New Seeds of Contemplation

by Thomas Merton

He is the “Thou” before whom our inmost “I” springs into awareness. He is the I Am before whom with our own most personal and inalienable voice we echo “I am.”

Our idea of God tells us more about ourselves than about Him.

Unnatural, frantic, anxious work, work done under pressure of greed or fear or any other inordinate passion, cannot properly speaking be dedicated to God, because God never wills such work directly.

But let us not be blind to the distinction between sound, healthy work and unnatural toil.

The obstacle is in our “self,” that is to say in the tenacious need to maintain our separate, external, egotistic will.

It is true to say that for me sanctity consists in being myself and for you sanctity consists in being your self and that, in the last analysis, your sanctity will never be mine and mine will never be yours,

To put it better, we are even called to share with God the work of creating the truth of our identity.

Therefore there is only one problem on which all my existence, my peace and my happiness depend: to discover myself in discovering God. If I find Him I will find myself and if I find my true self I will find Him.

Set me free from the laziness that goes about disguised as activity when activity is not required of me,

Solitude is not and can never be a narcissistic dialogue of the ego with itself.

God is murdered in men.

There can be no contemplation where there is no secret.

There are men dedicated to God whose lives are full of restlessness and who have no real desire to be alone. They admit that exterior solitude is good, in theory, but they insist that it is far better to preserve interior solitude while living in the midst of others.

They are great promoters of useless work. They love to organize meetings and banquets and conferences and lectures. They print circulars, write letters, talk for hours on the telephone in order that they may gather a hundred people together in a large room where they will all fill the air with smoke and make a great deal of noise and roar at one another and clap their hands and stagger home at last patting one another on the back with the assurance that they have all done great things to spread the Kingdom of God.

Finally, as might be expected, the moral theology of the devil grants an altogether unusual amount of importance to … the devil.

It is not humility to insist on being someone that you are not.

IF a writer is so cautious that he never writes anything that cannot be criticized, he will never write anything that can be read. If you want to help other people you have got to make up your mind to write things that some men will condemn.

is not that someone else is preventing you from living happily; you yourself do not know what you want. Rather than admit this, you pretend that someone is keeping you from exercising your liberty. Who is this? It is you yourself.

everybody is running away from the responsibility of thinking,

The function of faith is not to reduce mystery to rational clarity, but to integrate the unknown and the known together in a living whole, in which we are more and more able to transcend the limitations of our external self.

For the imagination is only one of the means for keeping the object of our belief before our minds. We do not always have to force ourselves to picture Christ as we think He must have looked, or ought to have looked, for really no one can be quite sure just how He looked.

Use whatever helps you, and avoid what gets in your way.

EVERY one of us forms an idea of Christ that is limited and incomplete. It is cut according to our own measure. We tend to create for ourselves a Christ in our own image, a projection of our own aspirations, desires and ideals. We find in Him what we want to find. We make Him not only the incarnation of God but also the incarnation of the things we and our society and our part of society happen to live for.

it is not enough merely to imitate the Christ we have in our imaginations.

For if we depend on our own ideas, our own judgment and our own efforts to reproduce the life of Christ, we will only act out some kind of pious charade which will ultimately scare everybody we meet because it will be so stiff and artificial and so dead.

IF I have this divine life in me, what do the accidents of pain and pleasure, hope and fear, joy and sorrow matter to me?

An interesting entrance into the question, “does all this matter?” Mertons answer is - no, not really. But not because nothing really exists and we’re all just walking into the Void. It doesn’t matter because I have become one with Existence Godself.

Popularly, even among Christians, a sacrifice is regarded only as a moral act, a work of piety or of virtue, which is marked by a special difficulty.

her greatest glory is that she is most hidden,

What role does secrecy play in religious space? Why is "hidden" a good thing?

when you use the expression to “desire God” you implicitly reduce God to the status of an “object” or of a “thing,”

As if sanctity and mysticism were “goods” that one must have in order to be acceptable in the Kingdom of God—just as one must have a new car every two years, a ranch house and a TV set in order to be acceptable in the cities of men.

too often the weakest thing about our faith is the illusion that our faith is strong, when the “strength” we feel is only the intensity of emotion or of sentiment, which have nothing to do with real faith.

Emotion has nothing to do with faith. Interesting. WHat role do emotions play then in the drama of faith

If we are not humble, we tend to demand that faith must also bring with it good health, peace of mind, good luck, success in business, popularity, world peace, and every other good thing we can imagine.

Less and less conscious of themselves, they finally cease to be aware of themselves

It is interesting that we must first find god through the medium of self, god crafted and designed us with a bit of the godstuff so we can know god this way. and yet as we begin to know ourselves we find that we are nlthing, fleeting, empty. We go through self, to god, and there find that we are nothing and god is everything

The experimental “awareness” of the presence of God is just as truly a created thing as a glass of beer.

Blinded by their desire for ceaseless motion, for a constant sense of achievement, famished with a crude hunger for results, for visible and tangible success, they work themselves into a state in which they cannot believe that they are pleasing God unless they are busy with a dozen jobs at the same time.

when all that God asks of them is to be quiet and keep themselves at peace,

These two combine to produce in you the anxiety and darkness and helplessness which make lucid and particular acts at once so hard and so futile.

Here i asked myself: "and what is the point, the purpose, of all this?" and realized that this is precisely the wrong question (or the right one as it helped me see my problem). There is no purpose besides God. There is no motivation besides knowing god. We do no engage in meditation or contemplation because it makes us better or because we ge peace. The ONLY goal is god. Any "result" is mere happenstance - a great coincidence of being near to and one with Love godself.

When you find some paragraph or sentence that interests you, stop reading and turn it over in your mind and absorb it and contemplate it and rest in the general, serene, effortless consideration of the thought, not in its details but as a whole, as something held and savored in its entirety: and so pass from this to rest in the quiet expectancy of God.

Even your Director himself may not always be right.

What matters in the contemplative life is not for you or your Director to be always infallibly right, but for you to be heroically faithful to grace and to love.

Nothing is more suspicious, in a man who seems holy, than an impatient desire to reform other men.

We will be able to keep our tranquillity and our freedom, and above all we will learn to leave the results to God, and not indulge our own vanity by insisting on quick and visible conversions in everyone we talk to.

Man has been turned, spiritually, inside out, so that his ego plays the part of the “person”—a role which it actually has no right to assume.

“Hell” can be described as a perpetual alienation from our true being, our true self, which is in God.