned his reputation. Here you will find Neither a proverb nor a memorandum. There are no ways, No methods to admire Where poverty is no achievement. His God lives in his emptiness like an affliction. What choice remains? Well, to be ordinary is not a choice: It is the usual freedom Of men without visions. [1499.jpg] -- from Selected Poems of Thomas Merton, by Thomas Merton
~ Thomas Merton, When in the soul of the serene disciple
,#NFDB
1369:When In The Soul Of The Serene Disciple
When in the soul of the serene disciple
With no more Fathers to imitate
Poverty is a success,
It is a small thing to say the roof is gone:
He has not even a house.
Stars, as well as friends,
Are angry with the noble ruin.
Saints depart in several directions.
Be still:
There is no longer any need of comment.
It was a lucky wind
That blew away his halo with his cares,
A lucky sea that drowned his reputation.
Here you will find
Neither a proverb nor a memorandum.
There are no ways,
No methods to admire
Where poverty is no achievement.
His God lives in his emptiness like an affliction.
What choice remains?
Well, to be ordinary is not a choice:
It is the usual freedom
Of men without visions. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1370:Realmente, la verdad que muchos nunca entienden, hasta que es demasiado tarde, es que cuanto más intentáis evitar el sufrimiento tanto más sufrís, porque motivos menores y más insignificantes empiezan a torturaros, en proporción a vuestro temor de sufrir. El que más hace para evitar el sufrimiento es, al final, el que sufre más: su sufrimiento le llega de cosas tan pequeñas y triviales que uno puede decir que ya no es objetivo en absoluto. Es su propia existencia, su propio ser, lo que es a la vez el sujeto y el origen de su dolor; su misma existencia y conciencia, su mayor tortura. Ésta es una de las grandes perversiones por medio de las cuales el demonio usa nuestras filosofías para extraernos toda nuestra naturaleza interior y desentrañar nuestras facultades para siempre, volviéndolas en contra de nosotros mismos. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1371:When I speak of the contemplative life [...] I am talking about a special dimension of inner discipline and experience, a certain integrity and fullness of personal development, which are not compatible with a purely external, alienated, busy-busy existence. This does not mean that they are incompatible with action, with creative work, with dedicated love. On the contrary, these all go together. A certain depth of disciplined experience is a necessary ground for fruitful action. Without a more profound human understanding derived from exploration of the inner ground of human existence, love will tend to be superficial and deceptive. Traditionally, the ideas of prayer, meditation, and contemplation have been associated with this deepening of one's personal life and this expansion of the capacity to understand and serve others. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1372:It is true that the materialistic society, the so-called culture that has evolved under the tender mercies of capitalism, has produced what seems to be the ultimate limit of this worldliness. And nowhere, except perhaps in the analogous society of pagan Rome, has there ever been such a flowering of cheap and petty and disgusting lusts and vanities as in the world of capitalism, where there is no evil that is not fostered and encouraged for the sake of making money. We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible, in order to cater to them with the products of our factories and printing presses and movie studios and all the rest. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1373:A man is a free being who is always changing into himself. This changing is never merely indifferent. We are always getting either better or worse. Our development is measured by our acts of free choice, and we make ourselves by the patterns of our desires.
If our desires reach out for the things that we were created to have and to make and to become, then we will develop into what we were truly meant to be.
But if our desires reach out for things that have have no meaning for the growth of our spirit, if they lose themselves in dreams or passions or illusions, we will be false to ourselves and to other men and to God. We will judge ourselves as aliens and exiles from ourselves and from God.
In hell, there is no recollection. The damned are exiled not only from God and from other men, but even from themselves. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1374:Pico Iyer: “And at some point, I thought, well, I’ve been really lucky to see many, many places. Now, the great adventure is the inner world, now that I’ve spent a lot of time gathering emotions, impressions, and experiences. Now, I just want to sit still for years on end, really, charting that inner landscape because I think anybody who travels knows that you’re not really doing so in order to move around—you’re traveling in order to be moved. And really what you’re seeing is not just the Grand Canyon or the Great Wall but some moods or intimations or places inside yourself that you never ordinarily see when you’re sleepwalking through your daily life. I thought, there’s this great undiscovered terrain that Henry David Thoreau and Thomas Merton and Emily Dickinson fearlessly investigated, and I want to follow in their footsteps. ~ Krista Tippett, #NFDB
1375:We overcome the evil in the world by the charity and compassion of God, and in so doing we drive all evil out of our own hearts. The evil that is in us is more than moral. There is a psychological evil, the distortion caused by selfishness and sin. Good moral intentions are enough to correct what is formally bad in our moral acts. But in order that our charity may heal the wounds of sin in our whole soul it must reach down into the furthest depths of our humanity, cleaning out all the infection of anxiety and false guilt that spring from pride and fear, releasing the good that has been held back by suspicion and prejudice and self-conceit. Everything in our nature must find its right place in the life of charity, so that the whole man may be lifted up to God, that the entire person may be sanctified and not only the intentions of his will. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1376:The Christian faith enables, or should enable, a man to stand back from society and its institutions and realize that they all stand under the inscrutable judgment of God and that, therefore, we can never give an unreserved assent to the policies, the programs and the organizations of men, or to “official” interpretations of the historic process. To do so is idolatry, the same kind of idolatry that was refused by the early martyrs who would not burn incense to the emperor. The policies of men contain within themselves the judgment and doom of God upon their society, and when the Church identifies her policies with theirs, she too is judged with them—for she has in this been unfaithful and is not truly “the Church.” The power of “the Church” (who is not “the Church” if she is rich and powerful) contains the judgment that “begins at the house of God. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1377:There is a 'movement' of meditation, expressing the basic 'paschal' rhythm of the Christian life, the passage from death to life in Christ. Sometimes prayer, meditation and contemplation are 'death' - a kind of descent into our own nothingness, a recognition of helplessness, frustration, infidelity, confusion, ignorance. Note how common this theme is in the Psalms. If we need help in meditation we can turn to scriptural texts that express this profound distress of man in his nothingness and his total need of God. Then as we determine to face the hard realities of our inner life and humbly for faith, he draws us out of darkness into light - he hears us, answers our prayer, recognizes our need, and grants us the help we require - if only by giving us more faith to believe that he can and will help us in his own time. This is already a sufficient answer. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1378:Thomas Merton to write: The modern child may early in his or her existence have natural inclinations toward spirituality. The child may have imagination, originality, a simple and individual response to reality, and even a tendency to moments of thoughtful silence and absorption. All these tendencies, however, are soon destroyed by the dominant culture. The child becomes a yelling, brash, false little monster, brandishing a toy gun or dressed up like some character he has seen on television. His head is filled with inane slogans, songs, noises, explosions, statistics, brand names, menaces, ribaldries, and cliches. Then, when the child gets to school, he learns to verbalize, rationalize, to pace, to make faces like an advertisement, to need a car and in short, to go through life with an empty head conforming to others, like himself, in togetherness.3 ~ Brennan Manning, #NFDB
1379:Secularity is a way of being dependent on the responses of our milieu. The secular or false self is the self which is fabricated, as Thomas Merton says, by social compulsions. “Compulsive” is indeed the best adjective for the false self. It points to the need for ongoing and increasing affirmation. Who am I? I am the one who is liked, praised, admired, disliked, hated or despised. Whether I am a pianist, a businessman or a minister, what matters is how I am perceived by my world. If being busy is a good thing, then I must be busy. If having money is a sign of real freedom, then I must claim my money. If knowing many people proves my importance, I will have to make the necessary contacts. The compulsion manifests itself in the lurking fear of failing and the steady urge to prevent this by gathering more of the same—more work, more money, more friends. ~ Henri J M Nouwen, #NFDB
1380:One might say I had decided to marry the silence of the forest. The sweet dark warmth of the whole world will have to be my wife. Out of the heart of that dark warmth comes the secret that is heard only in silence, but it is the root of all the secrets that are whispered by all the lovers in their beds all over the world. So perhaps I have an obligation to preserve the stillness, the silence, the poverty, the virginal point of pure nothingness which is at the center of all other loves. I attempt to cultivate this plant without contempt in the middle of the night and water it with psalms and prophecies in silence. It becomes the most rare of all the trees in the garden, at once the primordial paradise tree, the axis mundi, the cosmic axle, and the Cross. Nulla silva talem profert. There is only one such tree. It cannot be multiplied. It is not interesting. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1381:Secularity is a way of being dependent on the responses of our milieu. The secular or false self is the self which is fabricated, as Thomas Merton says, by social compulsions. 'Compulsive' is indeed the best adjective for the false self. It points to the need for ongoing and increasing affirmation. Who am I? I am the one who is liked, praised, admired, disliked, hated or despised. Whether I am a pianist, a businessman or a minister, what matters is how I am perceived by my world. If being busy is a good thing, then I must be busy. If having money is a sign of real freedom, then I must claim my money. If knowing many people proves my importance, I will have to make the necessary contacts. The compulsion manifests itself in the lurking fear of failure and the steady urge to prevent this by gathering more of the same - more work, more money, more friends. ~ Henri J M Nouwen, #NFDB
1382:God does not demand that every man attain to what is theoretically highest and best. It is better to be a good street sweeper than a bad writer, better to be a good bartender than a bad doctor, and the repentant thief who died with Jesus on Calvary was far more perfect than the holy ones who had Him nailed to the cross. And yet, abstractly speaking, what is more holy than the priesthood and less holy than the state of a criminal? The dying thief had, perhaps, disobeyed the will of God in many things: but in the most important event of his life he listened and obeyed. The Pharisees had kept the law to the letter and had spent their lives in the pursuit of a most scrupulous perfection. But they were so intent upon perfection as an abstraction that when God manifested His will and His perfection in a concrete and definite way they had no choice but to reject it. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1383:We cannot become saints merely by trying to run away from material things. To have a spiritual life is to have a life that is spiritual in all its wholeness--a life in which the actions of the body are holy because of the soul, and the soul is holy because of God dwelling and acting in it. When we live such a life, the actions of our body are directed to God by God Himself and give Him glory, and at the same time they help to sanctify the soul.
The saint, therefore, is sanctified not only by fasting when he should fast but also by eating when he should eat. He is not only sanctified by his prayers in the darkness of the night, but by the sleep that he takes in obedience to God, who made us what we are. Not only His solitude contributes to his union with God, but also his supernatural love for his friends and his relatives and those with whom he lives and works. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1384:Perhaps we still have a basically superstitious tendency to associate failure with dishonesty and guilt—failure being interpreted as “punishment.” Even if a man starts out with good intentions, if he fails we tend to think he was somehow “at fault.” If he was not guilty, he was at least “wrong.” And “being wrong” is something we have not yet learned to face with equanimity and understanding. We either condemn it with god-like disdain or forgive it with god-like condescension. We do not manage to accept it with human compassion, humility and identification. Thus we never see the one truth that would help us begin to solve our ethical and political problems: that we are all more or less wrong, that we are all at fault, all limited and obstructed by our mixed motives, our self-deception, our greed, our self-righteousness and our tendency to aggressivity and hypocrisy. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1385:Contemplation is also the response to a call: a call from Him who has no voice, and yet who speaks in everything that is, and who, most of all, speaks in the depths of our own being: for we ourselves are words of his. But we are words that are meant to respond to him, to answer to him, to echo him, and even in some way to contain him and signify him. Contemplation is this echo. It is a deep resonance in the inmost center of our spirit in which our very life loses its separate voice and re-sounds with the majesty and the mercy of the Hidden and Living One. He answers himself in us and this answer is divine life, divine creativity, making all things new. We ourselves become his echo and his answer. It is as if in creating us God asked a question, and in awakening us to contemplation he answered the question, so that the contemplative is at the same time, question and answer. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1386:Syrian monk, Isaac of Niniveh: Many are avidly seeking but they alone find who remain in continual silence. … Every man who delights in a multitude of words, even though he says admirable things, is empty within. If you love truth, be a lover of silence. Silence like the sunlight will illuminate you in God and will deliver you from the phantoms of ignorance. Silence will unite you to God himself. … More than all things love silence: it brings you a fruit that tongue cannot describe. In the beginning we have to force ourselves to be silent. But then there is born something that draws us to silence. May God give you an experience of this “something” that is born of silence. If only you practice this, untold light will dawn on you in consequence … after a while a certain sweetness is born in the heart of this exercise and the body is drawn almost by force to remain in silence. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1387:Please do not look only at the dark side
All the newspapers in the free world explain why you return their readers understand how you feel
You have the sympathy of millions
As a tribute to your sorrow we resolve to spend more money on nuclear weapons there is always a bright side
If this were only a movie a boat would be available have you ever seen our movies they end happily
You would lean at the rail with 'him' the sun would set on China kiss and fade
You would marry one of the kind authorities
In our movies there is no law higher than love in real life duty is higher
You would not want the authorities to neglect duty
How do you like the image of the free world sorry you cannot stay
This is the first and last time we will see you in our papers
When you are back home remember us we will be having a good time. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1388:At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us. It is so to speak His name written in us, as our poverty, as our indigence, as our dependence, as our sonship. It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely ... I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is every- where. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1389:Be still. Listen to the stones of the wall. Be silent, they try to speak your name. Listen to the living walls. Who are you? Who are you? Whose silence are you? Who (be quiet) are you (as these stones are quiet). Do not think of what you are still less of what you may one day be. Rather be what you are (but who?) be the unthinkable one you do not know. O be still, while you are still alive, and all things live around you speaking (I do not hear) to your own being, speaking by the unknown that is in you and in themselves. I will try, like them to be my own silence: and this is difficult. The whole world is secretly on fire. The stones burn, even the stones they burn me. How can a man be still or listen to all things burning? How can he dare to sit with them when all their silence is on fire? [bk1sm.gif] -- from The Strange Islands: Poems by Thomas Merton, by Thomas Merton
~ Thomas Merton, In Silence
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1390:When the light of God's truth begins to find its way through the mists of illusion and self-deception with which we have unconsciously surrounded ourselves, and when the image of God within us begins to return to itself, the false self which we inherited from Adam begins to experience the strange panic that Adam felt when, after his sin, he hid in the trees of the garden because he heard the voice of the Lord God in the afternoon.
If we are to recover our own identity, and return to God by the way Adam came in his fall, we must learn to stop saying: "I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked. And I hid." [Genesis 2:10] We must cast away the "aprons of leaves" and the "garments of skins" which the Fathers of the Church variously interpret as passions, and attachments to earthly things, and fixation in our own rigid determination to be someone other than our true selves. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1391:Duke Hwan and the Wheelwright (an excerpt)
The world values books, and thinks that in so doing it is valuing Tao. But books contain words only. And yet there is something else which gives value to the books. Not the words only, nor the thought in the words, but something else within the thought, swinging it in a certain direction that words cannot apprehend.
But it is the words themselves that the world values when it commits them to books: and though the world values them, these words are worthless as long as that which gives them value is not held in honor.
That which man apprehends by observation is only outward form and colour, name and noise: and he thinks that this will put him in possession of Tao. Form and color, name and sound, do not reach to reality. That is why: "He who knows does not say, he who says, does not know."
How then is the world going to know Tao through words? ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1392:Hence the aim of meditation, in the context of Christian faith, is not to arrive at an objective and apparently 'scientific' knowledge of God, but to come to know him through the realization that our very being is penetrated with his knowledge and love for us. Our knowledge of God is paradoxically a knowledge not of him as the object of our scrutiny, but of ourselves as utterly dependent on his saving and merciful knowledge of us. It is in proportion as we are known to him that we find our real being and identity in Christ. We know him and through ourselves in so far as his truth is the source of our being and his merciful love is the very heart of our life and existence. We have no other reason for being, except to be loved by him as our Creator and Redeemer, and to love him in return. There is no true knowledge of God that does not imply a profound grasp and an intimate personal acceptance of this profound relationship. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1393:My opinion is that it is a very extraordinary thing for anyone to be upset by such a topic. Why should anyone be shattered by the though of hell? It is not compulsory for anyone to go there. Those who do, do so by their own choice, and against the will of God, and they can only get into hell by defying and resisting all the work of Providence and grace. It is their own will that takes them there, not God's. In damning them He is only ratifying their own decision--a decision which He has left entirely to their own choice. Nor will He ever hold our weakness alone responsible for our damnation. Our weakness should not terrify us: it is the source of our strength. Libenter gloriabor in infirmitatibus meis ut inhabitet in me virtus Christi. Power is made perfect in infirmity, and our very helplessness is all the more potent a claim on that Divine Mercy Who calls to Himself the poor, the little ones, the heavily burdened. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1394:A TREE gives glory to God by being a tree. For in being what God means it to be it is obeying Him. It “consents,” so to speak, to His creative love. It is expressing an idea which is in God and which is not distinct from the essence of God, and therefore a tree imitates God by being a tree. The more a tree is like itself, the more it is like Him. If it tried to be like something else which it was never intended to be, it would be less like God and therefore it would give Him less glory. No two created beings are exactly alike. And their individuality is no imperfection. On the contrary, the perfection of each created thing is not merely in its conformity to an abstract type but in its own individual identity with itself. This particular tree will give glory to God by spreading out its roots in the earth and raising its branches into the air and the light in a way that no other tree before or after it ever did or will do. Do ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1395:Bodily agitation, then, is an enemy to the spirit. And by agitation I do not necessarily mean exercise or movement. There is all the difference in the world between agitation and work.
Work occupies the body and the mind and is necessary for the health of the spirit. Work can help us to pray and be recollected if we work properly. Agitation, however, destroys the spiritual usefulness of work and even tends to frustrate its physical and social purpose. Agitation is the useless and ill-directed action of the body. It expresses the inner confusion of a soul without peace. Work brings peace to the soul that has a semblance of order and spiritual understanding. It helps the soul to focus upon its spiritual aims and to achieve them. But the whole reason for agitation is to hide the soul from itself, to camouflage its interior conflicts and their purposelessness, and to induce a false feeling that 'we are getting somewhere'. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1396:On the contrary, the deep, inexpressible certitude of the contemplative experience awakens a tragic anguish and opens many questions in the depths of the heart like wounds that cannot stop bleeding. For every gain in deep certitude there is a corresponding growth of superficial “doubt.” This doubt is by no means opposed to genuine faith, but it mercilessly examines and questions the spurious “faith” of everyday life, the human faith which is nothing but the passive acceptance of conventional opinion. This false “faith” which is what we often live by and which we even come to confuse with our “religion” is subjected to inexorable questioning. This torment is a kind of trial by fire in which we are compelled, by the very light of invisible truth which has reached us in the dark ray of contemplation, to examine, to doubt and finally to reject all the prejudices and conventions that we have hitherto accepted as if they were dogmas. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1397:It is only the infinite mercy and love of God that has prevented us from tearing ourselves to pieces and destroying His entire creation long ago. People seem to think that it is in some way a proof that no merciful God exists, if we have so many wars. On the contrary, consider how in spite of centuries of sin and greed and lust and cruelty and hatred and avarice and oppression and injustice, spawned and bred by the free wills of men, the human race can still recover, each time, and can still produce man and women who overcome evil with good, hatred with love, greed with charity, lust and cruelty with sanctity. How could all this be possible without the merciful love of God, pouring out His grace upon us? Can there be any doubt where wars come from and where peace comes from, when the children of this world, excluding God from their peace conferences, only manage to bring about greater and greater wars the more they talk about peace? ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1398:Later on, like practically everyone else in our stupid and godless society, I was to consider these two years as “my religious phase.” I am glad that that now seems very funny. But it is sad that it is funny in so few cases. Because I think that practically everybody does go through such a phase, and for the majority of them, that is all that it is, a phase and nothing more. If that is so, it is their own fault: for life on this earth is not simply a series of “phases” which we more or less passively undergo. If the impulse to worship God and to adore Him in truth by the goodness and order of our own lives is nothing more than a transitory and emotional thing, that is our own fault. It is so only because we make it so, and because we take what is substantially a deep and powerful and lasting moral impetus, supernatural in its origin and in its direction, and reduce it to the level of our own weak and unstable and futile fancies and desires. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1399:If there are no self-evident first principles, as a foundation for reasoning to conclusions that are not immediately apparent, how can you construct any kind of a philosophy? If you have to prove even the basic axioms of your metaphysics, you will never have a metaphysics, because you will never have any strict proof of anything, for your first proof will involve you in an infinite regress, proving that you are proving what you are proving and so on, into the exterior darkness where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth. If Descartes thought it was necessary to prove his own existence by the fact that he was thinking, and that his though therefore existed in some subject, how did he prove that he was thinking in the first place? But as to the second step, that God must exist because Descartes had a clear idea of him – that never convinced me, then or at any other time, or now either. There are much better proofs for the existence of God than that one. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1400:When no one listens To the quiet trees When no one notices The sun in the pool. Where no one feels The first drop of rain Or sees the last star Or hails the first morning Of a giant world Where peace begins And rages end: One bird sits still Watching the work of God: One turning leaf, Two falling blossoms, Ten circles upon the pond. One cloud upon the hillside, Two shadows in the valley And the light strikes home. Now dawn commands the capture Of the tallest fortune, The surrender Of no less marvelous prize! Closer and clearer Than any wordy master, Thou inward Stranger Whom I have never seen, Deeper and cleaner Than the clamorous ocean, Seize up my silence Hold me in Thy Hand! Now act is waste And suffering undone Laws become prodigals Limits are torn down For envy has no property And passion is none. Look, the vast Light stands still Our cleanest Light is One! [1962.jpg] -- from The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton, by Thomas Merton
~ Thomas Merton, Stranger
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1401:New eyes awaken.
I send Love's name into the world with wings
And songs grow up around me like a jungle.
Choirs of all creatures sing the tunes
Your Spirit played in Eden.
Zebras and antelopes and birds of paradise
Shine on the face of the abyss
And I am drunk with the great wilderness
Of the sixth day in Genesis.
But sound is never half so fair
As when that music turns to air
And the universe dies of excellence.
Sun, moon and stars
Fall from their heavenly towers.
Joys walk no longer down the blue world's shore.
Though fires loiter, lights still fly on the air of the gulf,
All fear another wind, another thunder:
Then one more voice
Snuffs all their flares in one gust.
