St. Benedictus

HIK. HIDANGAN ISTIMEWA KRISTIANI.
HARAPAN IMAN KASIH.
Benediktus adalah seorang santo besar dalam Gereja, namun sayangnya tidak banyak yang dapat kita ketahui tentang riwayat hidupnya kecuali dari buku “Dialogue” yang ditulis oleh St. Gregorius.
Di kota Norcia, Italia, lahirlah seorang putera dari keluarga petani kaya yang bernama Benediktus. Ia memiliki seorang saudari kembar, yaitu Santa Skolastika yang sejak masa kecilnya telah membaktikan hidupnya untuk Tuhan. Ketika menginjak masa remaja, Benediktus dikirim ke Roma oleh orang tuanya.
Namun, rupanya cara hidup yang tidak baik di kota Roma membuatnya menjadi tidak tahan. Keadaan dunia di sekitarnya pada saat itu penuh dengan bangsa-bangsa kafir, Aria dan dunia tampaknya sudah mengarah ke barbarisme. Para pejabat saat itu kebanyakan jika bukan seorang atheis, adalah seorang barbarian atau seorang heretic. Banyak para pemuda yang mengikuti jejak para pendahulunya itu.
Benediktus muda yang melihat keadaan tersebut akhirnya memutuskan untuk meninggalkan Roma. Pada saat itu ia kira-kira mendekati umur 20 tahun. Mereka pergi ke desa Enfide di pengunungan, 30 mil dari Roma.
Dalam pencarian akan kesunyian yang total, Benediktus mulai mendaki lebih jauh lagi ke antara bukit-bukit hingga akhirnya ia mencapai sebuah tempat yang disebut Subiaco.
Di tempat yang berbatu cadas ini ia bertemu dengan seorang rahib yang bernama Romanus. Kepada rahib ini Benediktus menjelaskan maksud hatinya untuk hidup sebagai seorang eremit/pertapa. Romanus sendiri tinggal di sebuah pertapaan yang tidak jauh dari situ. Ia mau membantu pemuda ini, maka ia memberikan sebuah pakaian dari bulu domba dan membawa Benediktus ke sebuah gua di pegunungan.
Di tempat tersembunyi inilah Benediktus hidup selama tiga tahun, tanpa diketahui oleh siapa pun juga kecuali Romanus. Setiap hari ia membawa roti bagi pertapa muda ini. Makanan itu ditaruh dalam sebuah keranjang, yang diturunkan dengan tali melalui batu-batuan.
Orang yang pertama kali menemukan Benediktus adalah seorang pastor. Ketika itu pastor tersebut sedang mempersiapkan makan malam, tiba-tiba ia mendengar suara yang mengatakan kepadanya, “Engkau mempersiapkan bagi dirimu makanan yang enak, sedangkan hambaku Benediktus sedang kelaparan.” Pastor ini pun segera keluar dan mencari Benediktus, dengan susah payah akhirnya ia menemukannya.
Tidak lama kemudian beberapa gembala menemukan Benediktus. Ketika mereka menemukannya, mereka sangat terkesan dan belajar banyak dari percakapan mereka. Mulai saat itulah ia mulai dikenal orang, banyak orang mengunjunginya, membawa makanan dan menerima petunjuk dan nasihat darinya.
Meskipun Benediktus hidup jauh dari dunia, seperti para bapa padang gurun yang lain, ia harus menemui godaan-godaan. Pada suatu saat ketika ia sendirian, sang penggoda mulai menunjukkan dirinya. Seekor burung hitam mulai terbang mengitari mukanya, dan mendekat begitu dekatnya sehingga jika Benediktus mau, ia dapat menangkapnya dengan tangannya.
Akan tetapi, akhirnya burung tersebut pergi dengan membuat tanda salib. Kemudian godaan hawa nafsu muncul seperti yang belum pernah ia alami sebelumnya. Si jahat membawa ke dalam imajinasinya seorang wanita yang pernah ia temui sebelumnya. Si jahat membakar hatinya dengan hawa nafsu, sehingga pikirannya hampir dikuasai untuk meninggalkan pertapaannya.
Akan tetapi dibantu oleh kerahiman ilahi, ia menemukan kekuatan untuk menolak godaan tersebut. Ketika ia melihat tumbuhan dan semak berduri di dekatnya, ia melemparkan dirinya ke sana dan berguling-guling sehingga tubuhya terasa sakit. Melalui luka-luka di tubuhnya, ia menyembuhkan luka-luka di jiwanya, dan tidak pernah lagi mendapat kesukaran yang sama.
Di antara Tivoli dan Subiaco, terdapat sebuah tempat yang bernama Vicovaro. Di puncak bukit itu terdapat suatu komunitas rahib yang pemimpinnya baru saja meninggal. Mereka meminta Benediktus menggantikan pemimpin mereka.
