Thomas Merton

1915 - 1968

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 I am following your will does not mean 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 I will 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.

From Thoughts in Solitude, Part II, Ch 2…

The things I thought were so important—because of the effort I put into them—have turned out to be of small value. And the things I never thought about, the things I was never able either to measure or to expect, were the things that mattered.

“Yesterday, in Louisville, at the corner of 4th and Walnut, I wassuddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all thesepeople, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness. The whole illusion of a separate holy existence is a dream. Not that I question the reality of my vocation, or of my monastic life: but the conception of “separation from the world” that we have in the monastery too easily presents itself as a complete illusion….I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”

Excerpts from Contemplative Prayer

In meditation we should not look for a “method” or a “system,” but cultivate an “attitude,” an “outlook”: faith, openness, attention, reverence, expectation, supplication, trust, joy. All these finally permeate our being with love in so far as our living faith tells us we are in the presence of God, that we live in Christ, that in the Spirit of God we “see” God our Father without “seeing.”

Some people may doubtless have a spontaneous gift for meditative prayer. This is unusual today. Most people have to learn to meditate. There are ways of meditation. But we should not expect to find magical methods, systems which will make all difficulties and obstacles dissolve into thin air.

Excerpts from Contemplative Prayer

These obstacles [keeping us from becoming people of prayer] may have very deep roots in our character, and in fact we may eventually learn that a whole lifetime will barely be sufficientfor their removal. For example, many people who have a few natural gifts and a little ingenuity tend to imagine that they can quite easily learn, by their own cleverness, to master the methods—one might say the “tricks”—of the spiritual life.

The only trouble is that in the spiritual life there are no tricks and no shortcuts. Those who imagine that they can discover spiritual gimmicks and put them to work for themselves usually ignore God’s will and his grace. They make up their minds that they are going to attain this or that and try to write their own ticket in the life of contemplation.

Excerpts from Contemplative Prayer

Under the pretext that what is “within” is in fact real, spiritual, supernatural, etc., one cultivates neglect and contempt for the “external” as worldly, sensual, material, and opposed to grace. This is bad theology and bad asceticism. In fact, it is bad in every respect because instead of accepting reality as it is, we reject it in order to explore some perfect realm of abstract ideals which in fact has no reality at all.

Very often the inertia and repugnance which characterize the so-called “spiritual life” of many Christians could perhaps be cured by a simple respect for the concrete realities of everyday life, for nature, for the body, for one’s work, one’s friends, one’s surroundings, etc. (…) Meditation has no point unless it is firmly rooted in life.

For more information…

The Thomas Merton Center: http://www.merton.org/

The Merton Institute: http://www.mertoninstitute.org/

The Abbey of Gethsemani: http://www.monks.org/

Documentary: Soul Searching: The Journey of Thomas Merton

Bibliography: http://elvis.rowan.edu/~kilroy/JEK/12/10.html