And I go forth with no more wine and no more stars
And no more buds and no more Eden
And no more animals and no more sea:
While God sings by himself in acres of night
And walls fall down, that guarded Paradise. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1402:Most of the world is either asleep or dead. The religious people are, for the most part, asleep. The irreligious are dead. Those who are asleep are divided into two classes, like the Virgins in the parable, waiting for the Bridegroom's coming. The wise have oil in their lamps. That is to say they are detached from themselves and from the cares of the world, and they are full of charity. They are indeed waiting for the Bridegroom, and they desire nothing else but His coming, even though they may fall asleep while waiting for Him to appear. But the others are not only asleep: they are full of other dreams and other desires. Their lamps are empty because they have burned themselves out in the wisdom of the flesh and in their own vanity. When He comes, it is too late for them to buy oil. They light their lamps only after He has gone. So they fall asleep again, with useless lamps, and when they wake up they trim them to investigate, once again, the matters of a dying world. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1403:Hatred is the sign and the expression of loneliness, of unworthiness, of insufficiency. And in so far as each one of us is lonely, is unworthy, each one hates himself. Some of us are aware of this self-hatred, and because of it we reproach ourselves and punish ourselves needlessly. Punishment cannot cure the feeling that we are unworthy. There is nothing we can do about it as long as we feel that we are isolated, insufficient, helpless, alone. Others, who are less conscious of their own self-hatred, realize it in a different form by projecting it on to others. There is a proud and self-confident hate, strong and cruel, which enjoys the pleasure of hating, for it is directed outward to the unworthiness of another. But this strong and happy hate does not realize that like all hate, it destroys and consumes the self that hates, and not the object that is hated. Hate in any form is self-destructive, and even when it triumphs physically it triumphs in its own spiritual ruin. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1404:Echar la culpa al negro: no es solo cuestión de racionalizar y verbalizar. Se ha convertido en una fuerte necesidad emocional del hombre blanco. Echar la culpa al negro (y por extensión al comunista, al agitador exterior) le da al blanco una sensación más fuerte de identidad o, mejor dicho, le protege una identidad seriamente amenazada de disolución patológica. Echando la culpa al negro es como el blanco trata de mantenerse sin dispersión. El negro está en la triste situación de ser usado para todo, hasta para la propia inseguridad psicológica del blanco. Por desgracia, una simple irrupción de violencia no hará más que dar al blanco la justificación que desea. Le convencerá de que es de verdad,
porque tiene razón. El negro, en realidad, podría causar un caos en la sociedad blanca con la guerra psicológica si supiera usarla. Ya el arma psicológica de la no violencia se ha mostrado efectiva como ataque a la falsificada imagen que tiene el blanco de sí mismo como ser justo y cristiano. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1405:I was coming down Seventh Avenue one morning. It must have been in December or January. I had just come from the little church of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and from Communion, and was going to get some breakfast at a lunch wagon near Loew's Sheridan Theater. I don't know what I was thinking of, but as I walked along I nearly bumped into Mark who was on his way to the subway, going to Columbia for his morning classes.
'Where are you going?' he said. The question surprised me, as there did not seem to be any reason to ask where I was going, and all I could answer was: 'To breakfast.'
Later on, Mark referred again to the meeting and said:
'What made you look so happy, on the street, there?'
So that was what had impressed him, and that was why he had asked me where I was going. It was not where I was going that made me happy, but where I was coming from. Yet, as I say, this surprised me too, because I had not really paid any attention to the fact that I was happy - which indeed I was. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1406:O God, we are one with You. You have made us one with You. You have taught us that if we are open to one another, You dwell in us. Help us to preserve this openness and to fight for it with all our hearts. Help us to realize that there can be no understanding where there is mutual rejection. O God, in accepting one another wholeheartedly, fully, completely, we accept You, and we thank You, and we adore You, and we love You with our whole being, because our being is Your being, our spirit is rooted in Your spirit. Fill us then with love, and let us be bound together with love as we go our diverse ways, united in this one spirit which makes You present in the world, and which makes You witness to the ultimate reality that is love. Love has overcome. Love is victorious. Amen. ~ Thomas Merton, in his closing prayer to an informal address delivered in Calcutta, India (October 1968), from The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton (1975); quoted in Thomas Merton, Spiritual Master : The Essential Writings (1992), p. 237, #NFDB
1407:How am I to know the will of God? Even where there is no other more explicit claim on my obedience, such as a legitimate command, the very nature of each situation usually bears written into itself some indication of God’s will. For whatever is demanded by truth, by justice, by mercy, or by love must surely be taken to be willed by God. To consent to His will is, then, to consent to be true, or to speak truth, or at least to seek it. To obey Him is to respond to His will expressed in the need of another person, or at least to respect the rights of others. For the right of another man is the expression of God’s love and God’s will. In demanding that I respect the rights of another God is not merely asking me to conform to some abstract, arbitrary law: He is enabling me to share, as His son, in His own care for my brother. No man who ignores the rights and needs of others can hope to walk in the light of contemplation, because his way has turned aside from truth, from compassion and therefore from God. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1408:We are not only contingent beings, dependent on the love and will of a Creator whom we cannot know experientially except in so far as he reveals to us our personal relationship with him as his sons - we are also sinners who have FREELY REPUDIATED this relationship. We have rebelled against him. The spirit of rebellious refusal persists in our heart even when we try to return to him. Much could be said, at this point, about all the subtlety and ingenuity of religious egoism which is one of the worst and most ineradicable forms of self-deception. Sometimes one feels that a well-intentioned and inculpable atheist is in many ways better off - and gives more glory to God - than some people whose bigoted complacency and inhumanity to others are signs of the most obvious selfishness! Hence we not only need to recover an awareness of our creaturehood; we also must repair the injury done to truth and to love by this repudiation, this infidelity. But how? Humanly speaking, there is no way in which we can do this. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1409:Let no one hope to find in contemplation an escape from conflict, from anguish or from doubt. On the contrary, the deep, inexpressible certitude of the contemplative experience awakens a tragic anguish and opens many questions in the depths of the heart like wounds that cannot stop bleeding. For every gain in deep certitude there is a corresponding growth of superficial "doubt." This doubt is by no means opposed to genuine faith, but it mercilessly examines and questions the spurious "faith" of everyday life, the human faith which is nothing but the passive acceptance of conventional opinion. This false "faith" which is what we often live by and which we even come to confuse with our "religion" is subjected to inexorable questioning… Hence, is it clear that genuine contemplation is incompatible with complacency and with smug acceptance of prejudiced opinions. It is not mere passive acquiescence in the status quo, as some would like to believe – for this would reduce it to the level of spiritual anesthesia. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1410:I think that if there is one truth that people need to learn, in the world, especially today, it is this: the intellect is only theoretically independent of desire and appetite in ordinary, actual practice. It is constantly being blinded and perverted by the ends and aims of passion, and the evidence it presents to us with such a show of impartiality and objectivity is fraught with interest and propaganda. We have become marvelous at self-delusion; all the more so, because we have gone to such trouble to convince ourselves of our own absolute infallibility. The desires of the flesh—and by that I mean not only sinful desires, but even the ordinary, normal appetites for comfort and ease and human respect, are fruitful sources of every kind of error and mis-judgement, and because we have these yearnings in us, our intellects (which, if they operated all alone in a vacuum, would indeed, register with pure impartiality what they saw) present to us everything distorted and accommodated to the norms of our desire. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1411:SOULS are like wax waiting for a seal. By themselves they have no special identity. Their destiny is to be softened and prepared in this life, by God’s will, to receive, at their death, the seal of their own degree of likeness to God in Christ. And this is what it means, among other things, to be judged by Christ. The wax that has melted in God’s will can easily receive the stamp of its identity, the truth of what it was meant to be. But the wax that is hard and dry and brittle and without love will not take the seal: for the hard seal, descending upon it, grinds it to powder. Therefore if you spend your life trying to escape from the heat of the fire that is meant to soften and prepare you to become your true self, and if you try to keep your substance from melting in the fire—as if your true identity were to be hard wax—the seal will fall upon you at last and crush you. You will not be able to take your own true name and countenance, and you will be destroyed by the event that was meant to be your fulfillment. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1412:The reason why Catholic tradition is a tradition,” writes Thomas Merton, “is because there is only one living doctrine in Christianity: there is nothing new to be discovered.” A little bit of death from a thinker who brought the world so much life. Nothing new to be discovered? The minute any human or human institution arrogates to itself a singular knowledge of God, there comes into that knowledge a kind of strychnine pride, and it is as if the most animated and vital creature were instantaneously transformed into a corpse. Any belief that does not recognize and adapt to its own erosions rots from within. Only when doctrine itself is understood to be provisional does doctrine begin to take on a more than provisional significance. Truth inheres not in doctrine itself, but in the spirit with which it is engaged, for the spirit of God is always seeking and creating new forms. (To be fair, Merton himself certainly realized this later in his life, when he became interested in merging ideas from Christianity with Buddhism.) ~ Christian Wiman, #NFDB
1413:How did it ever happen that, when the dregs of the world had collected in western Europe, when Goth and Frank and Norman and Lombard had mingled with the rot of old Rome to form a patchwork of hybrid races, all of them notable for ferocity, hatred, stupidity, craftiness, lust, and brutality--how did it happen that, from all of this, there should come Gregorian chant, monasteries and cathedrals, the poems of Prudentius, the commentaries and histories of Bede, the Moralia of Gregory the Great, St. Augustine's City of God, and his Trinity, the writings of Anselm, St. Bernard's sermons on the Canticles, the poetry of Caedmon and Cynewulf and Langland and Dante, St. Thomas' Summa, and the Oxoniense of Duns Scotus?
How does it happen that even today a couple of ordinary French stonemasons, or a carpenter and his apprentice, can put up a dovecote or a barn that has more architectural perfection than the piles of eclectic stupidity that grow up at the cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars on the campuses of American universities? ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1414:Modern man, in so far as he is still Cartesian (he is of course going far beyond Descartes in many respects), is a subject for whom his own self-awareness as a thinking, observing, measuring and estimating "self" is absolutely primary. It is for him the one indubitable "reality," and all truth starts here. The more he is able to develop his consciousness as a subject over against objects, the more he can understand things in their relations to him and one another, the more he can manipulate these objects for his own interests, but also, at the same time, the more he tends to isolate himself in his own subjective prison, to become a detached observer cut off from everything else in a kind of impenetrable alienated and transparent bubble which contains all reality in the form of purely subjective experience. Modern consciousness then tends to create this solipsistic bubble of awareness - an ego-self imprisoned in its own consciousness, isolated and out of touch with other such selves in so far as they are all "things" rather than persons. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1415:The fact that our being necessarily demands to be expressed in action should not lead us to believe that as soon as we stop acting we cease to exist.
We do not live merely to “do something” – no matter what. We do not live more fully merely by doing something more, seeing more, tasting more and experiencing more than we ever have before.
Everything depends on the quality of our acts and experiences. A multitude of badly performed actions and experiences only half-lived exhausts and depletes our being.
By doing things badly we make ourselves less real. This growing unreality cannot help but make us unhappy and fill us with a sense of guilt.
There are times then when in order to keep ourselves in existence at all, we simply have to sit back awhile and do nothing. And for a man who has let himself be drawn completely out of himself by his activity, nothing is more difficult than to sit still and rest, doing nothing at all.
We must first recover the possession of our own being before we can act or taste or experience reality. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1416:The Tower of the Spirit
The Spirit has an impregnable tower
Which no danger can disturb
As long as the tower is guarded
By the invisible Protector
Who acts unconsciously, and whose actions
Go astray when they become deliberate,
Reflexive, and intentional.
The unconscious
And entire sincerity of Tao
Are disturbed by any effort
At self-conscious demonstration.
All such demonstrations
Are lies.
When one displays himself
In this ambiguous way
The world storms in
and imprisons him.
He is no longer protected
by the sincerity of Tao.
Each new act
Is a new failure.
If his acts are done in public,
In broad daylight,
He will be punished by men.
If they are done in private
And in secret,
He will be punished
By spirits.
Let each one understand
The meaning of sincerity
and guard against display.
He will be at peace
with men and spirits
and will act rightly, unseen,
in his own solitude,
in the tower of his spirit. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1417:It is by no means impossible for faith to coexist with doubt. The two are not mutually exclusive. Perhaps there are some who by God’s grace retain throughout their life the faith of a little child, enabling them to accept without question all that they have been taught. For most of those living in the West today, however, such an attitude is simply not possible. We have to make our own the cry, “Lord, I believe: help my unbelief” (Mark 9:24). For very many of us this will remain our constant prayer right up to the very gates of death. Yet doubt does not in itself signify lack of faith. It may mean the opposite—that our faith is alive and growing. For faith implies not complacency but taking risks, not shutting ourselves off from the unknown but advancing boldly to meet it. Here an Orthodox Christian may readily make his own the words of Bishop J.A.T. Robinson: “The act of faith is a constant dialogue with doubt.” As Thomas Merton rightly says, “Faith is a principle of questioning and struggle before it becomes a principle of certitude and peace. ~ Kallistos Ware, #NFDB
1418:Once he preached a sermon on "Music at Zion Church" and sent me word that I must be sure to be there, for I would hear him make mention of my father. That is just about typical of Protestant pulpit oratory in the more "liberal" quarters. I went, dutifully, that morning, but before he got around to the part in which I was supposed to be personally interested, I got an attack of my head-spinning and went out into the air. When the sermon was being preached, I was sitting on the church steps in the sun, talking to a black-gowned verger, or whatever he was called. By the time I felt better, the sermon was over.
I cannot say I went to this church very often: but the measure of my zeal may be judged by the fact that I once went even in the middle of the week. I forget what was the occasion: Ash Wednesday or Holy Thursday. There were one or two women in the place, and myself lurking in one of the back benches. We said some prayers. It was soon over. By the time it was, I had worked up courage to take the train into New York and go to Columbia for the day. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1419:The fact that our being necessarily demands to be expressed in action should not lead us to believe that as soon as we stop acting we cease to exist.
We do not live merely to “do something” – no matter what. We do not live more fully merely by doing something more, seeing more, tasting more and experiencing more than we ever have before.
Everything depends on the quality of our acts and experiences. A multitude of badly performed actions and experiences only half-lived exhausts and depletes our being.
By doing things badly we make ourselves less real. This growing unreality cannot help but make us unhappy and fill us with a sense of guilt.
There are times then when in order to keep ourselves in existence at all, we simply have to sit back awhile and do nothing. And for a man who has let himself be drawn completely out of himself by his activity, nothing is more difficult than to sit still and rest, doing nothing at all.
We must first recover the possession of our own being before we can act or taste or experience reality. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1420:Our landlord, Mr. Duggan, ran a nearby saloon. He got in trouble with Father for helping himself to the rhubarb which we were growing in the garden. I remember the grey summer dusk in which this happened. We were at the supper table, when the bended Mr. Duggan was observed, like some whale in the sea of green rhubarb, plucking up the red stalks. Father rose to his feet and hastened out into the garden. I could hear indignant words. We sat at the supper table, silent, not eating, and when Father returned I began to question him, and to endeavour to work out the morality of the situation. And I still remember it as having struck me as a difficult case, with much to be said on both sides. In fact, I had assumed that if the landlord felt like it, he could simply come and harvest all our vegetables, and there was nothing we could do about it. I mention this with the full consciousness that someone will use it against me, and say that the real reason I became a monk in later years was that I had the mentality of a medieval serf when I was barely out of the cradle. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1421:Look, a naked runner A messenger, Following the wind From budding hills. By sweet sunstroke Wounded and signed, (He is therefore sacred) Silence is his way. Rain is his own Most private weather. Amazement is his star. O stranger, Our early hope Flies fast by, A mute comet, an empty sun. Adam is his name! O primeval angel Virgin brother of astonishment, Born of one word, one bare Inquisitive diamond. O blessed, Invulnerable cry, O unplanned Saturday, O lucky father! Come without warning A friend of hurricanes, Lightning in your bones! We will open to you The sun-door, the noble eye! Open to rain, to somersaulting air, To everything that swims, To skies that wake, Flare and applaud. (It is too late, he flies the other way Wrapping his honesty in rain.) --- Pardon all runners, All speechless, alien winds, All mad waters. Pardon their impulses, Their wild attitudes, Their young flights, their reticence. When a message has no clothes on How can it be spoken. [1499.jpg] -- from Selected Poems of Thomas Merton, by Thomas Merton
~ Thomas Merton, A Messenger from the Horizon
,#NFDB
1422:There are many other escapes from the empirical, external self, which might seem to be, but are not, contemplation. For instance, the experience of being seized and taken out of oneself by collective enthusiasm, in a totalitarian parade: the self-righteous upsurge of party loyalty that blots out conscience and absolves every criminal tendency in the name of Class, Nation, Party, Race or Sect. The danger and the attraction of these false mystiques of Nation and of Class is precisely that they seduce and pretend to satisfy those who are no longer aware of any deep or genuine spiritual need. The false mysticism of the Mass Society captivates men who are so alienated from themselves and from God that they are no longer capable of genuine spiritual experience. Yet it is precisely these ersatz forms of enthusiasm that are “opium” for the people, deadening their awareness of their deepest and most personal needs, alienating them from their true selves, putting conscience and personality to sleep and turning free, reasonable men into passive instruments of the power politician. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1423:The Inner Law
He whose law is within himself
Walks in hiddenness.
His acts are not influenced
By approval or disapproval.
He whose law is outside himself
Directs his will to what is
Beyond his control
And seeks
To extend his power
Over objects.
He who walks in hiddenness
Has light to guide him
In all his acts.
He who seeks to extend his control
Is nothing but an operator.
While he thinks he is
Surpassing others,
Others see him merely
Straining, stretching,
To stand on tiptoe.
When he tries to extend his power
Over objects,
Those objects gain control
Of him.
He who is controlled by objects
Loses possession of his inner self:
If he no longer values himself,
How can he value others?
If he no longer values others,
He is abandoned.
He has nothing left!
There is no deadlier weapon than the will!
The sharpest sword
Is not equal to it!
There is no robber so dangerous
As Nature (Yang and Yin).
Yet it is not nature
That does the damage:
It is man’s own will! ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1424:Leaving Things Alone (excerpt)
You train your eye and your vision lusts after colour. You train your ear, and you long for delightful sound. You delight in doing good, and your natural kindness is blown out of shape. You delight in righteousness, and you become righteous beyond all reason. You overdo liturgy, and you turn into a ham actor. Overdo your love of music, and you play corn. Love of wisdom leads to wise contriving. Love of knowledge leads to faultfinding.
If men would stay as they really are, taking or leaving these eight delights would make no difference. But if they will not rest in their right state, the eight delights develop like malignant tumors. The world falls into confusion. Since man honour these delights, and lust after them, the world has gone stone-blind.
When the delight is over, they still will not let go of it: they surround its memory with ritual worship, they fall on their knees to talk about it, play music and sing, fast and discipline themselves in honour of the eight delights. When the delights become a religion, how can you control them? ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1425:Of us all, Father was the only one who really had any kind of a faith. And I do not doubt that he had very much of it, and that behind the walls of his isolation, his intelligence and his will, unimpaired, and not hampered in any essential way by the partial obstruction of some of his senses, were turned to God, and communed with God Who was with him and in him, and Who gave him, as I believe, light to understand and to make use of his suffering for his own good, and to perfect his soul. It was a great soul, large, full of natural charity. He was a man of exceptional intellectual honesty and sincerity and purity of understanding. And this affliction, this terrible and frightening illness which was relentlessly pressing him down even into the jaws of the tomb, was not destroying him after all. Souls are like athletes, that need opponents worthy of them, if they are to be tried and extended and pushed to the full use of their powers, and rewarded according to their capacity. And my father was in a fight with this tumor, and none of us understood the battle. We thought he was done for, but it was making him great. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1426:Strong hate, the hate that takes joy in hating, is strong because it does not believe itself to be unworthy and alone. It feels the support of a justifying God, of an idol of war, an avenging and destroying spirit. From such blood-drinking gods the human race was once liberated, with great toil and terrible sorrow, by the death of a God Who delivered Himself to the Cross and suffered the pathological cruelty of His own creatures out of pity for them. In conquering death He opened their eyes to the reality of a love which asks no questions about worthiness, a love which overcomes hatred and destroys death. But men have now come to reject this divine revelation of pardon, and they are consequently returning to the old war gods, the gods that insatiably drink blood and eat the flesh of men. It is easier to serve the hate-gods because they thrive on the worship of collective fanaticism. To serve the hate-gods, one has only to be blinded by collective passion. To serve the God of Love one must be free, one must face the terrible responsibility of the decision to love in spite of all unworthiness whether in oneself or in one’s neighbor. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1427:When psalms surprise me with their music And antiphons turn to rum The Spirit sings: the bottom drops out of my soul. And from the center of my cellar, Love, louder than thunder Opens a heaven of naked air. New eyes awaken. I send Love's name into the world with wings And songs grow up around me like a jungle. Choirs of all creatures sing the tunes Your Spirit played in Eden. Zebras and antelopes and birds of paradise Shine on the face of the abyss And I am drunk with the great wilderness Of the sixth day in Genesis. But sound is never half so fair As when that music turns to air And the universe dies of excellence. Sun, moon and stars Fall from their heavenly towers. Joys walk no longer down the blue world's shore. Though fires loiter, lights still fly on the air of the gulf, All fear another wind, another thunder: Then one more voice Snuffs all their flares in one gust. And I go forth with no more wine and no more stars And no more buds and no more Eden And no more animals and no more sea: While God sings by himself in acres of night And walls fall down, that guarded Paradise. [1499.jpg] -- from Selected Poems of Thomas Merton, by Thomas Merton
~ Thomas Merton, A Psalm
,#NFDB
1428:A selfish love seldom respects the rights of the beloved to be an autonomous person. Far from respecting the true being of another and granting his personality room to grow and expand in its own original way, this love seeks to keep him in subjection to ourselves. It insists that he conform himself to us, and it works in every possible way to make him do so. A selfish love withers and dies unless it is sustained by the attention of the beloved. When we love thus, our friends exist only in order that we may love them. In loving them we seek to make pets of them, to keep them tame. Such love fears nothing more than the escape of the beloved. It requires his subjection because that is necessary for the nourishment of our own affections. Selfish love often appears to be unselfish, because it is willing to make any concession to the beloved in order to keep him prisoner. But it is supreme selfishness to buy what is best in a person, his liberty, his integrity, his own autonomous dignity as a person, at the price of far lesser goods. Such selfishness is all the more abominable when it takes a complacent pleasure in its concessions, deluded that they are all acts of selfless charity. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1429:The real violence exerted by propaganda is this: by means of apparent truth and apparent reason, it induces us to surrender our freedom and self-possession. It predetermines us to certain conclusions, and does so in such a way that we imagine that we are fully free in reaching them by our own judgment and our own thought. Propaganda makes up our mind for us, but in such a way that it leaves us the sense of pride and satisfaction of men who have made up their own minds. And, in the last analysis, propaganda achieves this effect because we want it to. This is one of the few real pleasures left to modern man: this illusion that he is thinking for himself when, in fact, someone else is doing his thinking for him. And this someone else is not a personal authority, the great mind of a genial thinker, it is the mass mind, the general “they,” the anonymous whole. One is left, therefore, not only with the sense that one has thought things out for himself, but that he has also reached the correct answer without difficulty - the answer which is shown to be correct because it is the answer of everybody. Since it is at once my answer and the answer of everybody, how should I resist it? ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1430:I know my time, which is obscure, silent and brief For I am present without warning one night only. When sun rises on the brass valleys I become serpent. Though I show my true self only in the dark and to no man (For I appear by day as serpent) I belong neither to night nor day. Sun and city never see my deep white bell Or know my timeless moment of void: There is no reply to my munificence. When I come I lift my sudden Eucharist Out of the earth's unfathomable joy Clean and total I obey the world's body I am intricate and whole, not art but wrought passion Excellent deep pleasure of essential waters Holiness of form and mineral mirth: I am the extreme purity of virginal thirst. I neither show my truth nor conceal it My innocence is described dimly Only by divine gift As a white cavern without explanation. He who sees my purity Dares not speak of it. When I open once for all my impeccable bell No one questions my silence: The all-knowing bird of night flies out of my mouth. Have you seen it? Then though my mirth has quickly ended You live forever in its echo: You will never be the same again. [1499.jpg] -- from Selected Poems of Thomas Merton, by Thomas Merton
~ Thomas Merton, Night-Flowering Cactus
,#NFDB
1431:It is this kind of consciousness, exacerbated to an extreme, which has made inevitable the so called "death of God." Cartesian thought began with an attempt to reach God as object by starting from the thinking self. But when God becomes object, he sooner or later "dies," because God as object is ultimately unthinkable. God as object is not only a mere abstract concept, but one which contains so many internal contradictions that it becomes entirely nonnegotiable except when it is hardened into an idol that is maintained in existence by a sheer act of will. For a long time man continued to be capable of this willfulness: but now the effort has become exhausting and many Christians have realised it to be futile. Relaxing the effort, they have let go the "God-object" which their fathers and grandfathers still hoped to manipulate for their own ends. Their weariness has accounted for the element of resentment which made this a conscious "murder" of the deity. Liberated from the strain of willfully maintaining an object-God in existence, the Cartesian consciousness remains none the less imprisoned in itself. Hence the need to break out of itself and to meet "the other" in "encounter," "openness," "fellowship," "communion". ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1432:Thánh Tôma nói, (I-II, Q.34, a.4) một người tốt khi người ấy tìm thấy niềm vui trong điều tốt; người ấy xấu khi tìm thấy niềm vui trong điều xấu. Người ấy đức hạnh khi tìm thấy hạnh phúc trong đời sống đức hạnh; người ấy tội lỗi khi tìm thấy vui thú trong đời sống tội lỗi. Vì thế, những thứ chúng ta yêu quý nói cho chúng ta biết chúng ta là ai.