Pada mulanya ia menolak permintaan tersebut. Akan tetapi, karena mereka terus mendesak, akhirnya ia pun menyetujui. Namun, tidak lama kemudian mereka mulai membenci Benediktus, karena cara hidup dan disiplin yang diterapkan Benediktus terlalu keras bagi mereka yang sudah terbiasa hidup secara tidak benar.
Bahkan mereka juga berusaha untuk meracuni minumannya, tetapi ketika ia membuat membuat tanda salib botol anggur itu pun pecah berkeping-keping. Walaupun demikian Benediktus tidak marah kepada mereka; ia hanya berkata, “Tuhan mengampunimu, saudara-saudara. Mengapa engkau bersekongkol merencanakan hal yang jahat ini? Bukankah sudah kukatakan bahwa caraku tidak cocok dengan caramu? Pergi dan carilah kepala biara menurut seleramu sendiri, karena setelah kejadian ini kalian tidak bisa menahan saya di sini lagi di antara kalian.” Setelah berkata demikian ia pun kembali ke Subiaco.
Pada saat Benediktus kembali ke Subiaco, Tuhan mulai mengirim banyak orang kepadanya. Pada saat itu Tuhan mulai mengerjakan karya besar dalam dirinya. Rupanya Tuhan ingin memakai Benediktus untuk mempersatukan para rahib yang selama ini terpencar-pencar, untuk lebih menguatkan mereka.
Maka Benediktus mengumpulkan mereka yang mau mengikutinya dalam dua belas biara dari kayu, masing-masing terdiri dari 12 rahib dan memiliki kepala biaranya masing-masing. Ia menjadi pembimbing utama, namun tinggal secara terpisah dengan beberapa rahib yang dilatih secara khusus.
Selama itu mereka tidak memiliki peraturan tertulis sendiri, tetapi mereka diberi pengetahuan tentang hidup religius dan mengikuti-contoh kebajikan-kebajikan dari cara hidup Benediktus sendiri. Mulai saat itu banyak orang dari berbagai daerah dan bangsa ingin bergabung bersama Benediktus.
Suatu hari ada seorang bangsa Goth yang kasar dan tak terdidik datang kepada Benediktus dan ia diterima dengan sukacita serta diberi jubah biara. Dengan sabit besar, ia disuruh untuk membersihkan rumput-rumput liar yang tumbuh subur di dekat danau. Ia bekerja dengan sangat keras sampai kepala sabit tersebut terbang dan hilang ke dalam danau.
Orang muda yang malang ini pun sangat sedih. Ketika Benediktus mendengar tentang kejadian itu, ia membawanya ke ujung danau dan mengambil sabit tersebut dan melemparkannya ke dalam danau. Segera kepala sabit itu muncul dari danau dan menempel pada tongkatnya.
Benediktus lalu mengembalikan sabit itu dan berkata, “Ambillah! Lanjutkanlah pekerjaanmu dan janganlah bersedih hati!” Ini bukanlah mujizat Benediktus yang terakhir, yang menghapuskan pendapat orang bahwa pekerjaan tangan atau pekerjaan kasar itu menurunkan martabat dan merendahkan orang. Benediktus percaya bahwa pekerjaan kasar bukan saja bermartabat, tetapi juga baik untuk mencapai kesucian.
Sesuatu yang baik pasti juga akan menimbulkan reaksi dan tantangan. Di daerah sekitar Subiaco tinggallah seorang imam yang bernama Florentius. Ia menjadi iri hati melihat keberhasilan Benediktus.
Berbagai macam cara dilakukannya untuk menjatuhkan nama baik Benediktus. Ia menyebarkan fitnah-fitnah yang jahat kepada orang-orang di sekitarnya, bahkan hendak membunuh Benediktus dengan mengirimkan roti beracun. Namun Tuhan tidak tinggal diam, Ia mengirim seekor burung gagak untuk mengambil roti itu dari Benediktus.
Menyadari adanya maksud jahat dari Florentius, yang ditujukan kepada dirinya secara pribadi, maka akhirnya Benediktus memutuskan untuk meninggalkan Subiaco. Ia pergi ke daerah Monte Cassino, yang berada di tempat yang tinggi dan terpencil di perbatasan Campania. Monte Cassino dikelilingi lembah-lembah sempit yang naik ke atas menuju puncak gunung pada ketiga sisinya, dan di sisi yang lain adalah dataran Mediteranean.
Benediktus mengawali karya pertamanya di kota ini dengan berpuasa 40 hari lamanya, kemudian ia berkotbah untuk mempertobatkan mereka. Pengajaran dan mujizat yang dilakukannya membawa penduduk kota tersebut kepada pertobatan.
