TM - THOMAS MERTON MERTON'S WAY : (PART XXII – XXIII)

HIK – HIDANGAN ISTIMEWA KRISTIANI
SERI MONASTIK: "TM - THOMAS MERTON
MERTON'S WAY : (PART XXII – XXIII)
XXII.
“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, No Man Is an Island
“The thing that crushed me was that I had never learned to dance.”
― Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition
“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, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander
“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, The Seven Storey Mountain
“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, The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition
“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
“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, A Book of Hours
“We put words between ourselves and things.”
― Thomas Merton
“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, The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition
“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, Contemplative Prayer
“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, The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition
“Bonum est praestolari cum silentio salutare Dei. (“It is good to wait in silence for the salvation of God.”)”
― Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation
“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, No Man Is an Island
“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, No Man Is an Island
“The integrity of an artist lifts a man above the level of the world without delivering him from it.”
― Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition
“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, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander
“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, Praying the Psalms
“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, The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation
“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, New Seeds of Contemplation
“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, Entering the Silence: Becoming a Monk and a Writer: 2
“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, New Seeds of Contemplation
“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, The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition
“There are ways that seem to men to be good, the end whereof is in the depths of hell.”
― Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition
“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, Conjeturas de un espectador culpable
“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, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander
“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
“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, The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition
“Father,” I answered, “I want to give God everything.”
― Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition
“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, The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition
“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, The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition
XXIII.
“MANY poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves.”
― Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation
“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, Run to the Mountain: The Story of a VocationThe Journal of Th: 1
“How deluded we sometimes are by the clear notions we get out of books.”
― Thomas Merton
“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, The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition
“the humble man takes whatever there is in the world that helps him to find God and leaves the rest aside. He”
― Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation
“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, The Seven Storey Mountain
“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, The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition
“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
“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, A Year with Thomas Merton: Daily Meditations from His Journals
“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, New Seeds of Contemplation
“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, Contemplative Prayer
“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, No Man Is an Island
“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, No Man Is an Island
“...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, The Seven Storey Mountain