No Man Is an Island

by Thomas Merton

Prayer is inspired by God in the depth of our own nothingness. It is the movement of trust, of gratitude, of adoration, or of sorrow that places us before God, seeing both Him and ourselves in the light of His infinite truth, and moves us to ask Him for the mercy, the spiritual strength, the material help that we all need. The man whose prayer is so pure that he never asks God for anything does not know who God is, and does not know who he is himself: for he does not know his own need of God.

Our happiness consists in doing the will of God. But the essence of this happiness does not lie merely in an agreement of wills. It consists in a union with God.

We dwell in the will of God as in a sanctuary. His will is the cloud of darkness that surrounds His immediate presence.

There are religious men who have become so familiar with the concept of God’s will that their familiarity has bred an apparent contempt. It has made them forget that God’s will is more than a concept. It is a terrible and transcendent reality, a secret power which is given to us, from moment to moment, to be the life of our life and the soul of our own soul’s life. It is the living flame of God’s own Spirit, in Whom our own soul’s flame can play, if it wills, like a mysterious angel. God’s will is not an abstraction, not a machine, not an esoteric system. It is a living concrete reality in the lives of men, and our souls are created to burn as flames within His flame.

True happiness is not found in any other reward than that of being united with God. If I seek some other reward besides God Himself, I may get my reward but I cannot be happy.

If the Lord has given me intelligence, it is because He wills me to see something of His intentions for me, in order that I may enter into His plans with a free and intelligent co-operation. And so I cannot merely shut my eyes and will “whatever He wills” without ever looking up to see what He is doing.

Now the divine inheritance which God the Father gives to us in the Spirit of His love is simply the life of His incarnate Word in our souls. If we would live like sons of God, we must reproduce in our own lives the life and the charity of His only begotten Son.

Everything that exists and everything that happens bears witness to the will of God. It is one thing to see a sign and another thing to interpret that sign correctly.

And yet if we are too anxious to pry into the mystery that surrounds us we will lose the prophet’s reverence and exchange it for the impertinence of soothsayers.

If I am to know the will of God, I must have the right attitude toward life. I must first of all know what life is, and to know the purpose of my existence.

indeed knowing all moral theology and ethics and canon law, I might still go through life conforming myself to certain indications of God’s will without ever fully giving myself to God. For that, in the last analysis, is the real meaning of His will. He does not need our sacrifices, He asks for our selves. And if He prescribes certain acts of obedience, it is not because obedience is the beginning and the end of everything. It is only the beginning. Charity, divine union; transformation in Christ: these are the end.

Why? Because in order to find my true self in Christ, I must go beyond the limits of my own narrow egoism. In order to save my life, I must lose it. For my life in God is and can only be a life of unselfish charity.

And since no man is an island, since we all depend on one another, I cannot work out God’s will in my own life unless I also consciously help other men to work out His will in theirs.

Everything that God wills in my life is directed to this double end: my perfection as part of a universal whole, and my perfection in myself as an individual person, made in God’s image and likeness.

This view of life as a growth in God, as a transformation in Christ, and as a supernatural self-realization in the mystical body of Christ is the only one that really helps us to recognize and interpret the will of God correctly.

It takes more than an occasional act of faith to have such pure intentions. It takes a whole life of faith, a total consecration to hidden values. It takes sustained moral courage and heroic confidence in the help of divine grace. But above all it takes the humility and spiritual poverty to travel in darkness and uncertainty, where so often we have no light and see no sign at all.

It is not enough to do the will of God because His will is unavoidable. Nor is it enough to will what He wills because we have to. We have to will His will because we love it.

If I do His will as a free act of homage and adoration paid to a wisdom that I cannot see, His will itself becomes the life and substance and reality of my worship. But if I do His will as a perfunctory adjustment of my own will to the unavoidable, my worship is hollow and without heart.

Once we have heard the voice of the Almighty fulfilling His own command by speaking it in our hearts, we realize that our contemplation can never again be a mere looking or a mere seeking: it must also be a doing and a fulfillment. We hunger for the transforming words of God, words spoken to our spirit in secret and containing our whole destiny in themselves. We come to live by nothing but this voice. Our contemplation is rooted in the mystery of Divine Providence, and in its actuality. Providence can no longer be for us a philosophical abstraction. It is no longer a supernatural agency to provide us with food and clothing at the right time. Providence itself becomes our food and our clothing. God’s mysterious decisions are themselves our life.

Action is charity looking outward to other men, and contemplation is charity drawn inward to its own divine source.

the only thing that really matters is for love to spring up inexhaustibly from the infinite abyss of Christ and of God.

But the man of simple intention works in an atmosphere of prayer: that is to say he is recollected. His spiritual reserves are not all poured out into his work, but stored where they belong, in the depths of his being, with his God. He is detached from his work and from its results.

There is, therefore, much more in the word of the Cross than the acceptance of suffering or the practice of self-denial. The Cross is something positive. It is more than a death.

The Christian must not only accept suffering: he must make it holy. Nothing so easily becomes unholy as suffering.

Merely accepted, suffering does nothing for our souls except, perhaps, to harden them. Endurance alone is no consecration. True asceticism is not a mere cult of fortitude. We can deny ourselves rigorously for the wrong reason and end up by pleasing ourselves mightily with our self-denial.