Dengan bantuan mereka Benediktus merobohkan kuil Apollo yang berdiri di puncak Monte Cassino kemudian mendirikan sebuah biara di sana, yang kemudian menjadi biara paling terkenal di dunia, dasar yang didirikan oleh Benediktus di sekitar abad 530. Dari sinilah mulai suatu pengaruh yang memainkan peranan besar dalam sejarah Gereja dan kebudayaan Eropa sesudah masa Romawi.
Di Monte Cassino, Benediktus kembali menjalani kehidupannya sebagai seorang eremit. Namun tidak lama kemudian para muridnya segera berbondong-bondong ke Monte Cassino juga.
Belajar dari pengalaman peristiwa di Subiaco, ia tidak lagi menempatkan mereka dalam rumah-rumah yang terpisah melainkan mengumpulkan mereka semua dalam satu tempat, yang diatur oleh seorang kepala biara dan wakil-wakil di bawah pengawasannya.
Keadaan situasi di Monte Cassino berbeda dengan Subiaco, banyak orang datang ke sana, bukan hanya kaum awam namun juga para pembesar Gereja yang ingin berkonsultasi dengna Benediktus karena reputasi kesucian dan kebijaksanaannya. Apalagi letak Monte Cassino mudah dicapai dari Roma dan Capua. Pada saat ini pula Benediktus menulis peraturan-peraturannya.
Pada mulanya peraturan tersebut ditujukan bagi para rahibnya di Monte Cassino, namun Paus Hormidas menginginkan peraturan itu ditulis bagi semua rahib di Barat.
Peraturan-peraturan tersebut ditujukan bagi mereka yang ingin menyangkal keinginan mereka sendiri, dan mengambil “senjata yang kuat dan terang akan ketaatan untuk berperang di bawah Yesus Kristus, Raja kita yang sesungguhnya,” dan peraturan tersebut menyarankan suatu kehidupan doa liturgi, pengetahuan (“bacaan suci”) dan kerja tangan, hidup bersosialisasi dalam sebuah komunitas di bawah seorang pemimpin umum.
Abbas kudus ini tidak hanya melayani mereka yang mau mengikuti peraturannya, tetapi juga melayani umat di sekitar tempat tersebut; ia menyembuhkan orang-orang yang sakit, memberikan penghiburan bagi orang yang tertekan, membagikan amal dan makanan kepada yang miskin, juga pernah dikatakan bahwa ia membangkitkan orang mati tidak hanya satu kali.
Ketika Campania menderita kelaparan yang amat sangat, ia memberikan semua persediaan makanan di biara kecuali lima potong roti. “Kamu mungkin tidak memiliki cukup makanan hari ini,” katanya kepada para rahibnya ketika melihat kesedihan mereka, “tetapi besok kamu akan memiliki makanan yang berlebihan.” Esok paginya ada banyak terigu tergeletak tanpa diketahui siapa yang meletakkannya di pintu gerbang biara. Juga dari cerita turun temurun dalam ilustrasi kekuatan profetis Benediktus, dikatakan bahwa ia dapat membaca pikiran manusia.
Seorang bangsawan yang baru ia pertobatkan pada suatu waktu melihatnya menangis dan bertanya apa penyebab kesedihannya. Ia menjawab, ”Biara yang telah saya dirikan dan semua yang telah dipersiapkan bagi saudara-saudaraku telah diserahkan ke surga oleh hukuman Yang Mahakuasa. Hampir-hampir aku tidak dapat memohon belaskasihan bagi hidup mereka.” Nubuat ini terbukti sekitar empat puluh tahun kemudian, ketika biara Monte Cassino dihancurkan oleh bangsa Lombard.
Ketika Totila, orang Goth menang atas Itali, ia menyampaikan keinginannya untuk bertemu dengan Benediktus karena telah banyak mendengar tentangnya. Oleh karena itu, ia mengirim utusan untuk memberitahukan kedatangannya ke Sang Abbas. Untuk membuktikan apakah orang kudus ini benar memiliki kemampuan seperti yang telah ia dengar, Totila memerintahkan Riggo, kapten pengawalnya untuk mengenakan jubah ungu kebesarannya dan mengirimnya bersama dengan tiga bangsawan yang biasa menyertai raja ke Monte Cassino.
Namun, penyamaran ini tidak dapat mengelabui Benediktus yang menyambut Riggo dengan kata-kata, “Anakku, lepaskanlah jubah yang kau pakai itu karena itu bukan kepunyaanmu.” Maka cepat-cepat Riggo pergi dan melaporkan kepada tuannya bahwa ia telah diketahui.
Ketika Totila sendiri datang kepada hamba Tuhan tersebut, diceritakan bahwa ia begitu terpesona hingga ia sujud berlutut di hadapannya. Akan tetapi, Benediktus mengangkatnya dari tanah, serta menegurnya karena kelakukan-kelakuannya yang jahat, dan meramalkan kepadanya semua yang akan menimpanya.