Vì thế, người ta biết một người nhờ kết cục này. Người ta cũng biết người ấy nhờ sự khởi đầu của anh ta. Và nếu muốn biết một người vào bất kỳ một thời khắc quy định nào đó, hãy xem họ đã rời xa điểm khởi đầu và đến gần cái kết cục của mình là bao nhiêu. Bởi đó, một người phạm tội mặc dù tự ý, nhưng không yêu tội, người ấy vẫn không là người tội lỗi đúng nghĩa.
Người thành tâm xuất phát từ Thiên Chúa sẽ quay trở về với Ngài. Khởi đầu với quà tặng được hiện hữu và những khả năng Thiên Chúa trao ban, người đó đạt đến tuổi lý luận và bắt đầu chọn lựa. Phong cách chọn lựa của người ấy chịu ảnh hưởng rất nhiều bởi những gì đã xảy ra với anh ta trong tuổi ấu thơ và bởi tính khí mà với nó anh được sinh ra.
Nó sẽ tiếp tục bị ảnh hưởng bởi những hành động của những người chung quanh, bởi những sự kiện của thế giới mà trong đó người đó sống, bởi tính cách của xã hội. Tuy nhiên, tự cơ bản, nó vẫn tự do. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1433:For Abelard, the death of Christ on the Cross did not, strictly speaking, redeem man: it only offered him an example of supreme humility, charity, and self-sacrifice. Bernard asserts, against Abelard, that Christ became man precisely in order to redeem mankind from sin, deliver man from the power of the devil, and to become, instead of fallen Adam, the new head of a redeemed and sanctified human race. Jesus, says Saint Bernard, not only taught us justice but gave us justice. He not only showed us His love by dying for us on the Cross, but by the effects of His death He really and objectively causes His charity to exist and act in our hearts. In, doing so, He actually destroys sin in our souls and communicates to us a new life which is totally supernatural and divine. The effect of our redemption is therefore a complete and literal regeneration of those souls to whom its fruits are applied. Without this dogmatic basis the whole mystical theology of Saint Bernard would be incomprehensible. The purpose of all his mystical and ascetic teaching is to show us how to co-operate with the action of divine grace so that our redemption and regeneration may not remain a dead letter but may actually influence all our conduct and find expression in every part of our lives ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1434:THE notion of dogma terrifies men who do not understand the Church. They cannot conceive that a religious doctrine may be clothed in a clear, definite and authoritative statement without at once becoming static, rigid and inert and losing all its vitality. In their frantic anxiety to escape from any such conception they take refuge in a system of beliefs that is vague and fluid, a system in which truths pass like mists and waver and vary like shadows. They make their own personal selection of ghosts, in this pale, indefinite twilight of the mind. They take good care never to bring these abstractions out into the full brightness of the sun for fear of a full view of their unsubstantiality. They favor the Catholic mystics with a sort of sympathetic regard, for they believe that these rare men somehow reached the summit of contemplation in defiance of Catholic dogma. Their deep union with God is supposed to have been an escape from the teaching authority of the Church, and an implicit protest against it. But the truth is that the saints arrived at the deepest and most vital and also the most individual and personal knowledge of God precisely because of the Church’s teaching authority, precisely through the tradition that is guarded and fostered by that authority. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1435:We are living under a tyranny of untruth which confirms itself in power and establishes a more and more total control over men in proportion as they convince themselves they are resisting error.
Our submission to plausible and useful lies involves us in greater and more obvious contradictions, and to hide these from ourselves we need greater and ever less plausible lies. The basic falsehood is the lie that we are totally dedicated to truth, and that we can remain dedicated to truth in a manner that is at the same time honest and exclusive: that we have the monopoly of all truth, just as our adversary of the moment has the monopoly of all error.
We then convince ourselves that we cannot preserve our purity of vision and our inner sincerity if we enter into dialogue with the enemy, for he will corrupt us with his error. We believe, finally, that truth cannot be preserved except by the destruction of the enemy - for, since we have identified him with error, to destroy him is to destroy error. The adversary, of course, has exactly the same thoughts about us and exactly the same basic policy by which he defends the “truth.” He has identified us with dishonesty, insincerity, and untruth. He believes that, if we are destroyed, nothing will be left but truth. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1436:There is no where in you a paradise that is no place and there You do not enter except without a story. To enter there is to become unnameable. Whoever is nowhere is nobody, and therefore cannot exist except as unborn: No disguise will avail him anything Such a one is neither lost nor found. But he who has an address is lost. They fall, they fall into apartments and are securely established! They find themselves in streets. They are licensed To proceed from place to place They now know their own names They can name several friends and know Their own telephones must some time ring. If all telephones ring at once, if all names are shouted at once and all cars crash at one crossing: If all cities explode and fly away in dust Yet identities refuse to be lost. There is a name and a number for everyone. There is a definite place for bodies, there are pigeon holes for ashes: Such security can business buy! Who would dare to go nameless in so secure a universe? Yet, to tell the truth, only the nameless are at home in it. They bear with them in the center of nowhere the unborn flower of nothing: This is the paradise tree. It must remain unseen until words end and arguments are silent. [1499.jpg] -- from Selected Poems of Thomas Merton, by Thomas Merton
~ Thomas Merton, The Fall
,#NFDB
1437:CONTEMPLATION is the highest expression of man’s intellectual and spiritual life. It is that life itself, fully awake, fully active, fully aware that it is alive. It is spiritual wonder. It is spontaneous awe at the sacredness of life, of being. It is gratitude for life, for awareness and for being. It is a vivid realization of the fact that life and being in us proceed from an invisible, transcendent and infinitely abundant Source. Contemplation is, above all, awareness of the reality of that Source. It knows the Source, obscurely, inexplicably, but with a certitude that goes both beyond reason and beyond simple faith. For contemplation is a kind of spiritual vision to which both reason and faith aspire, by their very nature, because without it they must always remain incomplete. Yet contemplation is not vision because it sees “without seeing” and knows “without knowing.” It is a more profound depth of faith, a knowledge too deep to be grasped in images, in words or even in clear concepts. It can be suggested by words, by symbols, but in the very moment of trying to indicate what it knows the contemplative mind takes back what it has said, and denies what it has affirmed. For in contemplation we know by “unknowing.” Or, better, we know beyond all knowing or “unknowing. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1438:If we really sought truth we would begin slowly and laboriously to divest ourselves one by one of all our coverings of fiction and delusion: or at least we would desire to do so, for mere willing cannot enable us to effect it. On the contrary, the one who can best point out our error, and help us to see it, is the adversary whom we wish to destroy. This is perhaps why we wish to destroy him. So, too, we can help him to see his error, and that is why he wants to destroy us.
In the long run, no one can show another the error that is within him, unless the other is convinced that his critic first sees and loves the good that is within him. So while we are perfectly willing to tell our adversary he is wrong, we will never be able to do so effectively until we can ourselves appreciate where he is right. And we can never accept his judgment on our errors until he gives evidence that he really appreciates our own peculiar truth. Love, love only, love of our deluded fellow man as he actually is, in his delusion and in his sin: this alone can open the door to truth. As long as we do not have this love, as long as this love is not active and effective in our lives (for words and good wishes will never suffice) we have no real access to the truth. At least not to moral truth. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1439:The story of the Fall tells us in mythical language that "original sin" is not simply a stigma arbitrarily making good pleasures seem guilty, but a basic inauthenticity, a kind of predisposition to bad faith in our understanding of ourselves and of the world. It implies a determined willfulness in trying to make things be other than they are in order that we may be able to make them subserve, at any moment, to our individual desire for pleasure or for power. But since things do not obey our arbitrary impulsions, and since we cannot make the world correspond to and confirm the image of it dictated by our needs and illusions, our willfulness is inseparable from error and from suffering. Hence, Buddhism says, deluded life itself is in a state of Dukkha, and every movement of desire tends to bear ultimate fruit in pain rather than lasting joy, in hate rather than love, in destruction rather than creation. (Let us note in passing that when technological skill seems in fact to give man almost absolute power in manipulating the world, this fact is no way reverses his original condition of brokenness and error but only makes it all the more obvious. We who live in the age of the H-bomb and the extermination camp have reason to reflect on this, though such reflection is a bit unpopular.) ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1440:The grace of Easter is a great silence, an immense tranquility and a clean taste in your soul. It is the taste of heaven, but not the heaven of some wild exaltation. The Easter vision is not riot and drunkenness of spirit, but a discovery of order above all order—a discovery of God and of all things in Him. This is a wine without intoxication, a joy that has no poison in it. It is life without death. Tasting it for a moment, we are briefly able to see and love all things according to their truth, to possess them in their substance hidden in God, beyond all sense. For desire clings to the vesture and accident of things, but charity possesses them in the simple depths of God. If Mass could only be, every morning, what it is on Easter morning! If the prayers could always be so clear, if the Risen Christ would always shine in my heart and all around me and before me in His Easter simplicity! For His simplicity is our feast. This is the unleavened bread which is manna and the bread of heaven, this Easter cleanness, this freedom, this sincerity. Give us always this bread of heaven. Slake us always with this water that we might not thirst forever! This is the life that pours down into us from the Risen Christ, this is the breath of his Spirit, and this is the love that quickens His Mystical Body. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1441:and burdens of mature life, when they became aware of their own weakness, they lost their peace, they let go of their precious self-respect, and it became impossible for them to “believe.” That is to say it became impossible for them to comfort themselves, to reassure themselves, with the images and concepts that they found reassuring in childhood. Place no hope in the feeling of assurance, in spiritual comfort. You may well have to get along without this. Place no hope in the inspirational preachers of Christian sunshine, who are able to pick you up and set you back on your feet and make you feel good for three or four days—until you fold up and collapse into despair. Self-confidence is a precious natural gift, a sign of health. But it is not the same thing as faith. Faith is much deeper, and it must be deep enough to subsist when we are weak, when we are sick, when our self-confidence is gone, when our self-respect is gone. I do not mean that faith only functions when we are otherwise in a state of collapse. But true faith must be able to go on even when everything else is taken away from us. Only a humble man is able to accept faith on these terms, so completely without reservation that he is glad of it in its pure state, and welcomes it happily even when nothing else comes with it, and when everything else is taken away. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1442:Once the question of grace and free will is reduced to a juridical matter, once witnesses line up with plaintiff or defendant and the jurors strive to determine who is entitled to what, we are inevitably tempted to act as if everything that was given to free will was taken from grace and everything conceded to grace was withdrawn from our own liberty.
On both sides of the debate, whether one is arguing "for grace" or whether one is a defender of "nature," it seems that everyone is more or less obsessed with this great illusion of ownership and possession. What is strictly mine? How much can God demand of me - how much can I demand of Him? Even if I come up with the answer that nothing is strictly mine at all, I have still falsified the perspective by asking a foolish question in the first place. "How much is mine?" Should such a question ever be asked? Should such a division ever be made at all? To ask such a question makes it almost impossible for me to grasp the paradox which is the only possible answer: That everything is mine precisely because everything is His. If it were not His, it could never be mine. If it could not be mine, He would not even want it for Himself. And all that is His is His very self. All that He gives me becomes, in some way, my own self. What, then is mine? He is mine. And what is His? I am His. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1443:One who is content with what he has, and who accepts the fact that he inevitably misses very much in life, is far better off than one who has much more but who worries about all he may be missing . . . the relative perfection which we must attain to in this life if we are to live as sons of God is not the twenty-four-hour-a-day production of perfect acts of virtue, but a life from which practically all the obstacles to God's love have been removed or overcome. One of the chief obstacles to this perfection of selfless charity is the selfish anxiety to get the most out of everything, to be a brilliant success in our own eyes and in the eyes of other men. We can only get rid of this anxiety by being content to miss something in almost everything we do. We cannot master everything, taste everything, understand everything, drain every experience to its last dregs. But if we have the courage to let almost everything else go, we will probably be able to retain the one thing necessary for us— whatever it may be. If we are too eager to have everything, we will almost certainly miss even the one thing we need. Happiness consists in finding out precisely what the "one thing necessary" may be, in our lives, and in gladly relinquishing all the rest. For then, by a divine paradox, we find that everything else is given us together with the one thing we needed. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1444:In a state where “liberty” is based on the “rights” of each individual there can never be true justice. But in a state where you get to discussing the rights of beavers, then there is the danger not only of injustice but of violence and general ruin, through a kind of contagious madness that could sweep the country as the fear of the Martians swept New Jersey. (Rights: if a state guarantees the Rights of all men: men either will or will not demand the extreme limit of what they are entitled to. Furthermore, it is even their right to keep more than they have a right to if they can get it legally (or even illegally, as long as the injured party doesn’t complain and demand his rights). Now everybody does not demand the full extent of his rights. Most people, to tell the truth, don’t care. But some get as much as they can get; more than they have a “right” to; they take over the “rights” of many many others who don’t really care. Thus they become so big that they are monuments, and everyone looks up to them, and makes it his ideal to get that much more of his rights too (if he only could!). The ideal is greed and avarice. How can there be justice or liberty in such a state? Yet imagine the pandemonium if every man set out to demand at once the full extent of his (nebulous) rights, and the whole nation were swept by completely active and murderous avarice!) ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1445:It does not even seem to enter our minds that there might be some incongruity in praying to the God of peace, the God Who told us to love one another as He had loved us, Who warned us that they who took the sword would perish by it, and at the same time planning to annihilate not thousands but millions of civilians and soldiers, men, women and children without discrimination, even with the almost infallible certainty of inviting the same annihilation for ourselves! It may make sense for a sick man to pray for health and then take medicine, but I fail to see any sense at all in his praying for health and then drinking poison. WHEN I pray for peace I pray God to pacify not only the Russians and the Chinese but above all my own nation and myself. When I pray for peace I pray to be protected not only from the Reds but also from the folly and blindness of my own country. When I pray for peace, I pray not only that the enemies of my country may cease to want war, but above all that my own country will cease to do the things that make war inevitable. In other words, when I pray for peace I am not just praying that the Russians will give up without a struggle and let us have our own way. I am praying that both we and the Russians may somehow be restored to sanity and learn how to work out our problems, as best we can, together, instead of preparing for global suicide. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1446:3. To love another is to will what is really good for him. Such love must be based on truth. A love that sees no distinction between good and evil, but loves blindly merely for the sake of loving, is hatred, rather than love. To love blindly is to love selfishly, because the goal of such love is not the real advantage of the beloved but only the exercise of love in our own souls. Such love cannot seem to be love unless it pretends to seek the good of the one loved. But since it actually cares nothing for the truth, and never considers that it may go astray, it proves itself to be selfish. It does not seek the true advantage of the beloved or even our own. It is not interested in the truth, but only in itself. It proclaims itself content with an apparent good: which is the exercise of love for its own sake, without any consideration of the good or bad effects of loving. When such love exists on the level of bodily passion it is easily recognized for what it is. It is selfish, and, therefore, it is not love. Those whose love does not transcend the desires of their bodies, generally do not even bother to deceive themselves with good motives. They follow their passions. Since they do not deceive themselves, they are more honest, as well as more miserable, than those who pretend to love on a spiritual plane without realizing that their “unselfishness” is only a deception. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1447:In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world. . . .
This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud. . . . I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.
Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed. . . . But this cannot be seen, only believed and ‘understood’ by a peculiar gift. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1448:We are all broken by something. We have all hurt someone and have been hurt. We all share the condition of brokenness even if our brokenness is not equivalent. I desperately wanted mercy for Jimmy Dill and would have done anything to create justice for him, but I couldn’t pretend that his struggle was disconnected from my own. The ways in which I have been hurt—and have hurt others—are different from the ways Jimmy Dill suffered and caused suffering. But our shared brokenness connected us. Paul Farmer, the renowned physician who has spent his life trying to cure the world’s sickest and poorest people, once quoted me something that the writer Thomas Merton said: We are bodies of broken bones. I guess I’d always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we’re fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we’re shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion. We have a choice. We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our best hope for healing. Or we can deny our brokenness, forswear compassion, and, as a result, deny our own humanity. ~ Bryan Stevenson, #NFDB
1449:Chúng ta có thể xem thấy sự lớn lên của những thành phố này mà không làm một điều gì đó để thanh tẩy chính tâm hồn mình sao? Khi con người, đồng tiền và những cổ máy của nó đi vào sa mạc và cư ngụ ở đó; khi con người không chiến đấu với tên ác quỷ như Đức Kitô đã làm nhưng tin vào lời hứa về quyền lực và sự giàu sang của nó, cũng như thờ phượng sự khôn ngoan siêu nhân của nó, thì chính sa mạc tự nó di chuyển khắp nơi. Vậy thì bất cứ nơi đâu cũng phải là sa mạc, nơi đâu cũng là chốn cô tịch, trong đó, con người phải thực hành thống hối, chống lại kẻ thù và thanh luyện chính tâm hồn mình trong ân sủng của Thiên Chúa.
Sa mạc là ngôi nhà của thất vọng. Và giờ đây, thất vọng có mặt khắp nơi. Đừng nghĩ rằng, thinh lặng nội tâm của chúng ta bao hàm một sự chấp nhận thất bại. Chúng ta không thể thoát khỏi bất cứ điều gì bằng cách ngấm ngầm chấp nhận chịu thua. Thất vọng là một vực thẳm không đáy. Đừng nghĩ đến việc đóng kín nó lại bằng cách chấp nhận nó và tìm cách quên đi việc mình đã chấp nhận.
Vậy thì đây là sa mạc của chúng ta: sống đối mặt thất vọng, nhưng không chấp nhận nó. Đạp nó xuống bên dưới niềm hy vọng vào thánh giá. Không ngừng nghỉ tiến hành chiến đấu chống lại thất vọng. Cuộc chiến đó là hoang mạc của chúng ta. Nếu quả cảm chiến đấu, chúng ta sẽ thấy rằng, Đức Kitô đứng về phe chúng ta. Nếu không thể đối mặt với nó, chúng ta sẽ không bao giờ tìm thấy Ngài. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1450:I thought to myself, who is this excellent man Van Doren who being employed to teach literature, teaches just that: talks about writing and about books and poems and plays: does not get off on a tangent about the biographies of the poets or novelists: does not read into their poems a lot of subjective messages which were never there? Who is this man who does not have to fake and cover up a big gulf of ignorance by teaching a lot of opinions and conjectures and useless facts that belong to some other subject? Who is this who really loves what he has to teach, and does not secretly detest all literature, and abhor poetry, while pretending to be a professor of it?...It was because of this virtual scholasticism of Mark's that he would never permit himself to fall into the naive errors of those who try to read some favorite private doctrine into every poet they like of ever nation or every age. And Mark abhorred the smug assurance with which second-rate left-wing critics find adumbrations of dialectical materialism in everyone who ever wrote from Homer and Shakespeare to whomever they happen to like in recent times. If the poet is to their fancy, then he is clearly seen to be preaching the class struggle. If they do not like him, then they are able to show that he was really a forefather of fascism. And all their literary heroes are revolutionary leaders, and all their favorite villains are capitalists and Nazis. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1451:In actual fact, conventions are the death of real tradition as they are of all real life. They are parasites which attach themselves to the living organism of tradition and devour all its reality, turning it into a hollow formality.
