Tag: Thomas Merton
-
Thomas Merton on Spirituality
“The spiritual life is first of all a life. It is not merely something to be known and studied, it is to be lived.” But if so, then spirituality must be an engagement with ordinary life, not a withdrawal from it. Merton himself said, “Jesus lived the ordinary life of the men of His time, […]
-
Where to Find Solitude
Solitude is not found so much by looking outside the boundaries of your dwelling, as by staying within. Solitude is not something you must hope for in the future. Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present you will never find it. – Thomas Merton, The […]
-
Lucid Silence
The best thing for me is lucid silence that does not even imagine it speaks to anybody. A silence in which I see no interlocutor, frame no message for anyone, formulate no word either for man or paper. There will still be plenty to say when the time comes to write, and what is written […]
-
Solitude as Vocation
It is clear to me that solitude is my vocation, not as a flight from the world but as my place in the world, because for me to find solitude is only to separate myself from all the forces that destroy me and destroy history, in order to be united with the Life and Peace […]
-
To Belong to No One But God
Standing on rock. Present. The reality of the present and of solitude divorced from past and future. To be collected and gathered up in clarity and silence and to belong to God and to be nobody else’s business… To belong to God I have to belong to myself. I have to be alone – at […]
-
When You Make a Mistake
The thing to do when you have made a mistake is not to give up doing what you were doing and start something altogether new, but to start over again with the thing you began badly and try, for the love of God to do it well. – Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas, p. […]
-
Renouncing a Vocation
Somehow, I have to give up this thing that I love above everything else on earth because the love of God is greater… to renounce the purest of all vocations simply because it is not the one God has chosen for me – to accept something in which it seems likely that my highest personal […]
-
Beautiful Grace
From Thomas Merton’s The Sign of Jonas: But it is beautiful to see God’s grace working in people. The most beautiful thing about it is to see how the desires of the soul, inspired by God, so fit in and harmonize with grace that holy things seem natural to the soul, seem to be part of […]
PHILIPPINE THEO LAW GEE 