Kemudian raja itu mengharapkan doanya dan pergi, dan sejak saat itu tidak menjadi tidak sejahat semula. Kejadian ini terjadi pada tahun 542 dan Santo Benediktus tidak hidup cukup lama untuk melihat semua kepenuhan dari seluruh ucapan profetisnya sendiri.
Santo hebat ini juga telah meramalkan banyak hal lainnya dan bahkan juga akan kematiannya yang mendekati. Ia memberitahukan kepada para muridnya dan enam hari sebelum harinya ia meminta mereka untuk menggali kuburnya.
Segera setelah hal ini dilakukan ia terkena demam, dan pada hari terakhir ia menerima Tubuh dan Darah Yesus. Kemudian, ketika tangan-tangan penuh kasih dari saudara-saudaranya menopang tubuhnya yang lemah, ia mengucapkan kata-kata doa terakhirnya dan iapun meninggal – berdiri di atas kakinya dalam kapel, dengan tangannya terangkat ke atas mengarah ke surga. Ia dikuburkan di sebelah saudarinya Santa Skolastika di tempat altar dewa Apollo yang ia telah rubuhkan.
Keutamaan dan Teladan Hidup St. Benediktus
1. Pribadi yang sangat mengasihi Allah
Terlahir sebagai seorang putra dari keluarga kaya, tentunya Benediktus dapat menikmati semua kenikmatan yang disediakan oleh dunia ini. Namun, rupanya Tuhan jauh lebih memikat hati Benediktus dibandingkan dengan kenikmatan yang ditawarkan oleh dunia. Baginya hidup sederhana bersama Allah jauh lebih indah dibandingkan dengan hidup yang berlimpah harta dan kedudukan. Tanpa ragu-ragu Benedistus muda meninggalkan keluarga dan hartanya, kemudian ia hidup sangat sederhana dalam sebuah gua di pegunungan dan hanya berpakaian bulu domba. Ia menghabiskan waktunya untuk berdoa dan bermati raga, untuk mengasihi Allah dengan segenap hati dan kekuatannya.
2. Tegas dalam menolak godaan
Hidup secara tersembunyi bagi Allah dan jauh dari dunia rupanya tidak membuat Benediktus terluput dari godaan si jahat. Seringkali Benediktus digoda untuk keluar dari doa-doanya, untuk meninggalkan pertapaannya dan kembali ke dunia. Namun, Benediktus selalu menolak godaan tersebut secara radikal, ia tidak pernah mau mengikuti godaan tersebut.
Satu ketika Benediktus pernah digoda begitu hebat oleh roh jahat yang membawa ke dalam imajinasinya seorang wanita yang ia temui sebelumnya. Hatinya dibakar dengan kobaran nafsu, hingga hampir menguasai pikirannya untuk meninggalkan pertapaan. Akan tetapi, dibantu oleh kerahiman ilahi, Benediktus segera melawan godaan tersebut dengan melemparkan dirinya ke semak-semak berduri. Sejak saat itu ia tidak pernah lagi mendapat kesukaran yang sama.
3. Pemimpin yang bijaksana
Cara hidup radikal yang dijalani oleh Benediktus rupanya merupakan suatu persiapan untuk suatu karya besar yang telah disiapkan oleh Tuhan baginya. Cara hidup, kesucian, dan kesalehannya banyak menarik orang-orang di sekitarnya untuk mengikuti cara hidupnya yang keras. Benediktus merupakan seorang pemimpin yang bijaksana, ia memimpin murid-muridnya dengan penuh kasih namun tegas dalam menjalankan peraturan biara demi kebaikan hidup bersama. Ketika ia diminta menjadi pemimpin sebuah biara yang merosot kehidupannya, dengan segera ia menerapkan kembali disiplin dan peraturan biara. Meskipun menemui banyak tantangan, ia tetap berusaha sekuat tenaga untuk membawa mereka kembali pada semangat religius yang benar.
4. Pembimbing rohani yang ulung
Santo Benediktus bukan hanya seorang pemimpin yang bijaksana, tetapi juga seorang pembimbing rohani yang ulung. Ia selalu menolong orang-orang yang datang kepadanya, yang mencari bimbingan rohani dan nasehatnya. Dalam mengajar para rahibnya, Benediktus tidak hanya menekankan doa tetapi menekankan juga pekerjaan tangan. Baginya hidup rohani itu harus seimbang antara doa dan kerja. Pekerjaan tangan ia pandang tidak hanya bermartabat tetapi juga baik untuk kesucian.
5. Seorang yang lembut hati
Kasihnya yang begitu besar kepada Allah juga meluap kepada orang-orang yang ada di sekitarnya, khususnya bagi orang-orang yang miskin, menderita, dan sakit. Benediktus seringkali melayani umat yang ada di sekitar biaranya, menyembuhkan yang sakit, memberikan kelegaan kepada orang yang tertekan, membagikan amal dan makanan kepada orang-orang miskin, dan lain-lain.