Tradition is living and active, but convention is passive and dead. Tradition does not form us automatically: we have to work to understand it. Convention is accepted passively, as a matter of routine. Therefore, convention easily becomes an evasion of reality. It offers us only pretended ways of solving the problems of living - a system of gestures and formalities. Tradition really teaches us to live and shows us how to take full responsibility for our own lives. Thus tradition is often flatly opposed to what is ordinary, to what is mere routine. But convention, which is a mere repetition of familiar routines, follows the line of least resistance. One goes through an act, without trying to understand the meaning of it all, merely because everyone else does the same. Tradition, which is always old, is at the same time ever new because it is always reviving - born again in each new generation, to be lived and applied in a new and particular way. Convention is simply the ossification of social customs. The activities of conventional people are merely excuses for NOT acting in a more integrally human way. Tradition nourishes the life of the spirit; convention merely disguises its interior decay. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1452:The old and the new. For the “old man,” everything is old: he has seen everything or thinks he has. He has lost hope in anything new. What pleases him is the “old” he clings to, fearing to lose it, but he is certainly not happy with it. And so he keeps himself “old” and cannot change: he is not open to any newness. His life is stagnant and futile. And yet there may be much movement—but change that leads to no change. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. For the “new man” everything is new. Even the old is transfigured in the Holy Spirit and is always new. There is nothing to cling to, there is nothing to be hoped for in what is already past—it is nothing. The new man is he who can find reality where it cannot be seen by the eyes of the flesh—where it is not yet—where it comes into being the moment he sees it. And would not be (at least for him) if he did not see it. The new man lives in a world that is always being created, and renewed. He lives in this realm of renewal and creation. He lives in life. The old man lives without life. He lives in death, and clings to what has died precisely because he clings to it. And yet he is crazy for change, as if struggling with the bonds of death. His struggle is miserable, and cannot be a substitute for life. Thought of these things after Communion today, when I suddenly realized that I had, and for how long, deeply lost hope of “anything new.” How foolish, when in fact the newness is there all the time. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1453:Is Christian ethics merely a specific set of Christian answers to the question of good and evil, right and wrong? To make it no more than this is to forget that man’s fall was a fall into the knowledge of good and evil, reinforced by the inexorable knowledge of a condemning law, and that man’s restoration in Christ is a restoration to freedom and grace, to a love that needs no law since it knows and does only what is in accord with love and with God. To imprison ethics in the realm of division, of good and evil, right and wrong, is to condemn it to sterility, and rob it of its real reason for existing, which is love. Love cannot be reduced to one virtue among many others prescribed by ethical imperatives. When love is only “a virtue” among many, man forgets that “God is love” and becomes incapable of that all-embracing love by which we secretly begin to know God as our Creator and Redeemer - who has saved us from the limitations of a purely restrictive and aimless existence “under a law.”
So Bonhoeffer says very rightly: “In the knowledge of good and evil man does not understand himself in the reality of the destiny appointed in his origin, but rather in his own possibilities, his possibility of being good or evil. He knows himself now as something apart from God, outside God, and this means that he now knows only himself and no longer knows God at all…. The knowledge of good and evil is therefore separation from God. Only against God can man know good and evil. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1454:Now that the clouds have come like cattle To the cold waters of the city's river, All the windows turn their scandalized expression Toward the tide's tin dazzle, And question, with their weak-eyed stare, The riotous sun. From several places at a time Cries of defiance, As delicate as frost, as sharp as glass, Rise from the porcelain buildings And break in the blue sky. Then, falling swiftly from the air, The fragments of this fragile indignation Ring on the echoing streets No louder than a shower of pins. But suddenly the bridges' choiring cables Jangle gently in the wind And play like quiet piano-strings. All down the faces of the buildings Windows begin to close Like figures in a long division. Those whose eyes all night have simulated sleep, Suddenly stare, from where they lie, like wolves, Tied in the tangle of the bedding, And listen for the waking blood To flood the apprehensive silence of their flesh. They fear the heart that now lies quenched may quicken, And start to romp against the rib, Soft and insistent as a secret bell. They also fear the light will grow Into the windows of their hiding places, like a tree Of tropical flowers And put them, one by one, to flight. Then life will have to begin. Pieces of paper, lying in the streets, Will start up, in the twisting wind, And fly like idiot birds before the faces of the crowds. And in the roaring buildings Elevator doors will have begun To clash like sabres. [1499.jpg] -- from Selected Poems of Thomas Merton, by Thomas Merton
~ Thomas Merton, Aubade -- The City
,#NFDB
1455:But now, supposing that, instead of confessing the sins of the world which she has taken upon herself, the Church - or a group of Christians who arrogate to themselves the name of “Church” - becomes a social mechanism for self-justification? Supposing this “Church,” which is in reality no church at all, takes to herself the function of declaring that everyone else is guilty and rationalizing the sins of her members as acts of virtue? Suppose that she becomes a perfect and faultless machine for declaring herself not guilty? Suppose that she provides men with a convenient method of deciding when they do or do not need to accuse themselves of anything before God? Supposing that, instead of conscience, she provides men with the support of unanimous group approval or disapproval?
This is what explains the fact that some men can commit murder in the name of Christ and believe themselves guiltless, indeed congratulate themselves on having served Him well. For them, the function of “the Church” is to provide a milieu in which one can decide what is and is not guilty, what is or is not sinful. The “Church” becomes simply a place where men gather to decree that others are guilty and they themselves are innocent. The fact that others then accuse them of hypocrisy and of flagrant infidelity to truth only confirms them in their own self-assured righteousness. The “Church” in such an event becomes a machine for setting the unquiet conscience at rest. It is a perfectly efficient machine for the manufacture of self-complacency and inner peace! ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1456:It is a pity that the beautiful Christian metaphor “salvation” has come to be so hackneyed and therefore so despised. It has been turned into a vapid synonym for “piety”—not even a truly ethical concept. “Salvation” is something far beyond ethical propriety. The word connotes a deep respect for the fundamental metaphysical reality of man. It reflects God’s own infinite concern for man, God’s love and care for man’s inmost being, God’s love for all that is His own in man, His son. It is not only human nature that is “saved” by the divine mercy, but above all the human person. The object of salvation is that which is unique, irreplaceable, incommunicable—that which is myself alone. This true inner self must be drawn up like a jewel from the bottom of the sea, rescued from confusion, from indistinction, from immersion in the common, the nondescript, the trivial, the sordid, the evanescent. We must be saved from immersion in the sea of lies and passions which is called “the world.” And we must be saved above all from that abyss of confusion and absurdity which is our own worldly self. The person must be rescued from the individual. The free son of God must be saved from the conformist slave of fantasy, passion and convention. The creative and mysterious inner self must be delivered from the wasteful, hedonistic and destructive ego that seeks only to cover itself with disguises. To be “lost” is to be left to the arbitrariness and pretenses of the contingent ego, the smoke-self that must inevitably vanish. To be “saved” is to return to one’s inviolate and eternal reality and to live in God. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1457:Supernatural hope is the virtue that strips us of all things in order to give us possession of all things. We do not hope for what we have. Therefore, to live in hope is to live in poverty, having nothing. And yet, if we abandon ourselves to economy of Divine Providence, we have everything we hope for. By faith we know God without seeing Him. By hope we possess God without feeling His presence. If we hope in God, by hope we already possess Him, since hope is a confidence which He creates in our souls as secret evidence that He has taken possession of us. So the soul that hopes in God already belongs to Him, and to belong to Him is the same as to possess Him, since He gives Himself completely to those who give themselves to Him. The only thing faith and hope do not give us is the clear vision of Him Whom we possess. We are united to Him in darkness, because we have to hope. Spes quae videtur non est spes.* Hope deprives us of everything that is not God, in order that all things may serve their true purpose as means to bring us to God. Hope is proportionate to detachment. It brings our souls into the state of the most perfect detachment. In doing so, it restores all values by setting them in their right order. Hope empties our hands in order that we may work with them. It shows us that we have something to work for, and teaches us how to work for it. Without hope, our faith gives us only an acquaintance with God. Without love and hope, faith only knows Him as a stranger. For hope casts us into the arms of His mercy and of His providence. If we hope in Him, we will not only come to know that He is merciful but we will experience His mercy in our own lives. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1458:We are all convinced that we desire the truth above all. Nothing strange about this. It is natural to man, an intelligent being, to desire the truth. (I still dare to speak of man as “an intelligent being”!) But actually, what we desire is not “the truth” so much as “to be in the right.” To seek the pure truth for its own sake may be natural to us, but we are not able to act always in this respect according to our nature. What we seek is not the pure truth, but the partial truth that justifies our prejudices, our limitations, our selfishness. This is not “the truth.” It is only an argument strong enough to prove us “right.” And usually our desire to be right is correlative to our conviction that somebody else (perhaps everybody else) is wrong.
Why do we want to prove them wrong? Because we need them to be wrong. For if they are wrong, and we are right, then our untruth becomes truth: our selfishness becomes justice and virtue: our cruelty and lust cannot be fairly condemned. We can rest secure in the fiction we have determined to embrace as “truth.” What we desire is not the truth, but rather that our lie should be proved “right,” and our iniquity be vindicated as “just.” This is what we have done to pervert our natural, instinctive appetite for truth.
No wonder we hate. No wonder we are violent. No wonder we exhaust ourselves in preparing for war! And in doing so, of course, we offer the enemy another reason to believe that he is right, that he must arm, that he must get ready to destroy us. Our own lie provides the foundation of truth on which he erects his own lie, and the two lies together react to produce hatred, murder, disaster. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1459:See the high birds! Is theirs the song That dies among the wood-light Wounding the listener with such bright arrows? Or do they play in wheeling silences Defining in the perfect sky The bounds of (here below) our solitude, Where spring has generated lights of green To glow in clouds upon the sombre branches? Ponds full of sky and stillnesses What heavy summer songs still sleep Under the tawny rushes at your brim? More than a season will be born here, nature, In your world of gravid mirrors! The quiet air awaits one note, One light, one ray and it will be the angels' spring: One flash, one glance upon the shiny pond, and then Asperges me! sweet wilderness, and lo! we are redeemed! For, like a grain of fire Smouldering in the heart of every living essence God plants His undivided power -- Buries His thought too vast for worlds In seed and root and blade and flower, Until, in the amazing light of April, Surcharging the religious silence of the spring, Creation finds the pressure of His everlasting secret Too terrible to bear. Then every way we look, lo! rocks and trees Pastures and hills and streams and birds and firmament And our own souls within us flash, and shower us with light, While the wild countryside, unknown, unvisited of men, Bears sheaves of clean, transforming fire. And then, oh then the written image, schooled in sacrifice, The deep united threeness printed in our being, Shot by the brilliant syllable of such an intuition, turns within, And plants that light far down into the heart of darkness and oblivion, Dives after, and discovers flame. [1499.jpg] -- from Selected Poems of Thomas Merton, by Thomas Merton
~ Thomas Merton, The Sowing of Meanings
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1460:Advising the Prince
The recluse Hsu Su Kwei had come to see Prince Wu.
The Prince was glad. "I have desired," he said, "To see you for a long time. Tell me if I am doing right.
I want to love my people, and by the exercise of justice
To put an end to war.
Is this enough?
"By no means," said the recluse.
"Your 'love' for your people
Puts them in mortal danger.
Your exercise of justice is the root
Of war after war!
Your grand intentions
Will end in disaster!
"If you set out to 'accomplish something great'
You only deceive yourself.
Your love and justice
Are fraudulent.
They are mere pretexts
For self-assertion, for aggression.
One action will bring on another
And in the chain of events
Your hidden intentions
Will be made plain.
You claim to practice justice. Should you seem to succeed
Success itself will bring more conflict.
Why all these guards
Standing at attention
At the palace gate around the temple altar
Everywhere.
You are at war with yourself!
You do not believe in justice,
Only in power and success.
If you overcome
An enemy and annex his country
You will be even less at peace
With yourself than you are now.
Nor will your passions let you
Sit still. You will fight again
And again for the sake of
A more perfect exercise of justice!
Abandon your plan
To be a 'loving inequitable ruler.'
Try to respond
To the demands of inner truth.
Stop vexing yourself and your people
With these obsessions!
Your people will breathe easy at last.
They will live
And war will end by itself! ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1461:The twentieth-century mystic Thomas Merton wrote, “There can be an intense egoism in following everybody else. People are in a hurry to magnify themselves by imitating what is popular—and too lazy to think of anything better. Hurry ruins saints as well as artists. They want quick success, and they are in such a haste to get it that they cannot take time to be true to themselves. And when the madness is upon them, they argue that their very haste is a species of integrity.”20 Merton elegantly articulates how the pressure of the create-on-demand world can cause us to look sideways at our peers and competitors instead of looking ahead. The process of discovering and refining your voice takes time. Unnecessary Creation grants you the space to discover your unique aptitudes and passions through a process of trial, error, and play that won’t often be afforded to you otherwise. Initiating a project with no parameters and no expectations from others also forces you to stay self-aware while learning to listen to and follow your intuition. Both of these are crucial skills for discovering your voice. It’s completely understandable if you’re thinking, “But wait—I hardly have time to breathe, and now you want me to cram something else into my schedule, just for my own enjoyment?” It’s true that every decision about where we spend our time has an opportunity cost, and dedicating time to Unnecessary Creation seems like a remarkably inefficient choice. In truth, it is inefficient. Consider, however, the opportunity cost of spending your life only on pragmatics. You dedicate your time to pleasing everyone else and delivering on their expectations, but you never get around to discovering your deeper aptitudes and creative capacities. Nothing is worth that. ~ Jocelyn K Glei, #NFDB
1462:When I get honest, I admit I am a bundle of paradoxes. I believe and I doubt, I hope and get discouraged, I love and I hate, I feel bad about feeling good, I feel guilty about not feeling guilty. I am trusting and suspicious. I am honest and I still play games. Aristotle said I am a rational animal; I say I am an angel with an incredible capacity for beer.
To live by grace means to acknowledge my whole life story, the light side and the dark. In admitting my shadow side I learn who I am and what God's grace means. As Thomas Merton put it, "A saint is not someone who is good but who experiences the goodness of God."
The gospel of grace nullifies our adulation of televangelists, charismatic superstars, and local church heroes. It obliterates the two-class citizenship theory operative in many American churches. For grace proclaims the awesome truth that all is gift. All that is good is ours not by right but by the sheer bounty of a gracious God. While there is much we may have earned--our degree and our salary, our home and garden, a Miller Lite and a good night's sleep--all this is possible only because we have been given so much: life itself, eyes to see and hands to touch, a mind to shape ideas, and a heart to beat with love. We have been given God in our souls and Christ in our flesh. We have the power to believe where others deny, to hope where others despair, to love where others hurt. This and so much more is sheer gift; it is not reward for our faithfulness, our generous disposition, or our heroic life of prayer. Even our fidelity is a gift, "If we but turn to God," said St. Augustine, "that itself is a gift of God."
My deepest awareness of myself is that I am deeply loved by Jesus Christ and I have done nothing to earn it or deserve it. ~ Brennan Manning,#NFDB
1463:What is serious to men is often very trivial in the sight of God. What in God might appear to us as "play" is perhaps what he Himself takes most seriously. At any rate, the Lord plays and diverts Himself in the garden of His creation, and if we could let go of our own obsession with what we think is the meaning of it all, we might be able to hear His call and follow Him in His mysterious, cosmic dance. We do not have to go very far to catch echoes of that game, and of that dancing. When we are alone on a starlit night; when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children; when we know love in our own hearts; or when, like the Japanese poet Bashō we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash--at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the "newness," the emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves evident, provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance.
For the world and time are the dance of the Lord in emptiness. The silence of the spheres is the music of a wedding feast. The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of life, the more we analyze them out into strange finalities and complex purposes of our own, the more we involve ourselves in sadness, absurdity and despair. But it does not matter much, because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things; or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there. Indeed, we are in the midst of it, and it is in the midst of us, for it beats in our very blood, whether we want it to or not.
Yet the fact remains that we are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the winds and join in the general dance. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1464:Nếu biết được tình yêu của Đức Giêsu dành cho chúng ta lớn lao nhường nào, chúng ta sẽ không bao giờ sợ hãi để đến với Ngài trong cơn túng quẫn, yếu đuối hoặc trong sự thảm hại và nhu nhược thiêng liêng của mình. Thật vậy, hiểu được bản chất đích thực tình yêu Đức Kitô dành cho chúng ta, chúng ta sẽ thích đến với Ngài, Đấng nghèo hèn và bơ vơ hơn cả chúng ta. Chúng ta sẽ không bao giờ cảm thấy xấu hổ về sự khốn cùng của mình. Sự khốn cùng trở nên ích lợi khi chúng ta không còn gì để tìm kiếm ngoại trừ lòng nhân hậu. Chúng ta có thể vui mừng về sự bơ vơ của mình khi thực sự tin rằng, quyền năng của Đức Kitô được hoàn thiện trong sự yếu đuối đó.
Dấu hiệu chắc chắn nhất cho thấy mỗi người có được một sự hiểu biết thiêng liêng về tình yêu Thiên Chúa dành cho mình chính là họ cảm kích cảnh túng quẫn của bản thân trong ánh sáng của lòng thương xót vô hạn của Ngài.
Chúng ta phải yêu chính sự nghèo khó riêng lòng mình có như Đức Giêsu yêu nó. Với Ngài, nó quá giá trị đến nỗi Ngài đã chết trên thánh giá để biểu tỏ sự khốn cùng của chúng ta cho Cha Ngài và ban sự giàu có của lòng nhân từ vô hạn của chính Ngài cho chúng ta.
Chúng ta cũng phải yêu sự khốn cùng của người khác như Đức Giêsu yêu nó. Phải thấy họ bằng đôi mắt đầy lòng thương xót của Ngài. Thế nhưng, sẽ không thể động lòng thương xót thật sự trước người khác nếu chúng ta không sẵn lòng chấp nhận những điều đáng tiếc và đón nhận sự tha thứ tội lỗi của chính mình.
Chúng ta sẽ thật sự không biết làm thế nào để có thể tha thứ cho đến khi biết được thứ tha là gì. Vì thế, hãy vui mừng khi chúng ta có thể được tha thứ bởi anh em. Chính sự tha thứ cho nhau làm cho tình yêu của Đức Giêsu dành cho chúng ta được thể hiện trong đời sống mình, vì khi tha thứ cho nhau, chúng ta đối xử với nhau như Ngài đối xử với chúng ta. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1465:The Empty Boat
He who rules men lives in confusion;
He who is ruled by men lives in sorrow.
Yao therefore desired
Neither to influence others
Nor to be influenced by them.
The way to get clear of confusion
And free of sorrow
Is to live with Tao
In the land of the great Void.
If a man is crossing a river
And an empty boat collides with his own skiff,
Even though he be a bad-tempered man
He will not become very angry.
But if he sees a man in the boat,
He will shout at him to steer clear.
If the shout is not heard, he will shout again,
And yet again, and begin cursing.
And all because there is somebody in the boat.
Yet if the boat were empty.
He would not be shouting, and not angry.
If you can empty your own boat
Crossing the river of the world,
No one will oppose you,
No one will seek to harm you.
The straight tree is the first to be cut down,
The spring of clear water is the first to be drained dry.
If you wish to improve your wisdom
And shame the ignorant,
To cultivate your character
And outshine others;
A light will shine around you
As if you had swallowed the sun and the moon:
You will not avoid calamity.
A wise man has said:
"He who is content with himself
Has done a worthless work.
Achievement is the beginning of failure.
Fame is beginning of disgrace."
Who can free himself from achievement
And from fame, descend and be lost
Amid the masses of men?
He will flow like Tao, unseen,
He will go about like Life itself
With no name and no home.
Simple is he, without distinction.
To all appearances he is a fool.
His steps leave no trace. He has no power.
He achieves nothing, has no reputation.
Since he judges no one
No one judges him.
Such is the perfect man:
His boat is empty. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1466:Keng's Disciple
The disciple: "When I don't know people treat me like a fool.
When I do know, the knowledge gets me into trouble.
When I fail to do good. I hurt others.
When I do good, I hurt myself.
If I avoid my duty, I am remiss,
But if I do it, I am ruined.
How can I get out of these contradictions?
This is what I came to ask you."
". . . .You are trying to sound
The middle of the ocean
With a six-foot pole.
You have got lost and are trying
To find your way back
To your own true self.
You find nothing
But illegible signposts
Pointing in all directions.
I pity you."
The disciple asked for admittance,
Took a cell, and there
Meditated,
Trying to cultivate qualities
He thought desirable
And get rid of others
Which he disliked.
Ten days of that!
Despair!
". . . Do not try
To hold on to Tao -
Just hope that Tao
Will keep hold of you!"
". . . You want the first elements?
The infant has them.
Free from care, unaware of self,
He acts without reflection,
Stays where he is put, does not know why,
Does not figure things out,
Just goes along with them,
Is part of the current.
These are the first elements!"
The disciple asked:
Is this perfection?
Lao replied: "Not at all.
It is only the beginning.
This melts the ice.
This enables you
To unlearn,
So that you can be led by Tao,
Be a child of Tao
If you persist in trying
To attain what is never attained
(It is Tao's gift!)
If you persist in making effort
To obtain what effort cannot get;
If you persist in reasoning
About what cannot be understood,
You will be destroyed
By the very thing you seek.
To know when to stop to know
When you can get no further
By your own action,
This is the right beginning! ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1467:Giữa lòng biết ơn và sự vô ơn, không có tính trung lập. Những kẻ không biết ơn thì sớm bắt đầu phàn nàn về mọi thứ. Ai không yêu mến, sẽ ghét bỏ. Trong đời sống thiêng liêng, không có chuyện dửng dưng như thế trước việc yêu hay ghét. Đó là lý do tại sao sự lãnh đạm (vốn dường như là dửng dưng) thì rất đáng ghét. Đó là sự ghét bỏ được trá hình như thể yêu thương.
