No Man Is an Island

by Thomas Merton

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.

It gives great glory to God for a person to live in this world using and appreciating the good things of life without care, without anxiety, and without inordinate passion.

The tremulous scrupulosity of those who are obsessed with pleasures they love and fear narrows their souls and makes it impossible for them to get away from their own flesh. They have tried to become spiritual by worrying about the flesh, and as a result they are haunted by it.

Our self-denial is sterile and absurd if we practice it for the wrong reasons or, worse still, without any valid reason at all.

In order to be intelligent, our self-denial must first of all be humble. Otherwise it is a contradiction in terms. If we deny ourselves in order to think ourselves better than other men our self-denial is only self-gratification.

Asceticism is content systematically to mortify and control our nature. Sacrifice does something more: it offers our nature and all its faculties to God.

On the contrary, it is only when we are detached from created things that we can begin to value them as we really should. It is only when we are “indifferent” to them that we can really begin to love them. The indifference of which I speak must, therefore, be an indifference not to things themselves but to their effects in our own lives.

The man who loves God more than himself is also able to love persons and things for the good that they possess in God. That is the same as saying he loves the glory they give to God: for that glory is the reflection of God in the goodness He has given to His creatures. Such a man is indifferent to the impact of things in his own life. He considers things only in relation to God’s glory and God’s will. As far as his own temporal advantage and satisfaction go, he is detached and unconcerned. But he is no more indifferent to the value of things in themselves than he is indifferent to God. He loves them in the same act with which he loves God. That is: he loves them in the act by which he has renounced them. And in that love by renouncing them he has regained them on a higher level.

Nothing that we consider evil can be offered to God in sacrifice. Therefore, to renounce life in disgust is no sacrifice. We give Him the best we have, in order to declare that He is infinitely better. We give Him all that we prize, in order to assure Him that He is more to us than our “all.” One of the chief tasks of Christian asceticism is to make our life and our body valuable enough to be offered to God in sacrifice.

Our asceticism is not supposed to make us weary of a life that is vile. It is not supposed to make our bodies, which are good, appear to us to be evil. It is not supposed to make us odious to ourselves. An asceticism that makes all pleasure seem gross and disgusting and all the activities of the flesh abominable is a perversion of the nature which God made good and which even sin has not succeeded in rendering totally vile. The real purpose of asceticism is to disclose the difference between the evil use of created things, which is sin, and their good use, which is virtue.

It is for each one to find out for himself the kind of work and environment in which he can best lead a spiritual life.

Everything in modern city life is calculated to keep man from entering into himself and thinking about spiritual things. Even with the best of intentions a spiritual man finds himself exhausted and deadened and debased by the constant noise of machines and loudspeakers, the dead air and the glaring lights of offices and shops, the everlasting suggestions of advertising and propaganda.

The whole mechanism of modern life is geared for a flight from God and from the spirit into the wilderness of neurosis.

Everything we love is uncertain: when we are seeking it, we fear we may not get it. When we have obtained it, we fear even more that it may be lost.

Discipline is not effective unless it is systematic, for the lack of system usually betrays a lack of purpose. Good habits are only developed by repeated acts, and we cannot discipline ourselves to do the same thing over again with any degree of intelligence unless we go about it systematically.

Pride makes us artificial, and humility makes us real.

All nature is meant to make us think of paradise.

We are warmed by fire, not by the smoke of the fire. We are carried over the sea by a ship, not by the wake of a ship. So too, what we are is to be sought in the invisible depths of our own being, not in our outward reflection in our own acts. We must find our real selves not in the froth stirred up by the impact of our being upon the beings around us, but in our own soul which is the principle of all our acts.

Stagnation and inactivity bring spiritual death.

The reason why men are so anxious to see themselves, instead of being content to be themselves, is that they do not really believe in their own existence. And they do not fully believe that they exist because they do not believe in God.

The activity that was meant to exalt him, reproaches and condemns him. It is never real enough. Never active enough. The less he is able to be the more he has to do. He becomes his own slave driver—a shadow whipping a shadow to death, because it cannot produce reality, infinitely substantial reality, out of his own nonentity.

We have to learn to commune with ourselves before we can communicate with other men and with God. A man who is not at peace with himself necessarily projects his interior fighting into the society of those he lives with, and spreads a contagion of conflict all around him.

In order to settle down in the quiet of our own being we must learn to be detached from the results of our own activity. We must withdraw ourselves, to some extent, from effects that are beyond our control and be content with the good will and the work that are the quiet expression of our inner life.