Benediktus begitu mudah jatuh iba melihat orang yang menderita, dan ia akan berusaha semampunya untuk membantu mereka. Suatu ketika terjadi kelaparan yang amat sangat di Campania. Namun karena belas kasihan dan kelembutan hatinya, ia memberikan semua persediaan makanan di biara kecuali lima potong roti. Pengorbanan dan belas kasihan St. Benediktus rupanya sangat berkenan di hadapan Tuhan, sehingga keesokan harinya ada begitu banyak tepung terigu tergeletak di pintu gerbang biara tanpa diketahui siapa yang meletakkannya.
6. Penuh dengan belas kasih dan pengampunan
Kasihnya yang begitu besar kepada Allah rupanya juga membuat Benediktus menjadi orang yang penuh dengan belas kasihan serta pengampunan kepada orang lain. Baginya kasih kepada sesama adalah perwujudan dari kasihnya yang begitu besar kepada Allah. Kasih bagi Benediktus juga berarti menerima orang lain dalam segala kekurangan dan kelemahan mereka, juga mengampuni segala kesalahan mereka. Namun, itu bukan berarti ia kompromi dengan dosa. Sikapnya ini seperti apa yang diteladankan oleh Yesus sendiri, Ia mengasihi para pendosa tetapi Ia membenci dosa. Sikap ini nampak ketika para rahib di biara memusuhinya, bahkan hendak meracuninya. Belas kasihannya yang begitu besar juga nampak ketika Florentius, seorang imam, membencinya karena iri hati kepada Benediktus.

MERTON'S WAY

HIK. HIDANGAN ISTIMEWA KRISTIANI.
HARAPAN IMAN KASIH.
MERTON'S WAY
1.
“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, No Man Is an Island
Permulaan cinta adalah kesediaan untuk membiarkan mereka yang kita cintai menjadi dirinya sendiri, tidak berusaha mengubah mereka untuk menjadi seperti yang kita bayangkan.
Jika dalam mencintai mereka, kita tidak mencintai mereka apa adanya, namun hanya persamaannya dengan kita, maka kita tidak mencintai mereka, kita hanya mencintai bayangan diri kita sendiri yang kita temukan dalam diri mereka.
- Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island
----------------
2.
“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, The Way of Chuang Tzu
Permulaan cinta adalah kesediaan untuk membiarkan mereka yang kita cintai untuk menjadi dirinya sendiri, tidak berusaha mengubah mereka menjadi seperti yang kita bayangkan.
― Thomas Merton, The Way of Chuang Tzu
===============
3.
“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.”
― Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island
Seni memungkinkan kita untuk menemukan dan kehilangan diri sendiri pada saat yang bersamaan.
― Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island
==========
4.
“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, Thoughts in Solitude

Tuhan Allahku, aku tidak tahu kemana aku pergi.
Aku tidak dapat melihat jalan di depanku
Aku tak tahu kepastian arah menuju.
Aku juga tidak terlalu mengenal diriku sendiri,
dan jika kusangka aku mengikuti keinginan-Mu,
mungkin bukan berarti itulah yang terjadi.
Tapi aku percaya bahwa hasrat untuk menyenangkan-Mu saja
sudah menyenangkan Engkau.
Dan kuharap kumiliki hasrat itu dalam segala hal yang kulakukan.
Kuharap aku tidak pernah melakukan apapun terlepas dari hasrat itu.
Dan aku tahu, jika aku melakukannya,
Engkau akan membimbingku pada jalan yang benar
walaupun aku tidak mengetahuinya.
Karenanya, aku percaya kepada-Mu selalu
walaupun kadang aku seperti tersesat dan ada dalam bayangan kematian.
Aku tidak akan takut, karena Engkau menyertaiku,
dan tidak akan meninggalkan aku menghadapi mara bahaya ku sendirian.
― Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude
-----------
5.
“Love is our true destiny.
We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone –
we find it with another.”
― Thomas Merton, Love and Living
Cinta adalah takdir kita yang sejati.
Kita tidak menemukan arti kehidupan sendirian, kita menemukannya bersama orang lain.
― Thomas Merton, Love and Living
-------------------
6.
“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
Kita tidak perlu tahu persis apa yang terjadi, atau tepat ke arah mana menuju.
Yang kita butuhkan adalah mengenali kemungkinan dan tantangan yang ditawarkan di saat ini, untuk menyambutnya dengan keberanian, iman, dan harapan.
-----------------
7.
“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
Jika kamu ingin mengenalku, jangan bertanya dimana aku tinggal,
atau apa makanan yang kusukai, atau bagaimana aku menyisir rambutku,
tapi tanyalah apa tujuan hidupku, secara rinci,
tanya apa yang kupikir menghalangiku untuk menjalani secara utuh hidup yang kuinginkan.