Some men believe in the power and the value of suffering. But their belief is an illusion. Suffering has no power and no value of its own. It is valuable only as a test of faith.

To believe in suffering is pride: but to suffer, believing in God, is humility. For pride may tell us that we are strong enough to suffer, that suffering is good for us because we are good. Humility tells us that suffering is an evil which we must always expect to find in our lives because of the evil that is in ourselves. But faith also knows that the mercy of God is given to those who seek Him in suffering, and that by His grace we can overcome evil with good. Suffering, then, becomes good by accident, by the good that it enables us to receive more abundantly from the mercy of God.

The saint is not one who accepts suffering because he likes it, and confesses this preference before God and men in order to win a great reward. He is one who may well hate suffering as much as anybody else, but who so loves Christ, Whom he does not see, that he will allow His love to be proved by any suffering. And he does this not because he thinks it is an achievement, but because the charity of Christ in his heart demands that it be done.

The saint is one so attuned to the spirit and heart of Christ that he is compelled to answer the demands of love by a love that matches that of Christ. This is for him a need so deep and so personal and so exacting that it becomes his whole destiny.

Some men have been picked out to bear witness to Christ’s love in lives overwhelmed by suffering.

Without God, we are no longer persons. We lose our manhood and our dignity. We become dumb animals under pain, happy if we can behave at least like quiet animals and die without too much commotion.

Suffering, therefore, must make sense to us not as a vague universal necessity, but as something demanded by our own personal destiny. When I see my trials not as the collision of my life with a blind machine called fate, but as the sacramental gift of Christ’s love, given to me by God the Father along with my identity and my very name, then I can consecrate them and myself with them to God.

For then I realize that my suffering is not my own. It is the Passion of Christ, stretching out its tendrils into my life in order to bear rich clusters of grapes, making my soul dizzy with the wine of Christ’s love, and pouring that wine as strong as fire upon the whole world.

If we consider suffering to be the greatest evil and pleasure the greatest good, we will live continually submerged in the only great evil that we ought to avoid without compromise: which is sin.

And why should we destroy ourselves by willing what God does not will? To will against His will is to turn our will against ourselves. Our deepest spiritual need is for whatever thing God wills for us. To will something else is to deprive ourselves of life itself. So, when we sin, our spirit dies of starvation.

What can human sympathy offer us in the loneliness of death? Flowers are an indecency in a death without God. They only serve to cover the body. The thing that has died has become a thing to be decorated and rejected. May its hopeless loneliness be forgotten and not remind us of our own!

In His Passion, in the sacraments which bring His Passion into our lives, the helplessness of human love is transformed into a divine power which raises us above all evil. It has conquered everything. Such love knows no separation. It fears suffering no more than young crops fear the spring rain.

The Christian has more than a philosophy of suffering. Sometimes, indeed, he may have no philosophy at all. His faith may be so inarticulate as to seem absurd. Nevertheless, he knows the peace of one who has conquered everything. Why is this? Because Christianity is Christ living in us, and Christ has conquered everything.

His love is so much stronger than death that the death of a Christian is a kind of triumph. And although we rightly sorrow at the sensible separation from those we love (since we are also meant to love their human presence), yet we rejoice in their death because it proves to us the strength of our mutual love. The conviction in our hearts, the unshakeable hope of communion with our dead in Christ, is always telling us that they live and that He lives and that we live. This is our great inheritance, which can only be increased by suffering well taken: this terrific grip of the divine life on our own souls, this grip of clean love that holds us so fast that it keeps us eternally free.

Heroism alone is useless, unless it be born of God. The fortitude given us in the charity of Christ is not complicated by pride.

The effect of suffering upon us depends on what we love. If we love ourselves selfishly, suffering is merely hateful.

Worse, if a man loves himself and learns that suffering is unavoidable, he may even come to take a perverse pleasure in suffering itself, showing that he loves and hates himself at the same time. In any case, if we love ourselves, suffering inexorably brings out selfishness, and then, after making known what we are, drives us to make ourselves even worse than we are.

If we love God and love others in Him, we will be glad to let suffering destroy anything in us that God is pleased to let it destroy, because we know that all it destroys is unimportant. We will prefer to let the accidental trash of life be consumed by suffering in order that His glory may come out clean in everything we do.

When is suffering useless? When it only turns us in upon ourselves, when it only makes us sorry for ourselves, when it changes love into hatred, when it reduces all things to fear. Useless suffering cannot be consecrated to God because its fruitlessness is rooted in sin. Sin and useless suffering increase together.

We cannot suffer well unless we see Christ everywhere—both in suffering and in the charity of those who come to the aid of our affliction.

Bitterness and bad temper are the flowers of an asceticism that has punished only the body.

If the spirit is weak with the flesh, it will find in the flesh the image and accusation of its own weakness. But if the spirit is violent with the flesh it will suffer, from the flesh, the rebound of its own violence.

Our whole being, both body and soul, is to be spiritualized and elevated by grace.

To have a spiritual life is to have a life that is spiritual in all its wholeness—a life in which the actions of the body are holy because of the soul, and the soul is holy because of God dwelling and acting in it.

God, in the same infinite act of will, wills the good of all beings and the good of each individual thing: for all lesser goods coincide in the one perfect good which is His love for them.