You must be free, and not involved. Solitude is to be preserved not as a luxury but as a necessity: not for “perfection” so much as for simple “survival” in the life God has given you. Hence, you must know when, how, and to whom you must say “no.” This involves considerable difficulty at times. You must not hurt people, or want to hurt them, yet you must not placate them at the price of infidelity to higher and more essential values.
People are constantly trying to use you to help them create the particular illusions by which they live. This is particularly true of the collective illusions which sometimes are accepted as ideologies. You must renounce and sacrifice the approval that is only a bribe enlisting your support of a collective illusion. You must not allow yourself to be represented as someone in whom a few of the favorite daydreams of the public have come true. You must be willing, if necessary, to become a disturbing and therefore an undesired person, one who is not wanted because he upsets the general dream. But be careful that you do not do this in the service of some other dream that is only a little less general and therefore seems to you the more real because it is more exclusive!
Thomas Merton, OCSO
Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, p. 83
