No Man Is an Island

by Thomas Merton

Only the man who has had to face despair is really convinced that he needs mercy. Those who do not want mercy never seek it. It is better to find God on the threshold of despair than to risk our lives in a complacency that has never felt the need of forgiveness. A life that is without problems may literally be more hopeless than one that always verges on despair.

Just as love does not find its fulfillment merely in loving blindly, so freedom wastes away when it merely “acts freely” without any purpose. An act without purpose lacks something of the perfection of freedom, because freedom is more than a matter of aimless choice. It is not enough to affirm my liberty by choosing “something.” I must use and develop my freedom by choosing something good.

The man who can face such dryness and abandonment for a long time, with great patience, and ask nothing more of God but to do His holy will and never offend Him, finally enters into pure prayer.

But it is clear that married life, for its success, presupposes the capacity for a deeply human love which ought to be spiritual and physical at the same time. The existence of a sacrament of matrimony shows that the Church neither considers the body evil nor repugnant, but that the “flesh” spiritualized by prayer and the Holy Ghost, yet remaining completely physical, can come to play an important part in our sanctification.

The latter is afraid of good things, and consequently cannot use them properly. He is terrified of the pleasure God has put in things, and in his terror thinks only of himself. He imagines God has placed all the good things of the world before him like a bait in a trap. He worries at all times about his own “perfection.” His struggle for perfection becomes a kind of battle of wits with the Creator Who made all things good. The very goodness of creatures becomes a threat to the purity of this virtuous one, who would like to abstain from everything. But he cannot. He is human, like the rest of men, and must make use like them of food and drink and sleep. Like them he must see the sky, and love, in spite of himself, the light of the sun! Every feeling of pleasure fills him with a sense of guilt. It has besmirched his own adored perfection. Strange that people like this should enter monasteries, which have no other reason for existing than the love of God!

Self-contemplation leads to the most terrible despair: the despair of a god that hates himself to death.

The relative perfection which we must attain to in this life if we are to live as sons of God is not the twenty-four-hour-a-day production of perfect acts of virtue, but a life from which practically all the obstacles to God’s love have been removed or overcome.

Love is perfect in proportion to its freedom. It is free in proportion to its purity. We act most freely when we act purely in response to the love of God. But the purest love of God is not servile, not blind, not limited by fear. Pure charity is fully aware of the power of its own freedom. Perfectly confident of being loved by God, the soul that loves Him dares to make a choice of its own, knowing that its own choice will be acceptable to love.

If we wait for some people to become agreeable or attractive before we begin to love them, we will never begin.

But in the mind of St. Paul the Resurrection of Christ demands our resurrection also, and the two are so inseparable that “if there be no Resurrection of the dead, then Christ is not risen again” (I Corinthians 15:13). It is clear then that the general resurrection is so fundamental a doctrine in the Christian faith that no man who does not accept it can truly call himself a Christian. For St. Paul adds: “If Christ be not risen again, then is our preaching vain and your faith is also vain” (I Corinthians 15:17).

Sincerity becomes impossible in a world that is ruled by a falsity that it thinks it is clever enough to detect. Propaganda is constantly held up to contempt, but in contemning it we come to love it after all. In the end we will not be able to get along without it.

The arguments of religious men are so often insincere, and their insincerity is proportionate to their anger. Why do we get angry about what we believe? Because we do not really believe it. Or else what we pretend to be defending as the “truth” is really our own self-esteem. A man of sincerity is less interested in defending the truth than in stating it clearly, for he thinks that if the truth be clearly seen it can very well take care of itself.

Most of the moral and mental and even religious complexities of our time go back to our desperate fear that we are not and can never be really loved by anyone.

Sincerity is, perhaps, the most vitally important quality of true prayer. It is the only valid test of our faith, our hope, and our love of God. No matter how deep our meditations, nor how severe our penances, how grand our liturgy, how pure our chant, how noble our thoughts about the mysteries of God; they are all useless if we do not really mean what we say.

Those who love only His apparent presence cannot follow the Lord wherever He goes. They do not love Him perfectly if they do not allow Him to be absent. They do not respect His liberty to do as He pleases. They think their prayers have made them able to command Him, and to subject His will to their own. They live on the level of magic rather than on the level of religion.

Do not anxiously desire to have others find consolation in God, but rather help them to love God.