THOMAS MERTON
The thoroughly secular man THOMAS MERTON undertook a lifelong spiritual journey into monasticism and the pursuit of his own spirituality. The more than 50 books, 2000 poems, and numerous essays, reviews, and lectures that have been recorded and published, now form the canon of Merton’s writings. His importance as a writer in the American literary tradition is becoming clear. His influence as a religious thinker and social critic is taking its place alongside such luminaries as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Flannery O’Connor, and Martin Luther King. His explorations of the religions of the east initiated Merton’s entrance into inter-religious dialogue that puts him in the pioneering forefront of worldwide ecumenical movements.
In our creation, God asked a question and in our truly living; God answers the question.
To say that I was born with original sin is to say I was born with a false self. I was born in a mask.
When the Love of God is in me, God is able to love you through me and you are able to love God through me. If my soul were closed to that love, God’s love for you and your love for God and God’s love for Himself in you and in me, would be denied the particular expression which it finds through me and through no other.
Because God’s love is in me, it can come to you from a different and special direction that would be closed if He did not live in me, and because his love is in you, it can come to me from a quarter from which it would not otherwise come. And because it is in both of us, God has greater glory. His love is expressed in two ways in which it would not otherwise be expressed; that is, in two more joys that could not exist without Him.
We must learn to realize that the love of God seeks us in every situation, and seeks our good. His inscrutible love seeks our awakening.
The object of salvation is that which is unique, irreplaceable, incommunicable- that which is myself alone…We must be saved from the immersion in the sea of lies and passions which is called “the world…the person must be rescued from the individiual.
To say that I am created in the image of God is to say that love is the reason of my existence…Love is my true character. Love is my name.
In the last analysis, the individual person is responsible for living his own life and for “finding himself.” If he persists in shifting his responsibility to somebody else, he fails to find out the meaning of his own existence.
Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone-we find it with another
Love seeks one thing only: the good of the one loved. It leaves all the other secondary effects to take care of themselves. Love, therefore, is its own reward.
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.
The tighter you squeeze, the less you have.
We stumble and fall constantly even when we are most enlightened. But when we are in true spiritual darkness, we do not even know that we have fallen.
What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it, all the rest are not only useless, but disastrous.