---------------
8.
“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
“Bersyukur” adalah menyadari kasih Tuhan di dalam segala yang telah Ia berikan, dan Ia telah memberikan segalanya.
Tiap tarikan nafas kita adalah pemberian kasih-Nya,
setiap saat kehidupan adalah rahmat, yang membawa serta rahmat besar dari-Nya.
Rasa syukur adalah menyadari rahmat itu, tidak menganggap rahmat itu "sudah seharusnya", tidak "tak menanggapi"nya, tetapi terus tersadar akan keajaiban baru dan memuji kebaikan Tuhan itu.
Orang yang bersyukur tahu bahwa Tuhan itu baik, bukan dengan dari mendengar kata orang tetapi dari mengalami.
Dan itulah yang membuat perbedaan.
-Thomas Merton
==============
9.
“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
Tugas kita adalah mengasihi orang lain tanpa berhenti untuk mempertanyakan apakah mereka itu pantas dikasihi atau tidak. Itu bukan urusan kita, bahkan, bukan urusan siapapun.
Yang diminta untuk kita lakukan adalah mengasihi, dan kasih itu sendiri yang akan melayakkan masing-masing diri kita sendiri dan orang lain itu.
============
10.
“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, The Seven Storey Mountain
Semakin engkau menghindari penderitaan, semakin engkau akan menderita, karna hal – hal yang remeh akan mulai menyiksamu, sebagai ganti dari ketakutanmu untuk terluka .
Orang yang paling menghindari untuk menderita, pada akhirnya, adalah orang yang paling menderita.
=============
11.
“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
Jangan berharap pada hasil.
Kau mungkin akan harus menerima kenyataan bahwa pekerjaanmu adalah sia-sia dan bahkan tidak menghasilkan apapun, atau hasilnya bertentangan dengan harapanmu.
Kalau kau terbiasa dengan pemikiran seperti ini, kau akan mulai tidak memusatkan perhatian pada “hasilnya”, tapi kepada “nilai”, kepada kebenaran akan pekerjaan itu sendiri.
Secara bertahap kau akan semakin berkurang berjuang untuk “ide” dan lebih kepada orang tertentu. Pada akhirnya, hubungan pribadilah yang akan menyelamatkan segalanya.
===============
12.
“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, New Seeds of Contemplation
Daripada membenci orang yang kita anggap pembuat masalah, bencilah hasrat membenci dan kekacauan dalam jiwamu sendiri, yang adalah membuat masalah.
Kalau kau cinta damai, bencilah ketidak adilan, bencilah tirani, bencilah ketamakan, tapi yang ada di dalam dirimu sendiri, bukan yang ada pada diri orang lain.
================
13.
“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
Akhirnya aku sampai pada kesimpulan bahwa ambisi tertinggiku adalah menjadi apa yang “aku sudah menjadi”.
Bahwa aku tidak akan pernah memenuhi kewajibanku untuk melampaui diri sendiri sebelum aku menerima diriku sendiri, dan jika aku menerima diriku sendiri dengan benar, aku sudah melampaui diriku sendiri.
===============
14.
“If a man is to live, he must be all alive, body, soul, mind, heart, spirit.”
― Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude
Jika seorang hidup, hendaklah ia hidup keseluruhan badan, jiwa, pikiran, perasaan, roh.
==============
15.
“Our idea of God tells us more about ourselves than about Him.”
― Thomas Merton
Pemikiran kita tentang Tuhan mengungkapkan lebih banyak diri kita daripada Dia.
==============
16.
“Anxiety is the mark of spiritual insecurity.”
― Thomas Merton
Kegelisahan adalah tanda “ketidakmantapan spiritual.
===============
17.
“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, No Man Is an Island
Hanya mereka yang pernah mengalami keputusasaan yang bisa benar benar mengakui bahwa ia memerlukan belas kasihan.
Adalah lebih baik menemukan Tuhan dalam keputusasaan daripada hidup dalam kepuasan yang tidak pernah merasa membutuhkan pengampunan.
Hidup yang tanpa masalah sesungguhnya lebih sia sia daripada hidup yang berada di pinggir keputusasaan.
================
18.
“A man knows when he has found his vocation when he stops thinking about how to live and begins to live.”
― Thomas Merton
Orang mengetahui telah menemukan panggilannya ketika ia berhenti berpikir bagaimana cara hidup dan memulai hidup.
==============
19.
“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
Membiarkan diri terbawa bermacam-macam masalah dan konflik,
melayani terlalu banyak tuntutan,mengerjakan terlalu banyak hal,
ingin menolong semua orang dalam segala sesuatu,
adalah “mengalah” pada “kekerasan terhadap waktu” kita.
================
20.
“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
Hidup itu sederhana : kita tinggal di dunia yang terbuka seluruhnya dan keilahian menyinarinya setiap saat. Ini bukanlah hanya kisah dongeng, tapi kenyataan.
