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Reflections With THOMAS MERTON
Thomas Merton, Trappist monk, priest, and author of many books including the bestselling autobiography The Seven Story Mountain, died accidentally in 1968. He left behind a deeply thoughtful, tough-minded body of writings about spiritual living in the modern world. These pages offer selections from those writing for all who would explore the interior life.
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Vocation to Solitude -- To deliver oneself up, to hand oneself over, entrust oneself completely to the silence of a wide landscape of woods and hills, or sea, or desert; to sit still while the sun comes up over the land and fills its silences with light. To pray and work in the morning and to labor in meditation in the evening when night falls upon that land and when the silence fills itself with darkness and with stars. This is a true and special vocation. There are few who are willing to belong completely to such silence, to let it soak into their bones, to breathe nothing but silence, to feed on silence, and to turn the very substance of their life into a living and vigilant silence.
~ Thomas Merton, Thoughs in Solitude |
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Out here in the woods I can think of nothing except God. It is not so much that I think of Him as I am as aware of Him as I am of the sun and the clouds and the blue sky and the thin cedar trees...Engulfed in the simple and lucid actuality of the afternoon -- I mean God's afternoon -- this sacramental moment of time when the shadows will get longer and longer, and one small bird sings quietly in the cedars, one car goes by in the remote distance, and the oak leaves move in the wind.
High up in the summer sky I watch the silent flight of a vulture, and the day goes by in prayer. This solitude confirms my call to solitude. The more I am in it, the more I love it. One day it will possess me entirely and no man will ever see me again.
~Thomas Merton, The Search for Solitude |
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O Lord my God, where have I been sleeping? What have I been doing? How slowly I awaken once again to the barrenness of my life and its confusion. You will forgive me if it is often that way -- I do not mean it to be. How little faith there has been in me -- how inert have been my hours of solitude, how my time has been wasted. You will forgive me if next week, too, my time is all wasted and I am once again in confusion. But at least this afternoon, sitting on a boulder among the birches, I thought with compunction of Your love and Your kingdom. And again tonight, by the gatehouse, I thought of the hope You have planted in our hearts and of the Kingdom of Heaven that I have done so little to gain for myself and for others.
Forgive me, O Lord, by your Cross and Passion and Resurrection. Teach me to see what it means that I am saved by Your Church. Teach me how, as a priest, I am to bring others to the knowledge of You and of the Kingdom and to salvation. Teach me to live in You with care for the purity of faith, with the zeal of true hope, and with true and objective charity for my brothers, for the
glory of the Father, Amen.
~Thomas Merton, Dialogues with Silence |
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It is in deep solitude that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brothers. The more solitary I am, the more affection I have for them. It is pure affection, and filled with reverence for the solitude of others. Solitude and silence teach me to love my brothers for what they are, not for what they say. Now it is no longer a question of dishonoring them by accepting their fictions, believing in their images of themselves which their weakness obliges them to compose, in the wan work of communication. Yet there will, it is true, always remain a dialectic between the words of men and their being. This will tell something about them we would not have realized if the words had not been there. ~Thomas Merton |
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A priest must not put the salvation of souls above his own soul. There is no question of a choice like that. But he has to put God and the Mass before everything. He has the whole Church on his conscience, and he not only gives up his will in order to possess the virtue of obedience, he gives up his will in order to become an instrument for the salvation of the world and for the pure glory of God. ~ Thomas Merton |
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Today I was on as deacon at Benediction. The new sense of practicality did not extend to the ceremonies. I was in a fog, but very happy. All I could think about was picking up the Host. I was afraid the whole Church might come down on my head, because of what I used to be -- as if that were not forgotten! But God weighs scarcely anything at all. Though containing more than the universe, He was so light that I nearly fell off the altar. He communicated all that lightness to my own spirit and when I came down I was so happy I had a hard time to keep myself from laughing out loud. ~Thomas Merton |
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Prayer and love are learned in the hour when prayer has become impossible and your heart has turned to stone. If you have never had any distractions you don't know how to pray. For the secret of prayer is a hunger for God and for the vision of God, a hunger that lies far deeper than the level of language or affection. And a man whose memory and imagination are persecuting him with a crowd of useless or even evil thoughts and images may sometimes be forced to pray far better, in the depths of his murdered heart, than one whose mind is swimming with clear concepts and brillian purposes and easy acts of love.
~Thomas Merton |
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Thomas Merton 2 |
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