Sự lãnh đạm mà trong đó linh hồn không “nóng cũng không lạnh” – không rõ yêu hay ghét – một tình trạng mà trong đó, người ta khước từ Thiên Chúa và khước từ ý muốn của Ngài đang khi bên ngoài, vẫn duy trì một sự giả vờ yêu mến Ngài để tránh khỏi những rối rắm và cứu lấy lòng tự trọng tưởng nghĩ đang có nơi mình. Đó là điều mà những ai có thói vô ơn trước những ân huệ của Thiên Chúa sớm đạt tới. Một người vốn thực sự muốn đáp trả lòng nhân lành của Thiên Chúa và hiểu biết tất cả những gì mình đã lãnh nhận không thể là một Kitô hữu hai lòng. Lòng biết ơn đích thực và sự giả hình không thể cùng nhau tồn tại. Chúng hoàn toàn không hợp nhau. Chính lòng biết ơn tự nó làm cho chúng ta chân thành – bằng không, đó chẳng phải là lòng biết ơn thật sự.
Tuy vậy, lòng biết ơn vượt hẳn một thao luyện tinh thần, hơn cả một công thức từ ngữ. Chúng ta không thể hài lòng ghi nhận trong trí những điều Thiên Chúa đã làm cho mình và rồi cám ơn Ngài chiếu lệ vì những ân huệ đã nhận lãnh.
Biết ơn là thừa nhận tình yêu Thiên Chúa trong mọi sự Ngài ban – và Ngài đã ban cho chúng ta mọi sự. Mọi hơi thở chúng ta hưởng nhận là một quà tặng của tình yêu Thiên Chúa, mọi khoảnh khắc tồn tại là một ân sủng, vì nó mang theo vô vàn ân sủng từ Ngài. Lòng biết ơn vì thế, không xem điều gì là hiển nhiên, không bao giờ không đáp trả, luôn tỉnh thức trước những kỳ công mới và ngợi khen lòng nhân lành của Thiên Chúa. Vì người biết ơn biết rằng, Thiên Chúa tốt lành, không phải qua tin đồn nhưng qua trải nghiệm. Và đó là điều tạo nên sự độc đáo, khác biệt hoàn toàn. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1468:The Active Life
If an expert does not have some problem to vex him,
he is unhappy!
If a philosopher's teaching is never attacked, she pines
away!
If critics have no one on whom to exercise their spite,
they are unhappy.
All such people are prisoners in the world of objects.
He who wants followers, seeks political power.
She who wants reputation, holds an office.
The strong man looks for weights to lift.
The brave woman looks for an emergency in which she
can show bravery.
The swordsman wants a battle in which he can swing
his sword.
People past their prime prefer a dignified retirement,
in which they may seem profound.
People experienced in law seek difficult cases to extend
the application of the laws.
Liturgists and musicians like festivals in which they
parade their ceremonious talents.
The benevolent, the dutiful, are always looking for
chances to display virtue.
Where would the gardener be if there were no more
weeds?
What would become of business without a market of
fools?
Where would the masses be if there were no pretext
for getting jammed together and making noise?
What would become of labor if there were no superfluous objects to
be made?
Produce! Get results! Make money! Make friends!
Make changes!
Or you will die of despair!
Those who are caught in the machinery of power take no joy except
in activity and change--the whirring of the machine! Whenever an
occasion for action presents itself, they are compelled to act; they
cannot help themselves. They are inexorably moved, like the ma-
chine of which they are a part. Prisoners in the world of objects,
they have no choice but to submit to the demands of matter! They
are pressed down and crushed by external forces, fashion, the mar-
ket, events, public opinion. Never in a whole lifetime do they re-
cover their right mind! The active life! What a pity! ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1469:Prince Wen Hui’s cook
Was cutting up an ox.
Out went a hand,
Down went a shoulder,
He planted a foot,
He pressed with a knee,
The ox fell apart
With a whisper,
The bright cleaver murmured
Like a gentle wind.
Rhythm! Timing!
Like a sacred dance,
Like “The Mulberry Grove,”
Like ancient harmonies!
“Good work!” the Prince exclaimed,
“Your method is faultless!”
“Method?” said the cook
Laying aside his cleaver,
“What I follow is Tao
Beyond all methods!”
“When I first began
To cut up an oxen
I would see before me
The whole ox
All in one mass.
“After three years
I no longer saw this mass.
I saw the distinctions.
“But now, I see nothing
With the eye. My whole being
Apprehends.
My senses are idle. The spirit
Free to work without plan
Follows its own instinct
Guided by natural line,
By the secret opening, the hidden space,
My cleaver finds its own way.
I cut through no joint, chop no bone.
A good cook needs a new chopper
Once a year–he cuts.
A poor cook needs a new one
Every month–he hacks!
“I have used this same cleaver
Nineteen years.
It has cut up
A thousand oxen.
Its edge is as keen
As if newly sharpened.
“There are spaces in the joints;
The blade is thin and keen:
When this thinness
Finds that space
There is all the room you need!
It goes like a breeze!
Hence I have this cleaver nineteen years
As if newly sharpened!
“True, there are sometimes
Tough joints. I feel them coming,
I slow down, I watch closely,
Hold back, barely move the blade,
And whump! the part falls away
Landing like a clod of earth.
“Then I withdraw the blade,
I stand still
And let the joy of the work
Sink in.
I clean the blade
And put it away.”
Prince Wan Hui said,
“This is it! My cook has shown me
How I ought to live
My own life!”
Chuang Tzu, The Way of Chuang Tzu, translated by Thomas Merton ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1470:Eventually, I developed my own image of teh "befriending" impulse behind my depression. Imagine that from early in my life, a friendly figure, standing a block away, was trying to get my attention by shouting my name, wanting to teach me some hard but healing truths about myself. But I-- fearful of what I might hear or arrogantly trying to live wihtout help or simply too busy with my ideas and ego and ethics to bother-- ignored teh shouts and walked away.
So this figure, still with friendly intent, came closer and shouted more loudly, but AI kept walking. Ever closer it came, close enough to tap me on the shoulder, but I walked on. Frustrated by my unresponsiveness, the figure threw stones at my back, then struck me with a stick, still wanting simply to get my attention. But despite teh pain, I kept walking away.
Over teh years, teh befriending intent of this figure never disapppeared but became obscured by the frustration cuased by my refusal to turn around. Since shouts and taps, stones and sticks had failed to do the trick, there was only one thing left: drop the nuclear bomb called depression on me, not with the intent to kill but as a last-ditch effort to get me to turn and ask the simple question, "What do you want?" When I was finally able to make the turn-- and start to absorb and act on the self-knowledge that then became available to me-- I began to get well.
The figure calling to me all those years was, I believe, what Thomas Merton calls "true self." This is not the ego self that wants to inflate us (or deflate us, another from of self-distortion), not the intellectual self that wants to hover above the mess of life in clear but ungrounded ideas, not the ethical self that wants to live by some abstract moral code. It is the self-planted in us by the God who made us in God's own image-- the self that wants nothing more, or less, than for us to be who we were created to be.
True self is true friend. One ignores or rejects such friendship only at one's peril. ~ Parker J Palmer,#NFDB
1471:First of all, let us not all be too glib in our statements about the will of God. God’s will is a profound and holy mystery, and the fact that we live our everyday lives engulfed in this mystery should not lead us to underestimate its holiness. We dwell in the will of God as in a sanctuary. His will is the cloud of darkness that surrounds His immediate presence. It is the mystery in which His divine life and our created life become “one spirit,” since, as St. Paul says, “Those who are joined to the Lord are one spirit” (I Corinthians 6: 17).
There are religious men who have become so familiar with the concept of God’s will that their familiarity has bred an apparent contempt. It has made them forget that God’s will is more than a concept. It is a terrible and transcendent reality, a secret power which is given to us, from moment to moment, to be the life of our life and the soul of our own soul’s life. It is the living flame of God’s own Spirit, in Whom our own soul’s flame can play, if it wills, like a mysterious angel. God’s will is not an abstraction, not a machine, not an esoteric system. It is a living concrete reality in the lives of men, and our souls are created to burn as flames within His flame. The will of the Lord is not a static center drawing our souls blindly toward itself. It is a creative power, working everywhere, giving life and being and direction to all things, and above all forming and creating, in the midst of an old creation, a whole new world which is called the Kingdom of God. What we call the “will of God” is the movement of His love and wisdom, ordering and governing all free and necessary agents, moving movers and causing causes driving drivers and ruling those who rule, so that even those who resist Him carry out His will without realizing that they are doing so In all His acts God orders all things whether good or evil for the good of those who know Him and seek Him and who strive to bring their own freedom under obedience to His divine purpose All that is done by the will of God in secret is done for His glory and for the good of those whom He has chosen to share in His glory! ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1472:Justify my soul, O God, but also from Your fountains fill my will with fire. Shine in my mind, although perhaps this means “be darkness to my experience,” but occupy my heart with Your tremendous Life. Let my eyes see nothing in the world but Your glory, and let my hands touch nothing that is not for Your service. Let my tongue taste no bread that does not strengthen me to praise Your great mercy. I will hear Your voice and I will hear all harmonies You have created, singing Your hymns. Sheep’s wool and cotton from the field shall warm me enough that I may live in Your service; I will give the rest to Your poor. Let me use all things for one sole reason: to find my joy in giving You glory. Therefore keep me, above all things, from sin. Keep me from the death of deadly sin which puts hell in my soul. Keep me from the murder of lust that blinds and poisons my heart. Keep me from the sins that eat a man’s flesh with irresistible fire until he is devoured. Keep me from loving money in which is hatred, from avarice and ambition that suffocate my life. Keep me from the dead works of vanity and the thankless labor in which artists destroy themselves for pride and money and reputation, and saints are smothered under the avalanche of their own importunate zeal. Stanch in me the rank wound of covetousness and the hungers that exhaust my nature with their bleeding. Stamp out the serpent envy that stings love with poison and kills all joy. Untie my hands and deliver my heart from sloth. Set me free from the laziness that goes about disguised as activity when activity is not required of me, and from the cowardice that does what is not demanded, in order to escape sacrifice. But give me the strength that waits upon You in silence and peace. Give me humility in which alone is rest, and deliver me from pride which is the heaviest of burdens. And possess my whole heart and soul with the simplicity of love. Occupy my whole life with the one thought and the one desire of love, that I may love not for the sake of merit, not for the sake of perfection, not for the sake of virtue, not for the sake of sanctity, but for You alone. For there is only one thing that can satisfy love and reward it, and that is You alone. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1473:Yet there can never be happiness in compulsion. It is not enough for love to be shared: it must be shared freely. That is to say it must be given, not merely taken. Unselfish love that is poured out upon a selfish object does not bring perfect happiness: not because love requires a return or a reward for loving, but because it rests in the happiness of the beloved. And if the one loved receives love selfishly, the lover is not satisfied. He sees that his love has failed to make the beloved happy. It has not awakened his capacity for unselfish love. Hence the paradox that unselfish love cannot rest perfectly except in a love that is perfectly reciprocated: because it knows that the only true peace is found in selfless love. Selfless love consents to be loved selflessly for the sake of the beloved. In so doing, it perfects itself. The gift of love is the gift of the power and the capacity to love, and, therefore, to give love with full effect is also to receive it. So, love can only be kept by being given away, and it can only be given perfectly when it is also received. 2. Love not only prefers the good of another to my own, but it does not even compare the two. It has only one good, that of the beloved, which is, at the same time, my own. Love shares the good with another not by dividing it with him, but by identifying itself with him so that his good becomes my own. The same good is enjoyed in its wholeness by two in one spirit, not halved and shared by two souls. Where love is really disinterested, the lover does not even stop to inquire whether he can safely appropriate for himself some part of the good which he wills for his friend. Love seeks its whole good in the good of the beloved, and to divide that good would be to diminish love. Such a division would not only weaken the action of love, but in doing so would also diminish its joy. For love does not seek a joy that follows from its effect: its joy is in the effect itself, which is the good of the beloved. Consequently, if my love be pure I do not even have to seek for myself the satisfaction of loving. Love seeks one thing only: the good of the one loved. It leaves all the other secondary effects to take care of themselves. Love, therefore, is its own reward. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1474:1 Each one shall sit at table with his own cup and spoon, and with his own repentance. Each one's own business shall be his most important affair, and provide his own remedies. They have neglected bowl and plate. Have you a wooden fork? Yes, each monk has a wooden fork as well as a potato. 2 Each one shall wipe away tears with his own saint, when three bells hold in store a hot afternoon. Each one is supposed to mind his own heart, with its conscience, night and morning. Another turn on the wheel: ho hum! And observe the Abbot! Time to go to bed in a straw blanket. 3 Plenty of bread for everyone between prayers and the psalter: will you recite another? Merci, and Miserere. Always mind both the clock and the Abbot until eternity. Miserere. 4 Details of the Rule are all liquid and solid. What canon was the first to announce regimentation before us? Mind the step on the way down! Yes, I dare say you are right, Father. I believe you; I believe you. I believe it is easier when they have ice water and even a lemon. Each one can sit at table with his own lemon, and mind his own conscience. 5 Can we agree that the part about the lemon is regular? In any case, it is better to have sheep than peacocks, and cows rather than a chained leopard says Modest, in one of his proverbs. The monastery, being owner of a communal rowboat, is the antechamber of heaven. Surely that ought to be enough. 6 Each one can have some rain after Vespers on a hot afternoon, but ne quid nimis, or the purpose of the Order will be forgotten. We shall send you hyacinths and a sweet millennium. Everything the monastery provides is very pleasant to see and to sell for nothing. What is baked smells fine. There is a sign of God on every leaf that nobody sees in the garden. The fruit trees are there on purpose, even when no one is looking. Just put the apples in the basket. In Kentucky there is also room for a little cheese. Each one shall fold his own napkin, and neglect the others. 7 Rain is always very silent in the night, under such gentle cathedrals. Yes, I have taken care of the lamp, Miserere. Have you a patron saint, and an angel? Thank you. Even though the nights are never dangerous, I have one of everything. [1499.jpg] -- from Selected Poems of Thomas Merton, by Thomas Merton
~ Thomas Merton, A Practical Program for Monks
,#NFDB
1475:When we speak of God’s will, we are usually speaking only of some recognizable sign of His will. The signpost that points to a distant city is not the city itself, and sometimes the signs that point to a great place are in themselves insignificant and contemptible. But we must follow the direction of the signpost if we are to get to the end of our journey.
Everything that exists and everything that happens bears witness to the will of God. It is one thing to see a sign and another thing to interpret that sign correctly. However, our first duty is to recognize signs for what they are. If we do not even regard them as indications of anything beyond themselves, we will not try to interpret them.
Of all the things and all the happenings that proclaim God’s will to the world, only very few are capable of being interpreted by men. And of these few, fewer still find a capable interpreter. So that the mystery of God’s will is made doubly mysterious by the signs that veil it from our eyes. To know anything at all of God’s will we have to participate, in some manner, in the vision of the prophets: men who were always alive to the divine light concealed in the opacity of things and events, and who sometimes saw glimpses of that light where other men saw nothing but ordinary happenings.
And yet if we are too anxious to pry into the mystery that surrounds us we will lose the prophet’s reverence and exchange it for the impertinence of soothsayers. We must be silent in the presence of signs whose meaning is closed to us. Otherwise we will begin incontinently to place our own superstitious interpretation upon everything— the number of steps to a doorway, a card pulled out of the pack, the shadow of a ladder, the flight of birds. God’s will is not so cheap a mystery that it can be unlocked by any key like these!
Nevertheless, there are some signs that everyone must know. They must be easily read and seen, and they are indeed very simple. But they come sparingly, few in number; they show us clearly enough the road ahead but not for more than a few paces. When we have taken those few paces, what will happen? We must learn to be poor in our dependence on these clear signs, to take them as they come, not to demand more of them than we need, not to make more of them than they really tell.
If I am to know the will of God, I must have the right attitude toward life. I must first of all know what life is, and to know the purpose of my existence. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1476:Thomas Merton said it was actually dangerous to put the Scriptures in the hands of people whose inner self is not yet sufficiently awakened to encounter the Spirit, because they will try to use God for their own egocentric purposes. (This is why religion is so subject to corruption!) Now, if we are going to talk about conversion and penance, let me apply that to the two major groups that have occupied Western Christianity—Catholics and Protestants. Neither one has really let the Word of God guide their lives.
Catholics need to be converted to giving the Scriptures some actual authority in their lives. Luther wasn’t wrong when he said that most Catholics did not read the Bible. Most Catholics are still not that interested in the Bible. (Historically they did not have the printing press, nor could most people read, so you can’t blame them entirely.) I have been a priest for 42 years now, and I would sadly say that most Catholics would rather hear quotes from saints, Popes, and bishops, the current news, or funny stories, if they are to pay attention. If I quote strongly from the Sermon on the Mount, they are almost throwaway lines. I can see Catholics glaze over because they have never read the New Testament, much less studied it, or been guided by it. I am very sad to have to admit this. It is the Achilles heel of much of the Catholic world, priests included. (The only good thing about it is that they never fight you like Protestants do about Scripture. They are easily duped, and the hierarchy has been able to take advantage of this.)
If Catholics need to be converted, Protestants need to do penance. Their shout of “sola Scriptura” (only Scripture) has left them at the mercy of their own cultures, their own limited education, their own prejudices, and their own selective reading of some texts while avoiding others. Partly as a result, slavery, racism, sexism, classism, xenophobia, and homophobia have lasted authoritatively into our time—by people who claim to love Jesus! I think they need to do penance for what they have often done with the Bible! They largely interpreted the Bible in a very individualistic and otherworldly way. It was “an evacuation plan for the next world” to use Brian McLaren’s phrase—and just for their group. Most of Evangelical Protestantism has no cosmic message, no social message, and little sense of social justice or care for the outsider. Both Catholics and Protestants (Orthodox too!) found a way to do our own thing while posturing friendship with Jesus. ~ Richard Rohr,#NFDB
1477:Those whose love does not transcend the desires of their bodies, generally do not even bother to deceive themselves with good motives. They follow their passions. Since they do not deceive themselves, they are more honest, as well as more miserable, than those who pretend to love on a spiritual plane without realizing that their “unselfishness” is only a deception. 4. Charity is neither weak nor blind. It is essentially prudent, just, temperate, and strong. Unless all the other virtues blend together in charity, our love is not genuine. No one who really wants to love another will consent to love him falsely. If we are going to love others at all, we must make up our minds to love them well. Otherwise our love is a delusion. The first step to unselfish love is the recognition that our love may be deluded. We must first of all purify our love by renouncing the pleasure of loving as an end in itself. As long as pleasure is our end, we will be dishonest with ourselves and with those we love. We will not seek their good, but our own pleasure. 5. It is clear, then, that to love others well we must first love the truth. And since love is a matter of practical and concrete human relations, the truth we must love when we love our brothers is not mere abstract speculation: it is the moral truth that is to be embodied and given life in our own destiny and theirs. This truth is more than the cold perception of an obligation, flowing from moral precepts. The truth we must, love in loving our brothers is the concrete destiny and sanctity that are willed for them by the love of God. One who really loves another is not merely moved by the desire to see him contented and healthy and prosperous in this world. Love cannot be satisfied with anything so incomplete. If I am to love my brother, I must somehow enter deep into the mystery of God’s love for him. I must be moved not only by human sympathy but by that divine sympathy which is revealed to us in Jesus and which enriches our own lives by the outpouring of the Holy Spirit in our hearts. The truth I love in loving my brother cannot be something merely philosophical and abstract. It must be at the same time supernatural and concrete, practical and alive. And I mean these words in no metaphorical sense. The truth I must love in my brother is God Himself, living in him. I must seek the life of the Spirit of God breathing in him. And I can only discern and follow that mysterious life by the action of the same Holy Spirit living and acting in the depths of my own heart. ~ Thomas Merton, #NFDB
1478:I hear You saying to me:
"I will give you what you desire. I will lead you into solitude. I will lead you by the way that you cannot possibly understand, because I want it to be the quickest way.
"Therefore all the things around you will be armed against you, to deny you, to hurt you, to give you pain, and therefore to reduce you to solitude.
"Because of their enmity, you will soon be left alone. They will cast you out and forsake you and reject you and you will be alone.
"Everything that touches you shall burn you, and you will draw your hand away in pain, until you have withdrawn yourself from all things. Then you will be all alone.
"Everything that can be desired will sear you, and brand you with a cautery, and you will fly from it in pain, to be alone. Every created joy will only come to you as pain, and you will die to all joy and be left alone. All the good things that other people love and desire and seek will come to you, but only as murderers to cut you off from the world and its occupations.
"You will be praised, and it will be like burning at the stake. You will be loved, and it will murder your heart and drive you into the desert.
"You will have gifts, and they will break you with their burden. You will have pleasures of prayer, and they will sicken you and you will fly from them.
"And when you have been praised a little and loved a little I will take away all your gifts and all your love and all your praise and you will be utterly forgotten and abandoned and you will be nothing, a dead thing, a rejection. And in that day you shall being to possess the solitude you have so long desired. And your solitude will bear immense fruit in the souls of men you will never see on earth.
"Do not ask when it will be or where it will be or how it will be: On a mountain or in a prison, in a desert or in a concentration camp or in a hospital or at Gethsemani. It does not matter. So do not ask me, because I am not going to tell you. You will not know until you are in it.
"But you shall taste the true solitude of my anguish and my poverty and I shall lead you into the high places of my joy and you shall die in Me and find all things in My mercy which has created you for this end and brought you from Prades to Bermuda to St. Antonin to Oakham to London to Cambridge to Rome to New York to Columbia to Corpus Christi to St. Bonaventure to the Cistercian Abbey of the poor men who labor in Gethsemani:
"That you may become the brother of God and learn to know the Christ of the burnt men. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1479:We are all broken by something. We have all hurt someone and have been hurt. We all share the condition of brokenness even if our brokenness is not equivalent. I desperately wanted mercy for Jimmy Dill and would have done anything to create justice for him, but I couldn’t pretend that his struggle was disconnected from my own. The ways in which I have been hurt—and have hurt others—are different from the ways Jimmy Dill suffered and caused suffering. But our shared brokenness connected us. Paul Farmer, the renowned physician who has spent his life trying to cure the world’s sickest and poorest people, once quoted me something that the writer Thomas Merton said: We are bodies of broken bones. I guess I’d always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we’re fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we’re shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion. We have a choice. We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our best hope for healing. Or we can deny our brokenness, forswear compassion, and, as a result, deny our own humanity. I thought of the guards strapping Jimmy Dill to the gurney that very hour. I thought of the people who would cheer his death and see it as some kind of victory. I realized they were broken people, too, even if they would never admit it. So many of us have become afraid and angry. We’ve become so fearful and vengeful that we’ve thrown away children, discarded the disabled, and sanctioned the imprisonment of the sick and the weak—not because they are a threat to public safety or beyond rehabilitation but because we think it makes us seem tough, less broken. I thought of the victims of violent crime and the survivors of murdered loved ones, and how we’ve pressured them to recycle their pain and anguish and give it back to the offenders we prosecute. I thought of the many ways we’ve legalized vengeful and cruel punishments, how we’ve allowed our victimization to justify the victimization of others. We’ve submitted to the harsh instinct to crush those among us whose brokenness is most visible. But simply punishing the broken—walking away from them or hiding them from sight—only ensures that they remain broken and we do, too. There is no wholeness outside of our reciprocal humanity. ~ Bryan Stevenson, #NFDB
1480:In this matter of monastic tradition, we must carefully distinguish between tradition and convention. In many monasteries there is very little living tradition, and yet the monks think themselves to be traditional. Why? Because they cling to an elaborate set of conventions. Convention and tradition may seem on the surface to be much the same thing. But this superficial resemblance only makes conventionalism all the more harmful. In actual fact, conventions are the death of real tradition as they are of all real life. They are parasites which attach themselves to the living organism of tradition and devour all its reality, turning it into a hollow formality.
Tradition is living and active, but convention is passive and dead. Tradition does not form us automatically: we have to work to understand it. Convention is accepted passively, as a matter of routine. Therefore convention easily becomes an evasion of reality. It offers us only pretended ways of solving the problems of living— a system of gestures and formalities. Tradition really teaches us to live and shows us how to take full responsibility for our own lives. Thus tradition is often flatly opposed to what is ordinary, to what is mere routine. But convention, which is a mere repetition of familiar routines, follows the line of least resistance. One goes through an act, without trying to understand the meaning of it all, merely because everyone else does the same. Tradition, which is always old, is at the same time ever new because it is always reviving - born again in each new generation, to be lived and applied in a new and particular way. Convention is simply the ossification of social customs. The activities of conventional people are merely excuses for not acting in a more integrally human way. Tradition nourishes the life of the spirit: convention merely disguises its interior decay.
Finally, tradition is creative. Always original, it always opens out new horizons for an old journey. Convention, on the other hand, is completely unoriginal. It is slavish imitation. It is closed in upon itself and leads to complete sterility.
Tradition teaches us how to love, because it develops and expands our powers, and shows us how to give ourselves to the world in which we live, in return for all that we have received from it. Convention breeds nothing but anxiety and fear. It cuts us off from the sources of all inspiration. It ruins our productivity. It locks us up within a prison of frustrated effort. It is, in the end, only the mask for futility and for despair. Nothing could be better than for a monk to live and grow up in his monastic tradition, and nothing could be more fatal than for him to spend his life tangled in a web of monastic conventions. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1481:Now, in Scribner's window, I saw a book called The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy. I went inside, and took it off the shelf, and looked at the table of contents and at the title page which was deceptive, because it said the book was made up of a series of lectures that had been given at the University of Aberdeen. That was no recommendation, to me especially. But it threw me off the track as to the possible identity and character of Etienne Gilson, who wrote the book.
I bought it, then, together with one other book that I have completely forgotten, and on my way home in the Long Island train, I unwrapped the package to gloat over my acquisitions. It was only then that I saw, on the first page of The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, the small print which said: "Nihil Obstat ... Imprimatur."
The feeling of disgust and deception struck me like a knife in the pit of the stomach. I felt as if I had been cheated! They should have warned me that it was a Catholic book! Then I would never have bought it. As it was, I was tempted to throw the thing out the window at the houses of Woodside -- to get rid of it as something dangerous and unclean. Such is the terror that is aroused in the enlightened modern mind by a little innocent Latin and the signature of a priest. It is impossible to communicate, to a Catholic, the number and complexity of fearful associations that a little thing like this can carry with it. It is in Latin -- a difficult, ancient and obscure tongue. That implies, to the mind that has roots in Protestantism, all kinds of sinister secrets, which the priests are supposed to cherish and to conceal from common men in this unknown language. Then, the mere fact that they should pass judgement on the character of a book, and permit people to read it: that in itself is fraught with terror. It immediately conjures up all the real and imaginary excesses of the Inquisition.
That is something of what I felt when I opened Gilson's book: for you must understand that while I admired Catholic culture, I had always been afraid of the Catholic Church. That is a rather common position in the world today. After all, I had not bought a book on medieval philosophy without realizing that it would be Catholic philosophy: but the imprimatur told me that what I read would be in full conformity with that fearsome and mysterious thing, Catholic Dogma, and the fact struck me with an impact against which everything in me reacted with repugnance and fear.
Now, in light of all this, I consider that it was surely a real grace that, instead of getting rid of the book, I actually read it. The result was that I at once acquired an immense respect for Catholic philosophy and for the Catholic faith. And that last thing was the most important of all. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1482:Perfect Joy (excerpts)
Is there to be found on earth a fullness of joy, or is there no such thing?
. . . What the world values is money, reputation, long life, achievement. What it counts as joy is health and comfort of body, good food, fine clothes, beautiful things to look at, pleasant music to listen to.
What it condemns is lack of money, a low social rank, a reputation for being no good, and an early death.
What it considers misfortune is bodily discomfort and labour, no chance to get your fill of good food, not having good clothes to wear, having no way to amuse or delight the eye, no pleasant music to listen to. If people find that they are deprived of these things, they go into a panic or fall into despair. They are so concerned for their life that their anxiety makes life unbearable, even when they have the things they think they want. Their very concern for enjoyment makes them unhappy.
. . . I cannot tell if what the world considers "happiness" is happiness or not. All I know is that when I consider the way they go about attaining it, I see them carried away headlong, grim and obsessed, in the general onrush of the human herd, unable to stop themselves or to change their direction. All the while they claim to be just on the point of attaining happiness.
. . . My opinion is that you never find happiness until you stop looking for it. My greatest happiness consists precisely in doing nothing whatever that is calculated to obtain happiness: and this, in the minds of most people, is the worst possible course.
I will hold to the saying that:"Perfect Joy is to be without joy. Perfect praise is to be without praise."
If you ask "what ought to be done" and "what ought not to be done" on earth in order to produce happiness, I answer that these questions do not have an answer. There is no way of determining such things.
Yet at the same time, if I cease striving for happiness, the "right" and the "wrong" at once become apparent all by themselves.
Contentment and well-being at once become possible the moment you cease to act with them in view, and if you practice non-doing (wu wei), you will have both happiness and well-being.
Here is how I sum it up:
Heaven does nothing: its non-doing is its serenity.
Earth does nothing: its non-doing is its rest.
From the union of these two non-doings
All actions proceed,
All things are made.
How vast, how invisible
This coming-to-be!
All things come from nowhere!
How vast, how invisible -
No way to explain it!
All beings in their perfection
Are born of non-doing.
Hence it is said:
"Heaven and earth do nothing
Yet there is nothing they do not do."
Where is the man who can attain
To this non-doing? ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1483:Kitô hữu là người không sống cho mình, Kitô hữu ra khỏi chính mình hoàn toàn nhưng sống trong Đức Kitô – người đó sống trong niềm tin và tình yêu cứu rỗi của Ngài, Đấng yêu thương con người và vì con người, Ngài đã chết. Trên hết mọi sự, người đó sống trong niềm hy vọng vào thế giới mai ngày.
Hy vọng là bí quyết của một đời sống khổ hạnh chân thực. Hy vọng từ chối những ước muốn và phán đoán riêng tư của chính mình, đồng thời loại bỏ thế giới trong hiện trạng của nó, không phải vì thế giới hay chính con người chúng ta xấu xa, nhưng bởi chúng ta không ở trong một điều kiện để sử dụng tốt nhất điều thiện của chính mình hay của thế gian. Tuy nhiên, chúng ta hoan hỷ trong hy vọng, tận hưởng các thọ tạo trong hy vọng. Chúng ta tận hưởng chúng không phải như chúng ở trong chính mình nhưng như chúng trong Đức Kitô – đầy hứa hẹn. Vì sự tốt lành của mọi thọ tạo là bằng chứng sự tốt lành của Thiên Chúa và sự tốt lành của Ngài là một bảo đảm cho lòng trung thành của Ngài với những gì Ngài hứa. Ngài hứa ban cho chúng ta một trời mới đất mới, một đời sống được phục sinh trong Đức Kitô. Mọi sự từ bỏ chính mình nếu không hoàn toàn bị nắm bắt do lời hứa của Ngài sẽ thiếu mất tính Kitô.
Lạy Chúa của con, con thật vô vọng ngoài niềm hy vọng vào thánh giá Chúa. Nhờ sự khiêm hạ, những khổ đau và cái chết của Chúa, Chúa đã giải thoát con khỏi mọi hy vọng hão huyền. Chúa đã tiêu diệt tính hư ảo của cuộc sống hiện tại nơi chính bản thân và đã ban cho con tất cả những gì là vĩnh cửu khi Ngài chỗi dậy từ cõi chết.
Tại sao con muốn trở nên giàu có khi Ngài đã nên nghèo khó? Tại sao con muốn trở nên nổi tiếng và quyền lực trong mắt người đời khi con cháu của những kẻ tâng bốc các tiên tri giả ném đá những tiên tri thực chối từ Ngài và đóng đinh Ngài vào thập giá? Tại sao con phải ôm ấp trong lòng niềm hy vọng vốn đang huỷ hoại đời con – hy vọng vào hạnh phúc trọn vẹn ở đời này – một kiểu hy vọng như thế tất phải vỡ mộng, vô nghĩa và chỉ có thất vọng?
Hy vọng của con ở nơi những gì mắt thường không bao giờ nhìn thấy; vì thế, đừng để con tin vào những phần thưởng hữu hình đời này. Hy vọng của con ở nơi những gì tâm hồn người đời không thể cảm nhận; vì thế, đừng để con tin vào những tình cảm của con tim. Hy vọng của con ở nơi những gì tay con người không bao giờ chạm thấu; vì thế, đừng để con tin vào những gì giữa những ngón tay mà con có thể nắm lấy. Cái chết sẽ nới lỏng sự giữ chặt của con và niềm hy vọng vô hiệu ấy sẽ tan bay.
Hãy để niềm tin của con náu ẩn trong lòng thương xót của Ngài, chứ không phải trong chính con. Hãy để hy vọng của con cư ngụ trong tình yêu của Ngài, chứ không phải ở sức khoẻ, sức mạnh, khả năng hoặc những kế sách của con người.
Nếu con tin tưởng Ngài, mọi sự sẽ trở nên sức mạnh, sức khoẻ và nguồn đỡ nâng cho con, mọi sự sẽ mang con đến tận quê trời. Nếu con không tin vào Ngài, mọi sự sẽ trở nên huỷ diệt đối với con. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1484:Chỉ trong sa mạc, bạn mới gặp được Thiên Chúa.
Không tai họa nào trong đời sống thiêng liêng lớn hơn tai họa bị nhấn chìm trong tính vô thực, nghĩa là trong cái không có thực, phi thực tế; bởi lẽ, cuộc sống mỗi người được duy trì và được nuôi dưỡng bên trong bởi những mối tương quan sống của chúng ta với những thực tại bên ngoài và bên trên chính mình. Khi đời sống được nuôi bằng cái vô thực, nó phải ngắc ngoải vì đói; vì thế, nó phải chết. Không sự khốn cùng nào lớn hơn bằng việc nhầm lẫn cái chết vô bổ này với “cái chết” thực, đầy hy sinh và mang lại hoa trái mà nhờ đó, chúng ta bước vào cuộc sống.
Cái chết mà nhờ đó, chúng ta bước vào đời sống mới không phải là sự chạy trốn thực tại nhưng là một quà tặng toàn vẹn của chính mình vốn bao gồm việc dấn thân hoàn toàn vào thực tại. Cái chết này khởi đầu bằng việc từ bỏ những thực tại hão huyền mà tạo vật đạt được khi chúng chỉ được nhìn thấy trong tương quan với những mối bận tâm lo cho chính mình nơi chúng ta.
Trước khi có thể thấy những vật tạo thành (đặc biệt vật chất) là vô thực, chúng ta phải thấy rõ ràng chúng là thực.
Vì tính “vô thực” của vật chất chỉ liên quan đến thực tại lớn hơn của những gì thuộc tinh thần.
Chúng ta bắt đầu việc từ bỏ của mình đối với các thọ tạo bằng cách lùi xa và nhìn chúng tự chính bản chất của chúng. Bằng cách đó, chúng ta nhìn xuyên suốt thực tại, thực tế, và sự thật của chúng vốn không thể khám phá cho đến khi chúng ta gạt chúng ra khỏi chính mình và lùi lại để chúng được nhìn theo luật gần xa. Chúng ta không thể nhìn xem sự vật theo luật gần xa khi chúng ta cứ khư khư ghì chặt chúng. Từ bỏ chúng, chúng ta mới bắt đầu hiểu rõ giá trị của chúng như chúng thực sự. Chỉ khi đó, chúng ta mới bắt đầu thấy Thiên Chúa trong chúng. Không đợi cho tới khi tìm thấy Ngài trong chúng, chúng ta mới có thể khởi hành trên con đường chiêm niệm tăm tối mà ở mút cùng của nó, chúng ta sẽ có thể thấy chúng trong Ngài.
Các Đan Phụ Sa Mạc tin rằng, chốn hoang dã được tạo nên có giá trị tột bật trong cái nhìn của Thiên Chúa một cách chính xác, bởi nó không có giá trị nào đối với con người. Vùng đất hoang là vùng đất mà con người không bao giờ có thể lãng phí bởi nó không mang lại cho nó một thứ gì cả. Không gì hấp dẫn họ, không có gì để họ khai thác. Sa mạc là nơi mà trong đó, dân được chọn đã lang thang bốn mươi năm chỉ được chăm sóc bởi một mình Thiên Chúa. Họ có thể đến Đất Hứa trong vòng vài tháng nếu trực tiếp đi đến đó. Kế hoạch của Thiên Chúa lại khác, họ phải học biết cách yêu mến Ngài trong hoang mạc và phải luôn nhìn lại thời gian trong sa mạc như là thời gian điền viên của đời họ với một mình Ngài.
Sa mạc được tạo thành một cách đơn sơ để trở nên chính nó, không phải để được con người chuyển đổi thành một cái gì khác. Núi non và biển khơi cũng vậy. Vì thế, sa mạc là nơi định cư hợp lý cho những ai không tìm kiếm điều gì ngoại trừ chính mình – nghĩa là một thọ tạo đơn độc, nghèo khó và không phụ thuộc vào ai ngoài một mình Thiên Chúa, nghĩa là không có một công trình nào đứng giữa chính nó và Đấng Tạo Thành nó. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1485:Chỉ trong sa mạc, bạn mới gặp được Thiên Chúa.
Không tai họa nào trong đời sống thiêng liêng lớn hơn tai họa bị nhấn chìm trong tính vô thực, nghĩa là trong cái không có thực, phi thực tế; bởi lẽ, cuộc sống mỗi người được duy trì và được nuôi dưỡng bên trong bởi nh���ng mối tương quan sống của chúng ta với những thực tại bên ngoài và bên trên chính mình. Khi đời sống được nuôi bằng cái vô thực, nó phải ngắc ngoải vì đói; vì thế, nó phải chết. Không sự khốn cùng nào lớn hơn bằng việc nhầm lẫn cái chết vô bổ này với “cái chết” thực, đầy hy sinh và mang lại hoa trái mà nhờ đó, chúng ta bước vào cuộc sống.
Cái chết mà nhờ đó, chúng ta bước vào đời sống mới không phải là sự chạy trốn thực tại nhưng là một quà tặng toàn vẹn của chính mình vốn bao gồm việc dấn thân hoàn toàn vào thực tại. Cái chết này khởi đầu bằng việc từ bỏ những thực tại hão huyền mà tạo vật đạt được khi chúng chỉ được nhìn thấy trong tương quan với những mối bận tâm lo cho chính mình nơi chúng ta.
Trước khi có thể thấy những vật tạo thành (đặc biệt vật chất) là vô thực, chúng ta phải thấy rõ ràng chúng là thực.
Vì tính “vô thực” của vật chất chỉ liên quan đến thực tại lớn hơn của nh��ng gì thuộc tinh thần.
Chúng ta bắt đầu việc từ bỏ của mình đối với các thọ tạo bằng cách lùi xa và nhìn chúng tự chính bản chất của chúng. Bằng cách đó, chúng ta nhìn xuyên suốt thực tại, thực tế, và sự thật của chúng vốn không thể khám phá cho đến khi chúng ta gạt chúng ra khỏi chính mình và lùi lại để chúng được nhìn theo luật gần xa. Chúng ta không thể nhìn xem sự vật theo luật gần xa khi chúng ta cứ khư khư ghì chặt chúng. Từ bỏ chúng, chúng ta mới bắt đầu hiểu rõ giá trị của chúng như chúng thực sự. Chỉ khi đó, chúng ta mới bắt đầu thấy Thiên Chúa trong chúng. Không đợi cho tới khi tìm thấy Ngài trong chúng, chúng ta mới có thể khởi hành trên con đường chiêm niệm tăm tối mà ở mút cùng của nó, chúng ta sẽ có thể thấy chúng trong Ngài.
Các Đan Phụ Sa Mạc tin rằng, chốn hoang dã được tạo nên có giá trị tột bật trong cái nhìn của Thiên Chúa một cách chính xác, bởi nó không có giá trị nào đối với con người. Vùng đất hoang là vùng đất mà con người không bao giờ có thể lãng phí bởi nó không mang lại cho nó một thứ gì cả. Không gì hấp dẫn họ, không có gì để họ khai thác. Sa mạc là nơi mà trong đó, dân được chọn đã lang thang bốn mươi năm chỉ được chăm sóc bởi một mình Thiên Chúa. Họ có thể đến Đất Hứa trong vòng vài tháng nếu trực tiếp đi đến đó. Kế hoạch của Thiên Chúa lại khác, họ phải học biết cách yêu mến Ngài trong hoang mạc và phải luôn nhìn lại thời gian trong sa mạc như là thời gian điền viên của đời họ với một mình Ngài.
Sa mạc được tạo thành một cách đơn sơ để trở nên chính nó, không phải để được con người chuyển đổi thành một cái gì khác. Núi non và biển khơi cũng vậy. Vì thế, sa mạc là nơi định cư hợp lý cho những ai không tìm kiếm điều gì ngoại trừ chính mình – nghĩa là một thọ tạo đơn độc, nghèo khó và không phụ thuộc vào ai ngoài một mình Thiên Chúa, nghĩa là không có một công trình nào đứng giữa chính nó và Đấng Tạo Thành nó. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1486:El núcleo del problema racial, tal como yo lo veo, es este: el negro (y también otros grupos raciales, pero el negro sobre
todo) resulta víctima de los conflictos psicológicos y sociales que ahora forman parte de una civilización blanca que teme una disgregación inminente y no tiene una comprensión madura de la realidad de la crisis. La sociedad blanca es pura y simplemente incapaz de aceptar realmente al negro y asimilarle, porque los blancos no pueden hacer frente a sus propios impulsos, no pueden defenderse contra sus propias emociones, que son extremadamente inestables en una sociedad sobreestimulada y rápidamente cambiante.
Para minimizar la sensación de riesgo y desastre siempre latente en sí mismos, los blancos tienen que proyectar sus miedos en algún objeto exterior a ellos mismos. Claro que la Guerra Fría ofrece amplias oportunidades, y cuanto más inseguros están los hombres, en un bando o en otro, más recurren a paranoicas acusaciones de «comunismo» o «imperialismo», según sea el caso. Las acusaciones no carecen de base, pero siguen siendo patológicas.
Aprisionado en este ineludible síndrome queda el negro, que tiene la desgracia de hacerse visible, con su presencia, su desgracia, sus propios conflictos y su propia división, precisamente en el momento en que la sociedad blanca está menos preparada para arreglárselas con un peso extra de riesgo.
¿Cuál es el resultado? Por un lado, la ternura de los «liberales» se precipita, de modo patético pero comprensible, a dar la bienvenida y a conciliar esa pena trágica. Por otro lado, los inseguros se endurecen de modo enconadamente patológico, se tensan las resistencias, y se confirman en el temor y el odio aquellos que (conservadores o no) están decididos a echar la culpa a otro de sus propias deformidades interiores.
La increíble inhumanidad de esta negativa a escuchar por un momento al negro, de algún modo, y de esta decisión de mantenerle oprimido a toda costa, me parece que proporcionará casi con seguridad una situación revolucionaria desesperanzadamente caótica y violenta. Cada vez más, la animosidad,
la suspicacia y el miedo que sienten esos blancos (y que en su raíz sigue siendo un miedo a su propia miseria interior, que probablemente no pueden sentir tal como es) llegan a hacerse una profecía que se cumple a sí misma. El odio del racista blanco al negro (lo repito, odio, porque aún es una palabra muy suave para indicar lo que hay en los corazones de esa agitada gente) se le hace aceptable cuando lo presenta como un odio del negro a los blancos, fomentado y estimulado por el comunismo. ¡La Guerra Fría y los miedos racistas se ensamblan en una sola unidad! ¡Qué sencillo es todo!
Al negro, claramente, se le invita a una sola reacción. Ha tenido innumerables razones para odiar al hombre blanco. Ahora se reúnen y se confirman sólidamente. Aunque no tenga nada que ganar por la violencia, tampoco tiene nada que perder. ¡Y por lo menos la violencia será un modo decisivo de decir lo que piensa de la sociedad blanca!
El resultado, sin duda, será muy desagradable, y la culpa caerá de lleno en las espaldas de la América blanca, con su inmadurez emocional, cultural y política, y su lamentable negativa a comprender. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1487:Vào một thời đại khi chính thể chuyên chế thao túng mọi cách hầu làm mất giá trị và nhân phẩm, chúng ta tin chắc rằng, tiếng nói của những ai ủng hộ sự tĩnh lặng và tự do bên trong của con người đều cần được lắng nghe.
Tiếng ầm ĩ giết người của chủ nghĩa duy vật nơi chúng ta không được phép dập tắt những tiếng nói vốn sẽ không bao giờ ngưng vang lên: liệu chúng có phải là tiếng nói của các Thánh Kitô Hữu, tiếng nói của những nhà thông thái Phương Đông như Lão Tử hay các Thiền sư, tiếng nói của những người như Thoreau hay Martin Buber, hay Max Picard. Hoàn toàn đúng khi nhấn mạnh rằng, con người là một “con vật xã hội” – sự thật đủ cho thấy. Nhưng đó không phải là lý do để biện hộ cho việc biến con người thành một bánh xe nhỏ trong một guồng máy chuyên chế – hay một bánh xe tôn giáo trước vấn đề đó.
