Happiness Is Not A Matter Of Intensity

One who is content with what he has, and who accepts the fact that he inevitably misses very much in life, is far better off than one who has much more but who worries about all he may be missing.
For we cannot make the best of what we are, if our hearts are always divided between what we are and what we are not.

-- Thomas Merton, No Man Is An Island

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.

-- Thomas Merton, No Man Is An Island

A Virtuous Life

St. Thomas says [I-II, Q.34,a.4) that a man is good when his will takes joy in what is good, evil when his will takes joy in what is evil.
He is virtuous when he finds happiness in a virtuous life, sinful when he takes pleasure in a sinful life.
Hence the things that we love tell us what we are.
A man is known, then, by his end.
He is also known by his beginning.
And if you wish to know him as he is at any given moment, find how far he is from his beginning and how near to his end.
-- Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude

The good man comes from God and returns to Him.
He starts with the gift of being and with the capacities God has given him.
He reaches the age of reason and begins to make choices.
-- Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude

Time For Courage & Faith

[Circular Letter, Advent-Christmas, 1967]

The times are difficult.

They call for courage and faith.

Faith is in the end a lonely virtue.

Lonely especially where a deep authentic community of love is not an accomplished fact, but a job to be begun over and over...

Love is not something we get from Mother Church as a child gets milk from the breast: it also has to be given.

We don't get love if don't give any.

Christmas, then, is not just a sweet regression to breast-feeding and infancy.

It is a serious and sometimes difficult feast.

Difficult especially if, for psychological reasons, we fail to grasp the indestructible kernel of hope that is in it.

If we are just looking for a little consolation-we may be disappointed.

Let us pray for one another, love one another in truth, in the sobriety of earnest, Christian hope: for hope, says Paul, does not deceive.

A blessed and joyous Christmas to all of you.

Thomas Merton, The Road to Joy

Solitude

Solitude as act: the reason no one understands solitude, or bothers to try to understand it, is that it appears to be nothing but a condition. Something one elects to undergo, like standing under a cold shower. Actually, solitude is a realization, an actualization, even a kind of creation, as well as a liberation of active forces within us, forces that are more than our own, and yet more ours that what appears to be "ours". As a mere condition, solitude can be passive, inert and basically unreal: a kind of permanent coma. One has to work at it to keep out of this condition. One has to work actively at solitude, not by putting fences around oneself but by destroying all the fences and throwing away all the disguises and getting down to the naked root of one's inmost desire, which is the desire of liberty-reality. To be free from the illusion that reality creates when one is out of right relation to it, and to be real in the freedom which reality gives when one is rightly related to it.

Thomas Merton. Learning to Love, Journals Volume 6

Fundamental Problem Of The Spiritual Life

The basic and most fundamental problem of the spiritual life is this acceptance of our hidden and dark self, with which we tend to identify all the evil that is in us.
We must learn by discernment to separate the evil growth of our actions from the good ground of the soul.
And we must prepare that ground so that a new life can grow up from it within us, beyond our knowledge and beyond our conscious control.
The sacred attitude is, then, one of reverence, awe and silence before the mystery that begins to take place within us when we become aware of our innermost self.
In silence, hope, expectation, and unknowing, the man of faith abandons himself to the divine will: not as an arbitrary and magic power whose decrees must be spelled out from cryptic ciphers, but as to the stream of reality and life itself.
The sacred attitude is, then, one of deep and fundamental respect for the real in whatever new form it may present itself.
Thomas Merton, The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation

Spiritual Instinct

The deepest spiritual instinct in man is that urge of inner truth that demands that he be faithful to himself: to his deepest and most original potentialities.

Thomas Merton, Love and Living

Thoughts For Christmas

The mystery of Christmas lays upon us all a debt and an obligation to the rest of [humankind] and to the whole created universe. We who have seen the light of Christ are obliged, by the greatness of the grace that has been given us, to make known the presence of the Savior to the ends of the earth. This we will do not by preaching the glad tidings of His coming, but above all by revealing Him in our lives. Christ is born to us today, in order that He may appear to the whole world through us.

Thomas Merton
Seasons of Celebration

 

This one day is the day of His birth, but every day of our mortal lives must be his manifestation, His divine Epiphany, in the world which He has created and redeemed.