=============
21.
“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
Perdamaian menuntut tindakan paling heroik dan pengorbanan yang tersulit.
Menuntut kepahlawanan yang lebih daripada perang. Menuntut kesetiaan kepada kebenaran dan kemurnian nurani yang sempurna.
=============
22.
“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 youfind 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, The Sign of Jonas
Menulis jurnal telah mengajariku bahwa tidak banyak hal – hal baru yang terjadi dalam hidup seperti yang kadang kita kira. Ketika membaca ulang jurnal, kau menyadari bahwa penemuan terbarumu adalah sesuatu yang sudah kau temukan lima tahun lalu. Adalah benar bahwa orang semakin mendalami lebih dan lebih terhadap pemikiran yang sama dan pengalaman yang sama.
===============
23.
“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, The Seven Storey Mountain
Jiwa itu seperti atlet, yang memerlukan lawan yang sepadan dengannya, jika ia dilatih dan diperluas dan didorong untuk menggunakan kekuatannya sepenuhnya, dan dihargai sesuai kecakapannya.
===========
24.
“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, Seeds of Contemplation
Kalau kau menulis untuk Tuhan kau akan menjangkau banyak orang dan memberi mereka sukacita. Kalau kau menulis untuk manusia, kau mungkin bisa mendapat uang dan memberi sukacita pada seorang dan kau mungkin akan membuat suara di dunia, untuk sesaat.
Kalau kau menulis untuk diri sendiri, kau dapat membaca apa yang kau tulis sendiri dan sepuluh menit kemudian kau akan jijik dan berharap mati.
==========
25.
“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, No Man Is an Island
Orang yang takut kesendirian akan selalu kesepian/ dalam kesendirian, tidak peduli berapa banyak ia membuat dirinya dikelilingi orang-orang.
Tetapi orang yang telah belajar dalam “solitude dan rekoleksi”, untuk berdamai dengan kesendiriannya dan memilih kenyataan itu daripada pertemanan yang ilusi, dapat menyadari persahabatan dengan Tuhan yang tak terlihat.
Orang demikian, sendirian bersama Tuhan di segala tempat, dan dia menikmati kehadiran orang lain, karena ia mencintai Tuhan yang hadir dalam diri mereka yang tidak pernah membosankan, dan karena Dia, cintanya kepada mereka tidak pernah menjadi jemu.
Salam HIKers,
Tuhan memberkati & Bunda merestui
Fiat Lux - Be the Light -
Jadilah Terang!
(Gen 1:3)
NB:
Pada jaman para pertapa Padang Gurun di awal perkembangan gereja, hiduplah seorang pertapa (heremits) bernama Josephus, seorang pertapa suci yang hidup di gubug kecil di padang gurun Mesir. Bersamanya hidup juga para pertapa lain di gubug2 terpisah yang agak berjauhan.
Suatu hari Josephus menerima kunjungan seorang turis yang tertarik belajar tentang kesucian hidup di padang gurun. Dalam kunjungannya, tak lupa sang turis memberi oleh2 untuk Josephus sekantong buah anggur yang segar. Sang turis mendengar kisah2 tentang kesederhanaan hidup dan saling berbagi penuh kasih di antara para heremit. Sang turis bertanya kepada Josephus: “Apakah benar para pertapa di sini hidup saling mengasihi dan saling memperhatikan satu sama lain tanpa batas?”
“Benar” jawab Josephus dengan rendah hati tanpa bermaksud pamer. Sang turis tidak langsung percaya dan kembali bertanya: “Apa buktinya?” Josephus tidak menjawab, tapi segera mengambil sekantong anggur segar yang diterimanya dari si turis, lalu pergi menuju pondok terdekat yang dihuni pertapa lainnya. Ia memberikan sekantong anggur itu kepada teman pertapa lainnya.
Pertapa lain yang menerima sekantong anggur segar menerima dengan penuh syukur, lalu teringat pelajaran dari Kitab Suci yang dibacanya,”Kasihilah sesamamu seperti engkau mengasihi dirimu sendiri…” teringat akan sahabat pertapa lainnya, ia keluar dari gubugnya dan memberikan sekantong anggur itu kepada pertapa lainnya. Demikian terjadi hal yang sama dalam beberapa hari.
Pada hari ketiga, sang turis terkejut dan terkagum2 ketika Josephus mendapat kunjungan dari pertapa lain yang mengantarkan sekantong anggur yang sama yang diberikannya kepada Josephus pada hari pertama, anggurnya tak berkurang satu pun!
Kasih itu harus dibagikan! Setiap kebaikan yang kita terima bukanlah sekedar pemberian cuma-cuma. Jika engkau menerima kebaikan dari seseorang, Tuhan ingin mengajarkan bahwa berbagi kasih itu indah. Selalu ada cara bagi Tuhan untuk mengajarkan kepada kita bahwa kita bukan satu2nya orang yang layak menerima kebaikan dari sesama.