It is, therefore, a very great thing to be little, which is to say: to be ourselves.

By doing things badly we make ourselves less real. This growing unreality cannot help but make us unhappy and fill us with a sense of guilt.

The very act of resting is the hardest and most courageous act he can perform: and often it is quite beyond his power.

The world is full of unsuccessful businessmen who still secretly believe they were meant to be artists or writers or actors in the movies.

The deep secrecy of my own being is often hidden from me by my own estimate of what I am. My idea of what I am is falsified by my admiration for what I do.

We cannot be happy if we expect to live all the time at the highest peak of intensity. Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance and order and rhythm and harmony.

If we have no silence, God is not heard in our music. If we have no rest, God does not bless our work. If we twist our lives out of shape in order to fill every corner of them with action and experience, God will silently withdraw from our hearts and leave us empty.

Each individual thing is only a sketch of the specific perfection planned for its kind. Why should we ask it to be anything more?

In any case, our destiny is the work of two wills, not one. It is not an immutable fate, forced upon us without any choice of our own, by a divinity without heart. Our vocation is not a supernatural lottery but the interaction of two freedoms, and, therefore, of two loves.

The importance of courageous sacrifice, in accomplishing our work of finding and witnessing to the truth, cannot be overemphasized. It is all-important. We cannot possess the truth fully until it has entered into the very substance of our life by good habits and by a certain perfection of moral activity.

Convention and tradition may seem on the surface to be much the same thing. But this superficial resemblance only makes conventionalism all the more harmful. In actual fact, conventions are the death of real tradition as they are of all real life. They are parasites which attach themselves to the living organism of tradition and devour all its reality, turning it into a hollow formality.

To live alone with God, he must really be able to live alone. You cannot live alone if you cannot stand loneliness. And you cannot stand loneliness if your desire for “solitude” is built on frustrated need for human affection. To put it in plain language, it is hopeless to try to live your life in a cloister if you are going to eat your heart out thinking that nobody loves you. You have to be able to disregard that whole issue, and simply love the whole world in God, embracing all your brethren in that same pure love, without seeking signs of affection from them and without caring whether or not you ever get any. If you think this is very easy, I assure you that you are mistaken.

Of all loves, charity alone is not possessive, because charity alone does not desire to be possessed.

Charity seeks the greatest good of the one loved: and there is no greater good than charity. All other goods are contained in it.

Love alone can teach us to penetrate the hidden goodness of the things we know. Knowledge without love never enters into the inner secrets of being. Only love can truly know God as He is, for God is love.

No mere effort of ours can make our love perfect. The peace, certitude, liberty, fearlessness of pure love, are gifts of God.

We tend to identify ourselves with those we love. We try to enter into their own souls and become what they are, thinking as they think, feeling as they feel, and experiencing what they experience. But there is no true intimacy between souls who do not know how to respect one another’s solitude. I cannot be united in love with a person whose very personality my love tends to obscure, to absorb, and to destroy.

There is no true love except in God, Who is the source both of our own being and of the being we love.

The beginning of this love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them.

There are plenty of men who will give up their interests for the sake of “society,” but cannot stand any of the people they live with. As long as we regard other men as obstacles to our own happiness we are the enemies of society and we have only a very small capacity for sharing in the common good.

We are obliged to become perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect (Matthew 5:48). That means that we do not regard the evil in others, but give them something of our own good in order to bring out the good He has buried in them.

And so that brings us to another element that determines the measure of our love for God: self-denial.

A Christian is essentially an exile in this world in which he has no lasting city. The very presence of the Holy Spirit in his heart makes him discontent with worldly and material values. He cannot place his trust in the things of this life. His treasure is somewhere else, and where his treasure is, his heart is also.

The Resurrection of Christ is, therefore, the heart of the Christian faith. Without it, the death of Jesus on the Cross is no more than the tragedy of an honest man—the death of a Jewish Socrates.

For when we say that Christ lives in us, we do not mean that He is present in our minds as a model of perfection or as a noble memory or as a brilliant example: we mean that by His Spirit He Himself becomes the principle of new life and new actions which are truly and literally His life and His actions as well as our own.

for a Christian the “common good” is really centered in the Resurrection of Christ from the dead. Anyone who wants to penetrate into the heart of Christianity and to draw forth from it the rivers of living water that give joy to the City of God (Psalm 45:5) he must enter into this mystery.

We will be perfect Christians when we have risen from the dead.