TM - THOMAS MERTON MERTON'S WAY : (PART XIX – XXI)

HIK – HIDANGAN ISTIMEWA KRISTIANI
SERI MONASTIK: "TM - THOMAS MERTON
MERTON'S WAY : (PART XIX – XXI)
XIX.
“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, The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition
“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, New Seeds of Contemplation
“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
“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, No Man Is an Island
“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, The Way of Chuang Tzu
“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, New Seeds of Contemplation
“Silence is not broken by speech, but by the anxiety to be heard.”
― Thomas Merton
“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, Thomas Merton - Spiritual Direction And Meditation
“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, The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition
“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, The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition
“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
“By faith we know God without seeing Him. By”
― Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island
“corazón”
― Thomas Merton, Conjeturas de un espectador culpable
“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, The Way of Chuang Tzu
“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, The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition
“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, New Seeds of Contemplation
“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, A Year with Thomas Merton: Daily Meditations from His Journals
“By faith we know God without seeing Him. By hope we possess God without feeling His presence.”
― Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island
“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, Contemplative Prayer
“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, The Way of Chuang Tzu
“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
“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, The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition
“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of heaven. And”
― Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition
“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, The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation
“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, No Man Is an Island
“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, New Seeds of Contemplation
“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
“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, A Book of Hours
“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, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander
“It can be said, without fear of error, that our meditation is as good as our faith.”
― Thomas Merton, Thomas Merton - Spiritual Direction And Meditation
XX.
“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, No Man Is an Island
“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
“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, The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition
“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, The Way of Chuang Tzu
“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, Entering the Silence: Becoming a Monk and a Writer: 2
“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, The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation
“It is when we insist most firmly on everyone else being "reasonable" that we become ourselves, unreasonable.”
― Thomas Merton, The Way of Chuang Tzu
“My mother was informing me, by mail, that she was about to die, and would never see me again.”
― Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain
“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, The Wisdom of the Desert
“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
“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, A Book of Hours
“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, The Way of Chuang Tzu
“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, The Wisdom of the Desert
“In all spiritualities there is a contrast between the affective or13 devotional (bhakti) and the intellectual, anoetic type of experience (raja yoga).”
― Thomas Merton, The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation
“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, Selected Poems of Thomas Merton
“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, The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition
“All those days and nights were without romance, horrible.”
― Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition
“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, The Wisdom of the Desert
“my desire of argument and religious discussion implied a fundamental and utter lack of faith,”
― Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition
“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
“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, No Man Is an Island
“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, The Way of Chuang Tzu
“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, Praying the Psalms
“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, Praying the Psalms
“We must slow down to a human tempo and we'll begin to have time to listen.”
― Thomas Merton
“Get warm any way you can, and love God and pray.”
― Thomas Merton, A Year with Thomas Merton: Daily Meditations from His Journals
“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, Zen and the Birds of Appetite
“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, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander
“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, The Seven Storey Mountain
“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, The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition
XXI.
“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, No Man Is an Island
“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, Zen and the Birds of Appetite
“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, No Man Is an Island
“As soon as one is conscious of the presence of the Master, one must, in all passivity, abandon the work to Him.”
― Thomas Merton, The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation
“humble realization of our mysterious being as persons in whom God dwells, with infinite sweetness and inalienable power.”
― Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation
“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, The Way of Chuang Tzu
“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, No Man Is an Island
“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, The Sign of Jonas
“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, A Year with Thomas Merton: Daily Meditations from His Journals
“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, No Man Is an Island
“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
“No one is so wrong as the man who knows all the answers. Like”
― Thomas Merton, The Way of Chuang Tzu
“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, No Man Is an Island
“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, No Man Is an Island
“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, The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition
“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
“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, The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition
“If you found God with great ease, perhaps it's not God that you have found.”
― Thomas Merton
“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, The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition
“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, Dialogues with Silence: Prayers & Drawings
“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, No Man Is an Island
“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, The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition
“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, The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition
“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, The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation
“(“A classic is a book that remains in print”—Mark Van Doren)”
― Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition
“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, The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition
“There is, in a word, nothing comfortable about the Bible...”
― Thomas Merton
“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, The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition
“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, No Man Is an Island
“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, The Seven Storey Mountain