Tag: Merton
True solitude
True solitude is found in humility, which is infinitely rich. False solitude is the refuge of pride, and it is infinitely poor. The poverty of false solitude comes from an illusion which pretends, by adorning itself in things it can never possess, to distinguish one individual self from the mass of other men. True solitude… Read More ›
Understanding Catholic Devotion to Mary
This is often forgotten by Catholics themselves, and therefore it is not surprising that those who are not Catholic often have a completely wrong conception of Catholic devotion to the Mother of God. They imagine, and sometimes we can understand their reasons for doing so, that Catholics treat the Blessed Virgin as an almost divine… Read More ›
Discover your deep self, in Christ
. . .it is precisely because it is public in the classical or “political” sense of the word, that the liturgy enables us to discover and to express the deepest meaning of Christian personalism. We must first emerge from the private realm, the “household” which is the realm of necessity and the proper domain of… Read More ›
Everything depends on the quality of our acts
Our being is not to be enriched merely by activity and experience as such. Everything depends on the quality of our acts and our experiences. A multitude of badly performed actions and of experiences only half-lived exhausts and depletes our being. By doing things badly we make ourselves less real. This growing unreality cannot help… Read More ›
A Chance to Choose
In our being there is a primordial yes that is not our own; it is not at our own disposal; it is not accessible to our inspection and understanding; we do not even fully experience it as real (except in rare and unique circumstances). And we have to admit that for most people this primordial… Read More ›
We must dare to be saints by the power of God
Easter is the mystery of our redemption. We who have died and risen with Christ are no longer sinners. Sin is dead in us. The Law has no further hold on us. And yet this is not as simple as it sounds. Our new life in Christ is not a permanent and guaranteed possession, handed over… Read More ›
Thou hast mercy upon all, O Lord
There is confidence everywhere in Ash Wednesday, yet that does not mean unmixed and untroubled security. The confidence of the Christian is always a confidence in spite of darkness and risk, in the presence of peril, with every evidence of possible disaster. Let us emend for the better in those things in which we have… Read More ›
The mask that each man wears . . .
[The] self is not by nature evil, and the fact that it is unsubstantial is not to be imputed to it as some kind of crime. It is afflicted with metaphysical poverty: but all that is poor deserves mercy. So too our outward self: as long as it does not isolate itself in a lie,… Read More ›
Our Inner Self
There is and can be no special planned technique for discovering and awakening one’s inner self, because the inner self is first of all a spontaneity that is nothing if not free. Therefore there is no use in trying to start with a definition of the inner self, and then deducing from its essential properties… Read More ›
The root-sin of modern man
The real root-sin of modern man is that, in ignoring and condemning being, and especially his own being, he has made his existence a disease and an affliction. And, strangely, he has done this with all kinds of vitalistic excuses, proclaiming at every turn that he stands on frontiers of new abundance and permanent bliss…. Read More ›