Whether you teach or live in the cloister or nurse the sick, whether you are in religion or out of it, married or single, no matter who you are or what you are, you are called to the summit of perfection: you are called to a deep interior life perhaps even to mystical prayer, and to pass the fruits of your contemplation on to others. And if you cannot do so by word, then by example.
Yet if this sublime fire of infused love burns in your soul, it will inevitably send forth throughout the Church and the world an influence more tremendous than could be estimated by the radius reached by words or by example.
Tags: love faith prayer perfection contemplation
The peace the world pretends to desire is really no peace at all. To some men, peace merely means the liberty to exploit other people without fear of retaliation or interference. To others, peace means the freedom to rob brothers without interruption. To still others, it means the leisure to devour the goods of the earth without being compelled to interrupt their pleasures to feed those whom their greed is starving. And to practically everybody, peace simply means the absence of any physical violence that might cast a shadow over lives devoted to the satisfaction of their animal appetites for comfort and pleasure.
Thomas MertonIt is not possible to be intimate with nore than very few, because there are only very few in the world with whom we have practically everything in common.
There is, however, one universal basis for friendship with all men: we are all loved by God, and I should desire them all to love Him with all their power.
... the truth remains that our destiny is to love one another as Christ has loved us.
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 MertonThe peculiar grace of a shaker chair is due to the fact that it was made by someone capable of believing that an angel might come and sit on it.
Thomas MertonThe religious answer is not really religious if it's not fully real. Evasion is the answer of superstition.
Thomas MertonWhat every man looks for in life is his own salvation and the salvation of the men he lives with. By salvation I mean first of all the full discovery of who he himself really is.
Thomas MertonBut if we love ourselves in the wrong way, we become incapable of loving anybody else. And indeed when we love ourselves wrongly we hate ourselves; if we hate ourselves we cannot help hating others.
Thomas MertonDeath 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.
Thomas MertonTags: inspirational spirituality meditation monasticism
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. Free by nature, in the image of God, I was nevertheless the prisoner of my own violence and my own selfishness, in the image of the world into which I was born. That world was the picture of Hell, full of men like myself, loving God and yet hating Him; born to love Him, living instead in fear and hopeless self-contradictory hungers.
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