Tentu engkau punya hak sepenuhnya untuk menikmati sendiri pemberian kasih dari orang lain. Tetapi jika kebaikan itu engkau simpan sendiri dan enggan meneruskan kebaikan yang sama kepada orang lain, engkau telah menutup jalan Tuhan untuk memberikan kebaikan kepada orang di sekitarmu.
Jika engkau percaya Tuhan itu Maha Kaya akan kasihNya, engkau akan tahu bahwa Ia tak pernah berhutang kebaikan dari kita. Jika kita membagikan kebaikan kepada orang lain, dengan cara yang berbeda kita akan menerima seratus kali lipat kebaikan dari Tuhan. Berbagi kasih tidak akan pernah membuatmu jatuh miskin. Hanya orang yang pelit berbagi yang bisa jatuh miskin.

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

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

TM - THOMAS MERTON MERTON'S WAY : (PART XVI – XVIII)

HIK – HIDANGAN ISTIMEWA KRISTIANI
SERI MONASTIK: "TM - THOMAS MERTON
MERTON'S WAY : (PART XVI – XVIII)
XVI.
“I need my heart to be moved by you.”
― Thomas Merton, Dialogues with Silence: Prayers & Drawings
“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, The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition
“your eyes must turn, again and again, to the House that hides the Sacramental Christ!”
― Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition
“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, No Man Is an Island
“There is only now.”
― Thomas Merton
“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, Zen and the Birds of Appetite
“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, New Seeds of Contemplation
“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, No Man Is an Island
“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, No Man Is an Island
“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, New Seeds of Contemplation
“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, The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition
“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
“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, No Man Is an Island
“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, No Man Is an Island
“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, The Way of Chuang Tzu
“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, Zen and the Birds of Appetite
“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, The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition
“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, The Way of Chuang Tzu
“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, A Year with Thomas Merton: Daily Meditations from His Journals
“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, No Man Is an Island
“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, New Seeds of Contemplation
“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, New Seeds of Contemplation
“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, No Man Is an Island
“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, The Wisdom of the Desert
“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, The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition
“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, No Man Is an Island
“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, The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition
“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, The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition
“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, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander
“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, The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition
XVII.
“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, Cables to the Ace Or, Familiar Liturgies of Misunderstanding
“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, No Man Is an Island
“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, The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition
“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, The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation
“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, The Seven Storey Mountain
“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, The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation
“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, The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition
“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
“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, The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation
“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, New Seeds of Contemplation
“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, Contemplative Prayer
“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, New Seeds of Contemplation
“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, The Seven Storey Mountain
“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, The Seven Storey Mountain
“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, New Seeds of Contemplation
“The time will come when they will sell you even your rain.”
― Thomas Merton, Raids on the Unspeakable
“Before we can see that created things (especially material) are unreal, we must see clearly that they are real.”
― Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude
“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, Contemplative Prayer
“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, The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition
“One bird sits still Watching the work of God:”
― Thomas Merton, A Book of Hours
“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, A Year with Thomas Merton: Daily Meditations from His Journals
“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, Thoughts in Solitude
“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, Zen and the Birds of Appetite
“Si ascendero in coelum, tu illic es. Si descendero in infernum, ades.”
― Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition
“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, Zen and the Birds of Appetite
“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, Conjeturas de un espectador culpable
“our material riches unfortunately imply a spiritual, cultural, and moral poverty that are perhaps far greater than we see.”
― Thomas Merton, Mystics and Zen Masters
“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, Conjeturas de un espectador culpable
XVIII.
“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, The Ascent to Truth
“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, A Year with Thomas Merton: Daily Meditations from His Journals
“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, New Seeds of Contemplation
“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, Thoughts in Solitude
“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, New Seeds of Contemplation
“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, Thoughts in Solitude
“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, Zen and the Birds of Appetite
“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
“He excels in giving irrelevant information.”
― Thomas Merton, Learning To Love: Exploring Solitude and Freedom
“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, Zen and the Birds of Appetite
“Instead of worshipping God through His creation we are always trying to worship ourselves by means of creatures. But”
― Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation
“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, Thoughts in Solitude
“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, The Seven Storey Mountain
“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, No Man Is an Island
“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, The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation
“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, No Man Is an Island
“live,” said Paul,”
― Thomas Merton, Zen and the Birds of Appetite
“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, The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition
“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, Thoughts in Solitude
“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, No Man Is an Island
“(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
“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, The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition
“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, Thoughts in Solitude
“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, A Book of Hours
“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, No Man Is an Island
“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, The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation
“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, No Man Is an Island
“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, A Thomas Merton Reader
“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, No Man Is an Island
“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, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander