The problem is to learn how to renounce resentment without selling out to the organization people who want everyone to accept absurdity and moral anarchy in a spirit of uplift and willing complicity. Few men are strong enough to find the solution. A monastery is not necessarily the right answer; there is resentment in monasteries also, and for the same reason that there is resentment anywhere else.
If you want to renounce resentment, you have to renounce the shadow self that feels itself menaced by the confusion without which it cannot subsist. This is the problem: having to live in complete servile dependence upon a system, an organization, a society, or a oerson that one despises or hates. To live in such dependence and yet to be compelled, by one’s own attachment to what appears to be “identity,” to seemingly approve and accept what one hates. To live an “I” that is essentially servile and dependent, and which presses its servility by constantly lauding and flattering the tyrant to whom it remains unwillingly, yet necessarily, subject.
Thomas Merton
New Seeds of Contemplation, pp 109-110