Thomas Merton
Seasons of Celebration

Not My Own Salvation

[In the last analysis what I am looking for in solitude is not happiness or fulfillment but salvation. Not "my own salvation" but the salvation of everybody. Here is where the game gets serious. I have used the word revolt in connection with solitude. Revolt against what? Against a notion of salvation that is entirely legal and extrinsic and can be achieved no matter how false, no matter how shriveled and fruitless one's inner life really is. This is the worst ambiguity: the impression that one can be grossly unfaithful to life, to experience, to love, to other people, to one's own deepest self, and yet be "saved" by an act of stubborn conformity, by the will to be correct. In the end this seems to me to be fatally like the act by which one is lost: the determination to be "right" at all costs, by dint of hardening one's core around an arbitrary choice of a fixed position. To close in on one's central wrongness with the refusal to admit that it might be wrong. . . I am here [in solitude and in the hermitage] for one thing: to be open, to be not "closed in" on any one choice to the exclusion of all others: to be open to God's will and freedom to His love, which comes to save me from all in myself that resists Him and says no to Him. This I must do not to justify myself, not to be right, not to be good, but because the whole world of lost people needs this opening by which salvation can get into it through me.

Thomas Merton
Learning to Love

 

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The big reasons for solitude: the true perspectives- leaving the "world"-even the monastic world with its business, vanities, superficiality. More and more I see the necessity of leaving my own ridiculous "career" as a religious journalist. Stop writing for publication- except poems and creative meditations.

Solitude-witness to Christ-emptiness.

Thomas Merton
A Search for Solitude

 

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The Sacred Attitude

The basic and most fundamental problem in the spiritual life is this acceptance of our hidden and dark self, with which we tend to identify all the evil that is in us.

We must learn by discernment to separate the evil growth of our actions from the good ground of the soul.

And we must prepare that ground so that a new life can grow up from it within us, beyond our knowledge and beyond our conscious control.

The sacred attitude is then one of reverence, awe and silence before the mystery that begins to take place within us when we become aware of our inmost self.

In silence, hope, expectation, and unknowing, the man of faith abandons himself to the divine will: not as to an arbitrary and magic power whose decrees must be spelled out from cryptic ciphers, but as to the stream of reality and of life itself.

Thomas Merton.
The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation.

 

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Ordinariness

In a world of tension and breakdown it is necessary for there to be those who seek to integrate their inner lives not by avoiding anguish and running away from problems, but by facing them in their naked reality and in their ordinariness.
Thomas Merton

शिप्व्रेक्केद इन साउथ कैरोलाइना

The Very Center

The Bible is a "worldly" book in the sense that
it sees God at the very center of man's life,
his work, his relations with his fellow man,
his play and his joy.

Thomas Merton

Opening the Bible

Key Problem Of Humanism

The key problem of humanism is the problem of that authentic love which united man to man not simply in a symbiotic and semiconscious relationship but as person to person in the authentic freedom of a mutual gift.

Thomas Merton

Love and Living

Pray - Period!

Pray - period!

Don't expect anything.

Or better, expect nothing.

Prayer cleanses us of expectations and

allows holy will, providence,

and life itself an entry.

What could be more worth

the effort -- or the noneffort?

Thomas Moore

By Experience

The grateful person knows that God is good,

not by hearsay but by experience.

And that is what makes all the difference.

Thomas Merton

Life's Secret

Love is our true destiny.
We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone-we find it with another.
We do not discover the secret of our lives merely by study and calculation in our own isolated meditations.
The meaning of our life is a secret that has to be revealed to us in love, by the one we love.

Thomas Merton

Prayer And Love

Prayer and love are learned in the hour
when prayer becomes impossible and
the heart has turned to stone.
Thomas Merton

Rain

The night became very dark.
The rain surrounded the whole cabin with its enormous virginal myth, a whole world of meaning, of secrecy, of silence, of rumor.
Think of it:
all that speech pouring down,
selling nothing,
judging nobody,
drenching the thick mulch of dead leaves,
soaking the trees,
filling the gullies and crannies of the wood with water,
washing out the places where men have stripped the hillside!
What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone,
in the forest, at night,
cherished by this wonderful, unintelligible, perfectly innocent speech,
the most comforting speech in the world,
the talk that rain makes by itself all over the ridges, and
the talk of the watercourses everywhere in the hollows!

Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it.
It will talk as long as it wants, this rain.
As long as it talks I am going to listen.

-- Thomas Merton.

Love And Need

When people are truly in love, they experience far more than just a mutual need of each other's company and consolation.
In their relations with each other they become different people: they are more than their everyday selves, more alive, more understanding, more enduring . . . They are made over into new beings. They are transformed by the power of their love.

Love is the revelation of our deepest personal meaning, value and identity.
But this revelation remains impossible as long as we are the prisoners of our own egoism.
I cannot find myself in myself, but only in another.
My true meaning and worth are shown to me not in my estimate of myself, but in the eyes of the one who loves me; and that one must love me as I am, with my faults and limitations, revealing to me the truth that these faults and limitations cannot destroy my worth in the eyes of that one who loves me; and that I am therefore valuable as a person, in spite of my shortcomings, in spite of the imperfections of my exterior "package."
The package is totally unimportant.
What matters is this infinitely precious message which I can discover only in my love for another person.
And this message, this secret, is not fully revealed to me unless at the same time I am able to see and understand the mysterious and unique worth of the one I love.

-- Thomas Merton.

"Love and Need" in Love and Living: 31.

Love is not only a special way of being alive,
it is the perfection of life.

He who loves is more alive and more real
that he was when he did not love.

-- Love and Living: 32.

Progressive Deadening Of Conscience

"It is sometimes discouraging to see how small the Christian peace movement is, and especially here in America where it is most necessary.
But we have to remember that this is the usual pattern, and the Bible has led us to expect it.
Spiritual work is done with disproportionately small and feeble instruments.
And now above all when everything is so utterly complex, and when people collapse under the burden of confusions and cease to think at all, it is natural that few may want to take on the burden of trying to effect something in the moral and spiritual way, in political action.
Yet this is precisely what has to be done.

[T]he great danger is that under the pressure of anxiety and fear,
the alternation of crisis and relaxation and new crisis,
the people of the world will come to accept gradually the idea of war,
the idea of submission to total power, and
the abdication of reason, spirit and individual conscience.

The great peril of the cold war is
the progressive deadening of conscience.

[I] rely very much on your help and friendship. Send me anything you think will be of service to the cause of peace, and pray that in all things I may act wisely."

-- Thomas Merton,
"Letter to Jean and Hildegard Goss-Mayer,"
The Hidden Ground of Love. Letters, Volume 1: 325-326

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It is the feast of St. Hilary [January 14], Doctor of the Church, who said:

"The best way to solve the problem of rendering
to Caesar what is Caesar's is to have nothing that is Caesar's."

-- Thomas Merton,
The Hidden Ground of Love: 337

Unity

"The heresy of individualism: thinking oneself a completely self-sufficient unit and asserting this imaginary "unity" against all others. The affirmation of the self as simply "not the other". The true way is just the opposite: the more I am able to affirm others, to say "yes" to them in myself, by discovering them in myself and myself in them, the more real I am. I am fully real if my own heart says yes to everyone.
I will be a better Catholic, not if I can refute every shade of Protestantism, but if I can affirm the truth in it and still go further.
So, too, with the Muslims, the Hindus, the Buddhists, etc. This does not mean syncretism, indifferentism, the vapid and careless friendliness that accepts everything by thinking of nothing. There is much that one cannot "affirm" and "accept," but first one must say "yes" where one really can.
If I affirm myself as a Catholic merely by denying all that is Muslim, Jewish, Protestant, Hindu, Buddhist, etc., in the end I will find that there is not much left for me to affirm as a Catholic: and certainly no breath of the Spirit with which to affirm it."

-- Thomas Merton,
Conjectures of A Guilty Bystander: 144

"If I do not have unity in myself,

how can I even think,

let alone speak, of unity among Christians?

Yet, of course, in seeking unity for all Christians,

I also attain unity within myself."

-- Thomas Merton,
Conjectures of A Guilty Bystander: 143