New Seeds of Contemplation

by Thomas Merton

In the first place, if meditation and affective prayer are easy, spontaneous and fruitful they should not be given up.

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. If God calls you to Him, then He implicitly promises you all the graces you need to reach Him. You must be blindly faithful to this promise.

Do not forget that, for all your efforts, you only won because of God, Who did the fighting in you.

So keep still, and let Him do some work.

The early chapters of Genesis (far from being a pseudo-scientific account of the way the world was supposed to have come into being) are precisely a poetic and symbolic revelation, a completely true, though not literal, revelation of God’s view of the universe and of His intentions for man.

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