Thật ra, sự tồn tại của một xã hội tuỳ thuộc vào sự trầm lắng riêng tư bất khả xâm phạm của các thành viên trong đó. Để xứng đáng với tên gọi của mình, xã hội được cấu thành không phải từ những con số hay những đơn vị máy móc, nhưng bởi những nhân vị. Việc trở thành một nhân vị bao hàm trách nhiệm và tự do. Cả hai điều này lại muốn nói đến một sự tĩnh lặng bên trong nào đó, một ý thức về sự chính trực cá nhân, ý thức về thực tại riêng tư cũng như khả năng của mỗi người để trao ban chính mình cho xã hội – hay để từ chối quà tặng đó.
Bị nhấn chìm hoàn toàn trong một biển người vô danh, bị xô đẩy dồn ép bởi những thế lực vô thức, con người đánh mất nhân tính đích thực, đánh mất sự chính trực, đánh mất khả năng yêu thương và khả năng tự quyết của mình. Khi xã hội được cấu thành bởi những con người vốn không biết sự tĩnh lặng bên trong là gì, xã hội đó không còn được liên kết với nhau bằng tình yêu. Do đó, nó được nối kết với nhau bởi một thứ quyền lực lạm dụng và bạo lực. Khi con người bị cưỡng bách để rồi mất đi sự tĩnh lặng và tự do lẽ ra họ đáng được, thì xã hội trong đó họ đang sống lại trở nên đồi bại, thối rữa bởi sự hèn hạ, căm phẫn và hận thù.
Không khối tiến bộ kỹ thuật nào có thể chữa lành mối thù hằn vốn ăn mòn nhựa sống của một xã hội duy vật tựa hồ căn bệnh ung thư thiêng liêng. Phương pháp trị liệu duy nhất là, và phải luôn luôn là, thiêng liêng. Nói thật nhiều về Thiên Chúa và tình yêu cho con người sẽ trở nên một việc vô bổ nếu họ không có khả năng lắng nghe. Đôi tai mà nhờ đó, người ta lắng nghe thông điệp của Tin Mừng đang ẩn tàng trong tâm hồn con người, và những đôi tai này không nghe bất cứ điều gì trừ phi chúng được ưu đãi với một sự trầm lắng và tĩnh lặng bên trong nào đó.
Nói cách khác, vì đức tin là một vấn đề thuộc tự do và tự quyết – đón nhận nhưng không quà tặng ân sủng được trao ban cách nhưng không – con người không thể chấp nhận một thông điệp thiêng liêng bao lâu tâm hồn và trí óc nó còn là nô lệ của hành động vô ý thức. Con người sẽ luôn là nô lệ chừng nào nó vẫn đắm chìm trong khối những cổ người máy khác, hoặc chừng nào nó không còn tính cá vị hay sự chính trực đúng đắn của mình với tư cách là những nhân vị.
Những gì được nói ở đây về sự cô tịch không chỉ là một giải pháp cho các nhà ẩn tu, nó còn liên quan đến toàn thể tương lai của con người và số phận của thế giới trong đó nó đang sống; và đặc biệt, dĩ nhiên, đến tương lai đời sống tôn giáo của nó. ~ Thomas Merton,#NFDB
1488:My years of struggling against inequality, abusive power, poverty, oppression, and injustice had finally revealed something to me about myself. Being close to suffering, death, executions, and cruel punishments didn't just illuminate the brokenness of others; in a moment of anguish and heartbreak, it also exposed my own brokenness. You can't effectively fight abusive power, poverty, inequality, illness, oppression, or injustice and not be broken by it.
We are all broken by something. We have all hurt someone and have been hurt. We all share the condition of brokenness even if our brokenness is not equivalent. The ways in which I have been hurt - and have hurt others - are different from the ways Jimmy Dill suffered and caused suffering. But our shared brokenness connected us.
Thomas Merton said: We are bodies of broken bones. I guess I'd always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we're fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we're shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion.
We have a choice. We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our best hope for healing. Or we can deny our brokenness, forswear compassion, and, as a result, deny our own humanity.
I thought of the guards strapping Jimmy Dill to the gurney that very hour. I thought of the people who would cheer his death and see it as some kind of victory. I realized they were broken people, too, even if they would never admit it. So many of us have become afraid and angry. We've become so fearful and vengeful that we've thrown away children, discarded the disabled, and sanctioned the imprisonment of the sick and the weak - not because they are a threat to public safety or beyond rehabilitation but because we think it makes us seem tough, less broken. I thought of the victims of violent crime and the survivors of murdered loved ones, and how we've pressured them to recycle their pain and anguish and give it back to the offenders we prosecute. I thought of the many ways we've legalized vengeful and cruel punishments, how we've allowed our victimization to justify the victimization of others. We've submitted to the harsh instinct to crush those among us whose brokenness is most visible.
But simply punishing the broken - walking away from them or hiding them from sight - only ensures that they remain broken and we do, too. There is no wholeness outside of our reciprocal humanity.
I frequently had difficult conversations with clients who were struggling and despairing over their situations - over the things they'd done, or had been done to them, that had led them to painful moments. Whenever things got really bad, and they were questioning the value of their lives, I would remind them that each of us is more than the worst thing we've ever done. I told them that if someone tells a lie, that person is not just a liar. If you take something that doesn't belong to you, you are not just a thief. Even if you kill someone, you're not just a killer. I told myself that evening what I had been telling my clients for years. I am more than broken. In fact, there is a strength, a power even, in understanding brokenness, because embracing our brokenness creates a need and desire for mercy, and perhaps a corresponding need to show mercy. When you experience mercy, you learn things that are hard to learn otherwise. You see things that you can't otherwise see; you hear things you can't otherwise hear. You begin to recognize the humanity that resides in each of us. ~ Bryan Stevenson,#NFDB
13 Poetry
13 Thomas Merton
1.tm - A Messenger from the Horizon, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
Original Language English Look, a naked runner A messenger, Following the wind From budding hills. By sweet sunstroke Wounded and signed, (He is therefore sacred) Silence is his way. Rain is his own Most private weather. Amazement is his star. O stranger, Our early hope Flies fast by, A mute comet, an empty sun. Adam is his name! O primeval angel Virgin brother of astonishment, Born of one word, one bare Inquisitive diamond. O blessed, Invulnerable cry, O unplanned Saturday, O lucky father! Come without warning A friend of hurricanes, Lightning in your bones! We will open to you The sun-door, the noble eye! Open to rain, to somersaulting air, To everything that swims, To skies that wake, Flare and applaud. (It is too late, he flies the other way Wrapping his honesty in rain.) --- Pardon all runners, All speechless, alien winds, All mad waters. Pardon their impulses, Their wild attitudes, Their young flights, their reticence. When a message has no clothes on How can it be spoken. [1499.jpg] -- from Selected Poems of Thomas Merton, by Thomas Merton
1.tm - A Practical Program for Monks, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
Original Language English 1 Each one shall sit at table with his own cup and spoon, and with his own repentance. Each one's own business shall be his most important affair, and provide his own remedies. They have neglected bowl and plate. Have you a wooden fork? Yes, each monk has a wooden fork as well as a potato. 2 Each one shall wipe away tears with his own saint, when three bells hold in store a hot afternoon. Each one is supposed to mind his own heart, with its conscience, night and morning. Another turn on the wheel: ho hum! And observe the Abbot! Time to go to bed in a straw blanket. 3 Plenty of bread for everyone between prayers and the psalter: will you recite another? Merci, and Miserere. Always mind both the clock and the Abbot until eternity. Miserere. 4 Details of the Rule are all liquid and solid. What canon was the first to announce regimentation before us? Mind the step on the way down! Yes, I dare say you are right, Father. I believe you; I believe you. I believe it is easier when they have ice water and even a lemon. Each one can sit at table with his own lemon, and mind his own conscience. 5 Can we agree that the part about the lemon is regular? In any case, it is better to have sheep than peacocks, and cows rather than a chained leopard says Modest, in one of his proverbs. The monastery, being owner of a communal rowboat, is the antechamber of heaven. Surely that ought to be enough. 6 Each one can have some rain after Vespers on a hot afternoon, but ne quid nimis, or the purpose of the Order will be forgotten. We shall send you hyacinths and a sweet millennium. Everything the monastery provides is very pleasant to see and to sell for nothing. What is baked smells fine. There is a sign of God on every leaf that nobody sees in the garden. The fruit trees are there on purpose, even when no one is looking. Just put the apples in the basket. In Kentucky there is also room for a little cheese. Each one shall fold his own napkin, and neglect the others. 7 Rain is always very silent in the night, under such gentle cathedrals. Yes, I have taken care of the lamp, Miserere. Have you a patron saint, and an angel? Thank you. Even though the nights are never dangerous, I have one of everything. [1499.jpg] -- from Selected Poems of Thomas Merton, by Thomas Merton <
1.tm - A Psalm, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
Original Language English When psalms surprise me with their music And antiphons turn to rum The Spirit sings: the bottom drops out of my soul. And from the center of my cellar, Love, louder than thunder Opens a heaven of naked air. New eyes awaken. I send Love's name into the world with wings And songs grow up around me like a jungle. Choirs of all creatures sing the tunes Your Spirit played in Eden. Zebras and antelopes and birds of paradise Shine on the face of the abyss And I am drunk with the great wilderness Of the sixth day in Genesis. But sound is never half so fair As when that music turns to air And the universe dies of excellence. Sun, moon and stars Fall from their heavenly towers. Joys walk no longer down the blue world's shore. Though fires loiter, lights still fly on the air of the gulf, All fear another wind, another thunder: Then one more voice Snuffs all their flares in one gust. And I go forth with no more wine and no more stars And no more buds and no more Eden And no more animals and no more sea: While God sings by himself in acres of night And walls fall down, that guarded Paradise. [1499.jpg] -- from Selected Poems of Thomas Merton, by Thomas Merton <
1.tm - Aubade -- The City, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
Original Language English Now that the clouds have come like cattle To the cold waters of the city's river, All the windows turn their scandalized expression Toward the tide's tin dazzle, And question, with their weak-eyed stare, The riotous sun. From several places at a time Cries of defiance, As delicate as frost, as sharp as glass, Rise from the porcelain buildings And break in the blue sky. Then, falling swiftly from the air, The fragments of this fragile indignation Ring on the echoing streets No louder than a shower of pins. But suddenly the bridges' choiring cables Jangle gently in the wind And play like quiet piano-strings. All down the faces of the buildings Windows begin to close Like figures in a long division. Those whose eyes all night have simulated sleep, Suddenly stare, from where they lie, like wolves, Tied in the tangle of the bedding, And listen for the waking blood To flood the apprehensive silence of their flesh. They fear the heart that now lies quenched may quicken, And start to romp against the rib, Soft and insistent as a secret bell. They also fear the light will grow Into the windows of their hiding places, like a tree Of tropical flowers And put them, one by one, to flight. Then life will have to begin. Pieces of paper, lying in the streets, Will start up, in the twisting wind, And fly like idiot birds before the faces of the crowds. And in the roaring buildings Elevator doors will have begun To clash like sabres. [1499.jpg] -- from Selected Poems of Thomas Merton, by Thomas Merton <
1.tm - Follow my ways and I will lead you, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
Original Language English Follow my ways and I will lead you To golden-haired suns, Logos and music, blameless joys, Innocent of questions And beyond answers. For I, Solitude, am thine own Self: I, Nothingness, am thy All. I, Silence, am thy Amen. [1964.jpg] -- from A Thomas Merton Reader, by Thomas Merton / Edited by Thomas P. McDonnell <
1.tm - In Silence, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
Original Language English Be still. Listen to the stones of the wall. Be silent, they try to speak your name. Listen to the living walls. Who are you? Who are you? Whose silence are you? Who (be quiet) are you (as these stones are quiet). Do not think of what you are still less of what you may one day be. Rather be what you are (but who?) be the unthinkable one you do not know. O be still, while you are still alive, and all things live around you speaking (I do not hear) to your own being, speaking by the unknown that is in you and in themselves. I will try, like them to be my own silence: and this is difficult. The whole world is secretly on fire. The stones burn, even the stones they burn me. How can a man be still or listen to all things burning? How can he dare to sit with them when all their silence is on fire? [bk1sm.gif] -- from The Strange Islands: Poems by Thomas Merton, by Thomas Merton <
1.tm - Night-Flowering Cactus, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
Original Language English I know my time, which is obscure, silent and brief For I am present without warning one night only. When sun rises on the brass valleys I become serpent. Though I show my true self only in the dark and to no man (For I appear by day as serpent) I belong neither to night nor day. Sun and city never see my deep white bell Or know my timeless moment of void: There is no reply to my munificence. When I come I lift my sudden Eucharist Out of the earth's unfathomable joy Clean and total I obey the world's body I am intricate and whole, not art but wrought passion Excellent deep pleasure of essential waters Holiness of form and mineral mirth: I am the extreme purity of virginal thirst. I neither show my truth nor conceal it My innocence is described dimly Only by divine gift As a white cavern without explanation. He who sees my purity Dares not speak of it. When I open once for all my impeccable bell No one questions my silence: The all-knowing bird of night flies out of my mouth. Have you seen it? Then though my mirth has quickly ended You live forever in its echo: You will never be the same again. [1499.jpg] -- from Selected Poems of Thomas Merton, by Thomas Merton <
1.tm - O Sweet Irrational Worship, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
Original Language English Wind and a bobwhite And the afternoon sun. By ceasing to question the sun I have become light, Bird and wind. My leaves sing. I am earth, earth All these lighted things Grow from my heart. A tall, spare pine Stands like the initial of my first Name when I had one. When I had a spirit, When I was on fire When this valley was Made out of fresh air You spoke my name In naming Your silence: O sweet, irrational worship! I am earth, earth My heart's love Bursts with hay and flowers. I am a lake of blue air In which my own appointed place Field and valley Stand reflected. I am earth, earth Out of my grass heart Rises the bobwhite. Out of my nameless weeds His foolish worship. [1499.jpg] -- from Selected Poems of Thomas Merton, by Thomas Merton <
1.tm - Song for Nobody, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
Original Language English A yellow flower (Light and spirit) Sings by itself For nobody. A golden spirit (Light and emptiness) Sings without a word By itself. Let no one touch this gentle sun In whose dark eye Someone is awake. (No light, no gold, no name, no color And no thought: O, wide awake!) A golden heaven Sings by itself A song to nobody. [1499.jpg] -- from Selected Poems of Thomas Merton, by Thomas Merton <
1.tm - Stranger, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
Original Language English When no one listens To the quiet trees When no one notices The sun in the pool. Where no one feels The first drop of rain Or sees the last star Or hails the first morning Of a giant world Where peace begins And rages end: One bird sits still Watching the work of God: One turning leaf, Two falling blossoms, Ten circles upon the pond. One cloud upon the hillside, Two shadows in the valley And the light strikes home. Now dawn commands the capture Of the tallest fortune, The surrender Of no less marvelous prize! Closer and clearer Than any wordy master, Thou inward Stranger Whom I have never seen, Deeper and cleaner Than the clamorous ocean, Seize up my silence Hold me in Thy Hand! Now act is waste And suffering undone Laws become prodigals Limits are torn down For envy has no property And passion is none. Look, the vast Light stands still Our cleanest Light is One! [1962.jpg] -- from The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton, by Thomas Merton <
1.tm - The Fall, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
Original Language English There is no where in you a paradise that is no place and there You do not enter except without a story. To enter there is to become unnameable. Whoever is nowhere is nobody, and therefore cannot exist except as unborn: No disguise will avail him anything Such a one is neither lost nor found. But he who has an address is lost. They fall, they fall into apartments and are securely established! They find themselves in streets. They are licensed To proceed from place to place They now know their own names They can name several friends and know Their own telephones must some time ring. If all telephones ring at once, if all names are shouted at once and all cars crash at one crossing: If all cities explode and fly away in dust Yet identities refuse to be lost. There is a name and a number for everyone. There is a definite place for bodies, there are pigeon holes for ashes: Such security can business buy! Who would dare to go nameless in so secure a universe? Yet, to tell the truth, only the nameless are at home in it. They bear with them in the center of nowhere the unborn flower of nothing: This is the paradise tree. It must remain unseen until words end and arguments are silent. [1499.jpg] -- from Selected Poems of Thomas Merton, by Thomas Merton <
1.tm - The Sowing of Meanings, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
Original Language English See the high birds! Is theirs the song That dies among the wood-light Wounding the listener with such bright arrows? Or do they play in wheeling silences Defining in the perfect sky The bounds of (here below) our solitude, Where spring has generated lights of green To glow in clouds upon the sombre branches? Ponds full of sky and stillnesses What heavy summer songs still sleep Under the tawny rushes at your brim? More than a season will be born here, nature, In your world of gravid mirrors! The quiet air awaits one note, One light, one ray and it will be the angels' spring: One flash, one glance upon the shiny pond, and then Asperges me! sweet wilderness, and lo! we are redeemed! For, like a grain of fire Smouldering in the heart of every living essence God plants His undivided power -- Buries His thought too vast for worlds In seed and root and blade and flower, Until, in the amazing light of April, Surcharging the religious silence of the spring, Creation finds the pressure of His everlasting secret Too terrible to bear. Then every way we look, lo! rocks and trees Pastures and hills and streams and birds and firmament And our own souls within us flash, and shower us with light, While the wild countryside, unknown, unvisited of men, Bears sheaves of clean, transforming fire. And then, oh then the written image, schooled in sacrifice, The deep united threeness printed in our being, Shot by the brilliant syllable of such an intuition, turns within, And plants that light far down into the heart of darkness and oblivion, Dives after, and discovers flame. [1499.jpg] -- from Selected Poems of Thomas Merton, by Thomas Merton <
1.tm - When in the soul of the serene disciple, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
Original Language English When in the soul of the serene disciple With no more Fathers to imitate Poverty is a success, It is a small thing to say the roof is gone: He has not even a house. Stars, as well as friends, Are angry with the noble ruin. Saints depart in several directions. Be still: There is no longer any need of comment. It was a lucky wind That blew away his halo with his cares, A lucky sea that drowned his reputation. Here you will find Neither a proverb nor a memorandum. There are no ways, No methods to admire Where poverty is no achievement. His God lives in his emptiness like an affliction. What choice remains? Well, to be ordinary is not a choice: It is the usual freedom Of men without visions. [1499.jpg] -- from Selected Poems of Thomas Merton, by Thomas Merton <
--- Overview of noun thomas_merton
The noun thomas merton has 1 sense (no senses from tagged texts)
1. Merton, Thomas Merton ::: (United States religious and writer (1915-1968))
--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun thomas_merton
1 sense of thomas merton
Sense 1
Merton, Thomas Merton
INSTANCE OF=> religious
=> religious person
=> person, individual, someone, somebody, mortal, soul
=> organism, being
=> living thing, animate thing
=> whole, unit
=> object, physical object
=> physical entity
=> entity
=> causal agent, cause, causal agency
=> physical entity
=> entity
INSTANCE OF=> writer, author
=> communicator
=> person, individual, someone, somebody, mortal, soul
=> organism, being
=> living thing, animate thing
=> whole, unit
=> object, physical object
=> physical entity
=> entity
=> causal agent, cause, causal agency
=> physical entity
=> entity
--- Hyponyms of noun thomas_merton
--- Synonyms/Hypernyms (Ordered by Estimated Frequency) of noun thomas_merton
1 sense of thomas merton
Sense 1
Merton, Thomas Merton
INSTANCE OF=> religious
INSTANCE OF=> writer, author
--- Coordinate Terms (sisters) of noun thomas_merton
1 sense of thomas merton
Sense 1
Merton, Thomas Merton
-> religious
=> friar, mendicant
=> monk, monastic
=> Benedictine
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=> superior
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HAS INSTANCE=> Merton, Thomas Merton
-> writer, author
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=> Gothic romancer
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=> polemicist, polemist, polemic
=> rhymer, rhymester, versifier, poetizer, poetiser
=> scenarist
=> scriptwriter
=> space writer
=> speechwriter
=> tragedian
=> wordmonger
=> word-painter
=> wordsmith
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HAS INSTANCE=> Lewis, C. S. Lewis, Clive Staples Lewis
HAS INSTANCE=> Lewis, Sinclair Lewis, Harry Sinclair Lewis
HAS INSTANCE=> London, Jack London, John Griffith Chaney
HAS INSTANCE=> Lowry, Malcolm Lowry, Clarence Malcolm Lowry
HAS INSTANCE=> Lyly, John Lyly
HAS INSTANCE=> Lytton, First Baron Lytton, Bulwer-Lytton, Edward George Earle Bulwer-Lytton
HAS INSTANCE=> Mailer, Norman Mailer
HAS INSTANCE=> Malamud, Bernard Malamud
HAS INSTANCE=> Malory, Thomas Malory, Sir Thomas Malory
HAS INSTANCE=> Malraux, Andre Malraux
HAS INSTANCE=> Mann, Thomas Mann
HAS INSTANCE=> Mansfield, Katherine Mansfield, Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp
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HAS INSTANCE=> Marquand, John Marquand, John Philip Marquand
HAS INSTANCE=> Marsh, Ngaio Marsh
HAS INSTANCE=> Mason, A. E. W. Mason, Alfred Edward Woodley Mason
HAS INSTANCE=> Maugham, Somerset Maugham, W. Somerset Maugham, William Somerset Maugham
HAS INSTANCE=> Maupassant, Guy de Maupassant, Henri Rene Albert Guy de Maupassant
HAS INSTANCE=> Mauriac, Francois Mauriac, Francois Charles Mauriac
HAS INSTANCE=> Maurois, Andre Maurois, Emile Herzog
HAS INSTANCE=> McCarthy, Mary McCarthy, Mary Therese McCarthy
HAS INSTANCE=> McCullers, Carson McCullers, Carson Smith McCullers
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HAS INSTANCE=> Melville, Herman Melville
HAS INSTANCE=> Merton, Thomas Merton
HAS INSTANCE=> Michener, James Michener, James Albert Michener
HAS INSTANCE=> Miller, Henry Miller, Henry Valentine Miller
HAS INSTANCE=> Milne, A. A. Milne, Alan Alexander Milne
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HAS INSTANCE=> Mitford, Nancy Mitford, Nancy Freeman Mitford
HAS INSTANCE=> Mitford, Jessica Mitford, Jessica Lucy Mitford
HAS INSTANCE=> Montaigne, Michel Montaigne, Michel Eyquem Montaigne
HAS INSTANCE=> Montgomery, L. M. Montgomery, Lucy Maud Montgomery
HAS INSTANCE=> More, Thomas More, Sir Thomas More
HAS INSTANCE=> Morrison, Toni Morrison, Chloe Anthony Wofford
HAS INSTANCE=> Munro, H. H. Munro, Hector Hugh Munro, Saki
HAS INSTANCE=> Murdoch, Iris Murdoch, Dame Jean Iris Murdoch
HAS INSTANCE=> Musset, Alfred de Musset, Louis Charles Alfred de Musset
HAS INSTANCE=> Nabokov, Vladimir Nabokov, Vladimir vladimirovich Nabokov
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HAS INSTANCE=> Norris, Frank Norris, Benjamin Franklin Norris Jr.
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HAS INSTANCE=> O'Connor, Flannery O'Connor, Mary Flannery O'Connor
HAS INSTANCE=> O'Flaherty, Liam O'Flaherty
HAS INSTANCE=> O'Hara, John Henry O'Hara
HAS INSTANCE=> Ondaatje, Michael Ondaatje, Philip Michael Ondaatje
HAS INSTANCE=> Orczy, Baroness Emmusca Orczy
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HAS INSTANCE=> Percy, Walker Percy
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HAS INSTANCE=> Pliny, Pliny the Younger, Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus
HAS INSTANCE=> Poe, Edgar Allan Poe
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HAS INSTANCE=> Pound, Ezra Pound, Ezra Loomis Pound
HAS INSTANCE=> Powys, John Cowper Powys
HAS INSTANCE=> Powys, Theodore Francis Powys
HAS INSTANCE=> Powys, Llewelyn Powys
HAS INSTANCE=> Pyle, Howard Pyle
HAS INSTANCE=> Pynchon, Thomas Pynchon
HAS INSTANCE=> Rand, Ayn Rand
HAS INSTANCE=> Richler, Mordecai Richler
HAS INSTANCE=> Roberts, Kenneth Roberts
HAS INSTANCE=> Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt, Anna Eleanor Roosevelt
HAS INSTANCE=> Roth, Philip Roth, Philip Milton Roth
HAS INSTANCE=> Rousseau, Jean-Jacques Rousseau
HAS INSTANCE=> Runyon, Damon Runyon, Alfred Damon Runyon
HAS INSTANCE=> Rushdie, Salman Rushdie, Ahmed Salman Rushdie
HAS INSTANCE=> Russell, George William Russell, A.E.
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HAS INSTANCE=> Salinger, J. D. Salinger, Jerome David Salinger
HAS INSTANCE=> Sand, George Sand, Amandine Aurore Lucie Dupin, Baroness Dudevant
HAS INSTANCE=> Sandburg, Carl Sandburg
HAS INSTANCE=> Saroyan, William Saroyan
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HAS INSTANCE=> Sontag, Susan Sontag
HAS INSTANCE=> Spark, Muriel Spark, Dame Muriel Spark, Muriel Sarah Spark
HAS INSTANCE=> Spillane, Mickey Spillane, Frank Morrison Spillane
HAS INSTANCE=> Stael, Madame de Stael, Baronne Anne Louise Germaine Necker de Steal-Holstein
HAS INSTANCE=> Steele, Sir Richrd Steele
HAS INSTANCE=> Stein, Gertrude Stein
HAS INSTANCE=> Steinbeck, John Steinbeck, John Ernst Steinbeck
HAS INSTANCE=> Stendhal, Marie Henri Beyle
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HAS INSTANCE=> Sterne, Laurence Sterne
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HAS INSTANCE=> Tarbell, Ida Tarbell, Ida M. Tarbell, Ida Minerva Tarbell
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HAS INSTANCE=> Thoreau, Henry David Thoreau
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HAS INSTANCE=> Toklas, Alice B. Toklas
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HAS INSTANCE=> Tolstoy, Leo Tolstoy, Count Lev Nikolayevitch Tolstoy
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HAS INSTANCE=> Untermeyer, Louis Untermeyer
HAS INSTANCE=> Updike, John Updike, John Hoyer Updike
HAS INSTANCE=> Van Doren, Carl Van Doren, Carl Clinton Van Doren
HAS INSTANCE=> Vargas Llosa, Mario Vargas Llosa, Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa
HAS INSTANCE=> Verne, Jules Verne
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HAS INSTANCE=> Vonnegut, Kurt Vonnegut
HAS INSTANCE=> Wain, John Wain, John Barrington Wain
HAS INSTANCE=> Walker, Alice Walker, Alice Malsenior Walker
HAS INSTANCE=> Wallace, Edgar Wallace, Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace
HAS INSTANCE=> Walpole, Horace Walpole, Horatio Walpole, Fourth Earl of Orford
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HAS INSTANCE=> Waugh, Evelyn Waugh, Evelyn Arthur Saint John Waugh
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--- Grep of noun thomas_merton
thomas merton
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Wikipedia - ALGOL 68C
Wikipedia - ALGOL 68RS
Wikipedia - ALGOL 68-RT
Wikipedia - ALGOL 68-R
Wikipedia - ALGOL 68S
Wikipedia - Algol 68
Wikipedia - ALGOL 68 -- Programming language
Wikipedia - Algolagnia
Wikipedia - ALGOL Bulletin
Wikipedia - Algol (disambiguation)
Wikipedia - Al Goldstein -- American pornographer
Wikipedia - Algol (film) -- 1920 film
Wikipedia - Algolia
Wikipedia - Algol-like
Wikipedia - ALGOL N
Wikipedia - ALGOL programming language
Wikipedia - Algolsheim -- Commune in Grand Est, France
Wikipedia - Algol variable -- A class of eclipsing binary stars
Wikipedia - Algol -- An eclipsing variable star in the constellation Perseus
Wikipedia - ALGOL -- Family of programming languages
Wikipedia - ALGOL W
Wikipedia - Algol-W
Wikipedia - ALGOL X
Wikipedia - ALGOL Y
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Wikipedia - Alice Dye -- Amateur golfer, golf course architect
Wikipedia - Alice Hewson -- English professional golfer
Wikipedia - Alice Miller (golfer) -- American professional golfer
Wikipedia - Alice Ritzman -- American golfer
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Wikipedia - Alison Munt -- Australian golfer
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Wikipedia - Alistair Presnell -- Australian professional golfer
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Wikipedia - Al Johnston -- Scottish-Canadian professional golfer
Wikipedia - Al Kelley -- American golfer
Wikipedia - Allan Dailey -- Scottish golfer
Wikipedia - Allan Macfie -- Scottish golfer
Wikipedia - Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold -- 1986 film by Gary Nelson
Wikipedia - Allan Robertson -- Scottish golfer
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Wikipedia - Allergology
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Wikipedia - All in the golden afternoon...
Wikipedia - Allison Finney -- American professional golfer
Wikipedia - Allium goloskokovii -- Species of plant
Wikipedia - Allium mongolicum -- Asian species of wild onion native to Mongolia, Inner Mongolia, Tuva, Kazakhstan, and parts of China
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Wikipedia - All the Gold in the World -- 1961 film
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Wikipedia - Al Mengert -- American professional golfer
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Wikipedia - American Arts Commemorative Series medallions -- Gold bullion medallions minted 1980-1984
Wikipedia - American Gigolo -- 1980 crime drama film by Paul Schrader
Wikipedia - American Gold Eagle -- Gold bullion coin of the United States
Wikipedia - American golden plover -- Species of bird
Wikipedia - American goldfinch -- A small North American migratory bird in the finch family
Wikipedia - American Institute of Chemists Gold Medal -- Award
Wikipedia - American Liberty high relief gold coin -- Series of United States special-issue bullion coins
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Wikipedia - A Moral Reckoning -- 2002 book by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
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Wikipedia - Amy Fruhwirth -- American golfer
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Wikipedia - Anarchism in Mongolia
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Wikipedia - Andaikhudag Formation -- Early Cretaceous geologic formation in Mongolia
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Wikipedia - Anders Haglund -- Swedish professional golfer
Wikipedia - Anders Mickelson -- Finnish goldsmith
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Wikipedia - Andreas Harto -- Danish professional golfer
Wikipedia - Andre Bossert -- Swiss professional golfer
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Wikipedia - Andre Lufwa -- Congolese sculptor
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Wikipedia - Andres Romero -- Argentine golfer
Wikipedia - Andre Stolz -- Australian professional golfer
Wikipedia - Andrew Buckle -- Australian professional golfer
Wikipedia - Andrew Butterfield -- English professional golfer
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Wikipedia - Andrew D. Goldstein -- American prosecutor
Wikipedia - Andrew Dodt -- Australian professional golfer
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Wikipedia - Andrew Goldberg (writer) -- American writer
Wikipedia - Andrew Goldman -- American sailor
Wikipedia - Andrew Gold -- American singer, musician and songwriter
Wikipedia - Andrew Johnson (golfer) -- American golfer
Wikipedia - Andrew Kirkaldy (golfer) -- Scottish golfer
Wikipedia - Andrew Landry -- American professional golfer
Wikipedia - Andrew Loupe -- American golfer
Wikipedia - Andrew Magee -- American professional golfer
Wikipedia - Andrew Marshall (golfer) -- English golfer
Wikipedia - Andrew McArthur -- Scottish golfer
Wikipedia - Andrew Murray (golfer) -- English golfer
Wikipedia - Andrew Oldcorn -- Scottish golfer
Wikipedia - Andrew Scott (golfer) -- Scottish golfer
Wikipedia - Andrew Shaw (golfer) -- New Zealand golfer
Wikipedia - Andrew Sherborne -- English golfer
Wikipedia - Andrew Strath -- Scottish professional golfer
Wikipedia - Andrew Svoboda -- American professional golfer
Wikipedia - Andrew V. Goldberg
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Wikipedia - Andrey Bogolyubsky
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Wikipedia - Andy Bean -- American professional golfer
Wikipedia - Andy Miller (golfer) -- American golfer
Wikipedia - Andy Morse -- American golfer
Wikipedia - Andy North -- American professional golfer
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Wikipedia - Angela Maria Guidi Cingolani -- Italian politician
Wikipedia - Angela Stanford -- American golfer
Wikipedia - Angel (coin) -- Medieval gold coin in England
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Wikipedia - Angelina Golikova -- Russian speed skater
Wikipedia - Angelo Que -- Filipino professional golfer
Wikipedia - Angel Yin -- American golfer
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Wikipedia - Angola Horror -- 1867 train wreck in New York State
Wikipedia - Angolan Americans -- Americans of Angolan birth or descent
Wikipedia - Angolan Civil War
Wikipedia - Angolan genet -- Species of mammal
Wikipedia - Angolan kusimanse -- Species of mongoose from Africa
Wikipedia - Angolan National Democratic Party -- Political party in Angola
Wikipedia - Angolan slender mongoose -- Species of mongoose from Africa
Wikipedia - Angolan Union for Peace, Democracy and Development -- Political party in Angola
Wikipedia - Angolan waxbill -- Species of bird
Wikipedia - Angola-Uruguay relations -- Diplomatic relations between the Republic of Angola and the Eastern Republic of Uruguay
Wikipedia - Angola -- Republic on the west coast of Southern Africa
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Wikipedia - Anibal Joao Melo -- Angolan writer and journalist
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Wikipedia - Anita Lihme -- American golfer and businesswoman
Wikipedia - Anja Monke -- German professional golfer
Wikipedia - Anke-Eve Goldmann -- Journalist
Wikipedia - Ankhnyam Ragchaa -- Mongolian actress
Wikipedia - Annabel Dimmock -- English professional golfer
Wikipedia - Annabel Goldie -- Former Leader of the Scottish Conservative Party
Wikipedia - Annabell Fuller -- English amateur golfer
Wikipedia - Anna Berg -- Swedish professional golfer
Wikipedia - Anna-Carin Jonasson -- Swedish professional golfer
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Wikipedia - Anna Golubkova -- Soviet writer, poet and literary critic
Wikipedia - Anna Le Moine -- Swedish curler and Olympic gold medalist
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Wikipedia - Anna Oxenstierna -- Swedish golfer
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Wikipedia - Annefried Gollner -- Austrian luger
Wikipedia - Anne-Lise Caudal -- French golfer
Wikipedia - Anne Marie Palli -- French professional golfer
Wikipedia - Anne Nason -- American golfer
Wikipedia - Anne Rollo -- Australian professional golfer
Wikipedia - Anne van Dam -- Dutch golfer
Wikipedia - Ann Gregory -- African-American amateur golfer
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Wikipedia - Annie Goldmann -- French sociologist
Wikipedia - Annika Sorenstam -- Swedish American golfer
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Wikipedia - Anthony Kang -- Korean-American professional golfer
Wikipedia - Anthony Kim -- American golfer
Wikipedia - Anthony Painter -- Australian professional golfer
Wikipedia - Anthony Wall -- English golfer
Wikipedia - Anti-Mongolianism
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Wikipedia - Antonio dos Santos (athlete) -- Angolan athlete
Wikipedia - Antonio Garrido (golfer) -- Spanish golfer
Wikipedia - Antonio Hortal -- Spanish golfer
Wikipedia - Antonio LascuM-CM-1a -- Filipino professional golfer
Wikipedia - Antonio Murdaca -- Australian professional golfer
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Wikipedia - Antonio Tavares (writer) -- Angolan writer and author
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Wikipedia - Antti Ahokas -- Finnish professional golfer
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Wikipedia - Aree Song -- South Korean golfer
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Wikipedia - Arghun dynasty -- Medieval Turco-Mongol dynasty
Wikipedia - Argolamprotes micella -- Species of moth
Wikipedia - Argolic Gulf -- A gulf of the Aegean Sea off the east coast of the Peloponnese, Greece
Wikipedia - Argolid
Wikipedia - Argol Parish close
Wikipedia - Argonaut Mine -- Gold mine in California, United States
Wikipedia - Aria, Argolis -- municipal community
Wikipedia - Ariel CaM-CM-1ete -- Argentine golfer
Wikipedia - Arielle Gold -- American snowboarder
Wikipedia - Ari Gold (musician) -- American singer-songwriter
Wikipedia - Ariya Jutanugarn -- Thai professional golfer
Wikipedia - Arjun Atwal -- Indian professional golfer
Wikipedia - Arjun Bhati -- Indian teenage golfer
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Wikipedia - Army Gold Medal -- British campaign medal
Wikipedia - Arnold Blyth -- Scottish golfer
Wikipedia - Arnold Goldberg
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Wikipedia - Arnold Palmer (drink) -- Beverage of iced tea and lemonade, named after the American golfer
Wikipedia - Arnold Palmer -- American golfer
Wikipedia - Arnold Stickley -- English golfer
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Wikipedia - Aron Price -- Australian professional golfer
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Wikipedia - Art Doering -- American golfer
Wikipedia - Arthur Campbell-Walker -- Scottish soldier, politician and golfer
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Wikipedia - Arthur E. Goldman
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Wikipedia - Arthur Goldreich
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Wikipedia - Arthur Havers -- English golfer
Wikipedia - Arthur Horne Goldfinch -- British politician
Wikipedia - Arthur Housman -- American actor in films during both the silent film era and the Golden Age of Hollywood (1889-1942)
Wikipedia - Arthur Hussey -- American golfer
Wikipedia - Arthur Lord -- American golfer
Wikipedia - Arthur Perowne (golfer) -- English golfer
Wikipedia - Arthur Reid (golfer) -- English golfer
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Wikipedia - Ashley Chesters -- English golfer
Wikipedia - Ashley Hall (golfer) -- Australian professional golfer
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Wikipedia - Augusto NuM-CM-1ez -- Argentine golfer
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Wikipedia - Austin Eaton III -- American golfer
Wikipedia - Austin Ernst -- American golfer
Wikipedia - Austin Powers in Goldmember -- 2002 American spy comedy film directed by Jay Roach
Wikipedia - Australian Gold Nugget -- Australian gold bullion coin
Wikipedia - Autumn Gold -- 2010 film
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Wikipedia - Avnei Eitan -- Israeli settlement in the Golan Heights
Wikipedia - Ayako Okamoto -- Japanese professional golfer
Wikipedia - Ayako Uehara (golfer) -- Japanese professional golfer
Wikipedia - Ayanga -- Chinese musical theater actor and singer from Inner Mongolia
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Wikipedia - A Yoke of Gold -- 1916 film
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Wikipedia - Azahara MuM-CM-1oz -- Spanish golfer
Wikipedia - Azuma Yano -- Japanese golfer
Wikipedia - Baatarsuren Shuudertsetseg -- Mongolian author
Wikipedia - Baatarzorig Batjargal -- Mongolian painter
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Wikipedia - Back to the Woods (1918 Goldwyn film) -- 1918 American silent comedy film
Wikipedia - Bactrian Gold
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Wikipedia - Badrakhyn Nyamjav -- Mongolian judoka
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Wikipedia - Bae Sang-moon -- South Korean professional golfer
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Wikipedia - Bailey (dog) -- Golden retriever owned by Elizabeth Warren
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Wikipedia - Baixa de Cassanje revolt -- 1961 revolt against Portuguese rule of Angola
Wikipedia - Baiying Bologai Formation -- Early Cretaceous geologic formation in Mongolia
Wikipedia - Bakhvain Buyadaa -- Mongolian judoka
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Wikipedia - Band of Gold (TV series) -- British television crime drama series aired on ITV from 1995 to 1997
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Wikipedia - Barent Gael -- Dutch Golden Age painter (1630-1698)
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Wikipedia - Barrick Gold -- Canadian mining company
Wikipedia - Barrow's goldeneye -- Species of bird
Wikipedia - Barry Cheesman -- American professional golfer
Wikipedia - Barry Goldwater Jr. -- American politician
Wikipedia - Barry Goldwater -- Republican nominee for President, 1964; U.S. Senator from Arizona
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Wikipedia - Barry M. Goldwater Air Force Range -- Bombing range in Arizona, United States
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Wikipedia - Bart Bryant -- American professional golfer
Wikipedia - Bartholomeus van Bassen -- Dutch Golden Age painter and architect
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Wikipedia - Battle of Grobnik Field -- 1242 Croat-Mongol battle
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Wikipedia - Battle of Khalkhyn Temple -- Border skirmish between Mongolia and Japan
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Wikipedia - Battle of Yamen -- 1279 naval battle between the Song dynasty and the Mongol Yuan dynasty; decisive Yuan victory
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Wikipedia - Battulgyn Temuulen -- Mongolian judoka
Wikipedia - Bavaria-Ingolstadt -- Duchy in the Holy Roman Empire
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Wikipedia - Bea Barrett -- American golfer
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Wikipedia - Beau Hossler -- American professional golfer
Wikipedia - Becky Iverson -- American golfer
Wikipedia - Becky Pearson -- American golfer
Wikipedia - Bedfordshire Golf Club -- Golf club in Bedfordshire, England
Wikipedia - Beilu Yiyu -- Mongol-Chinese dictionary
Wikipedia - Belen Mozo -- Spanish golfer
Wikipedia - Belgo-Congolese Round Table Conference -- 1960 meeting between Belgian and Congolese leaders
Wikipedia - Believe (Goldie song) -- 1998 single by Goldie
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Wikipedia - Ben Campbell (golfer) -- Scottish golfer
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Wikipedia - Ben Finegold -- American chess grandmaster
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Wikipedia - Bengo Province -- province of Angola
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Wikipedia - Benguela Province -- province of Angola
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Wikipedia - Benin Golf Air -- Defunct African airllne (2001-2012)
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Wikipedia - Benn Barham -- English golfer
Wikipedia - Ben Smith (golfer) -- American golfer
Wikipedia - Benton Township, Ringgold County, Iowa -- Township in Iowa, USA
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Wikipedia - Bernard Edmunds -- American golfer
Wikipedia - Bernard Gallacher -- Scottish professional golfer
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Wikipedia - Bernard Goldberg -- American journalist
Wikipedia - Bernard Goldstein (casino owner) -- American attorney and entrepreneur
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Wikipedia - Bernard Williams (sprinter) -- American track and field athlete, sprinter, Olympic gold medalist
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Wikipedia - Bernd Wiesberger -- Austrian professional golfer
Wikipedia - Bernhard Langer -- German golfer
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Wikipedia - Bert Gadd -- English golfer
Wikipedia - Bert Greene (golfer) -- American golfer
Wikipedia - Bertie Austin -- Canadian golfer
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Wikipedia - Bert Seymour -- English golfer
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Wikipedia - Bert Weaver -- American golfer
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Wikipedia - Bet365 Gold Cup -- Steeplechase horse race in Britain
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Wikipedia - Beth Bader -- American professional golfer
Wikipedia - Beth Bauer -- American professional golfer
Wikipedia - Beth Daniel -- American professional golfer
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Wikipedia - Betsy Cullen -- American professional golfer
Wikipedia - Bettina Hauert -- German professional golfer
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Wikipedia - Betty Dodd -- American professional golfer
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Wikipedia - Bhaggolokkhi -- Bangla web series
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Wikipedia - Bibliography of Angola -- Wikipedia bibliography
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Wikipedia - Bill Branch -- English golfer
Wikipedia - Bill Brask -- American professional golfer
Wikipedia - Bill Britton -- American professional golfer
Wikipedia - Bill Bryant (golf executive) -- American golf executive
Wikipedia - Bill Collins (golfer) -- American golfer
Wikipedia - Bill Cox (golfer) -- English golfer
Wikipedia - Bill Davies (golfer) -- English golfer
Wikipedia - Bill Dunk -- Australian professional golfer
Wikipedia - Bill Eggers -- American golfer
Wikipedia - Bill Garrett (golfer) -- American golfer
Wikipedia - Bill Gold -- American graphic designer
Wikipedia - Bill Haas -- American professional golfer
Wikipedia - Bill Hyndman -- American golfer
Wikipedia - Billie Jean Theide -- American sculptor and goldsmith
Wikipedia - Bill Johnston (golfer) -- Professional golfer
Wikipedia - Bill Laidlaw -- Scottish golfer
Wikipedia - Bill Large -- English golfer
Wikipedia - Bill Loeffler -- American golfer
Wikipedia - Bill Lunde -- American professional golfer
Wikipedia - Bill Malley (golfer) -- American golfer</