Tag: Merton
Finding Inner Solitude
You will never find interior solitude unless you make some conscious effort to deliver yourself from the desires and the cares and the attachments of an existence in time and in the world. Do everything you can to avoid the noise and the business of men. Keep as far away as you can from the… Read More ›
The Silence of the World is Real
Those who love their own noise are impatient of everything else. They constantly defile the silence of the forests and the mountains and the sea. They bore through silent nature in every direction with their machines, for fear that the calm world might accuse them of their own emptiness. The urgency of their swift movement… Read More ›
Fruitful Silence
Life is not to be regarded as an uninterrupted flow of words which is finally silenced by death. Its rhythm develops in silence, comes to the surface in moments of necessary expression, returns to deeper silence, culminates in a final declaration, then ascends quietly into the silence of Heaven which resounds with unending praise. Those… Read More ›
True-Self even in our thoughts
Our thought should not merely be an answer to what someone else has just said. Or what someone else might have said. Our interior word must be more than an echo of the words of someone else. There is no point in being a moon to somebody else’s sun, still less is there any justification… Read More ›
The first step toward finding God
Man’s intelligence, however we may misuse it, is far too keen and too sure to rest for long in error. It may embrace a lie and cling to it stubbornly, believing it to be true: but it cannot find true rest in falsehood. The mind that is in love with error wears itself out with… Read More ›
We are the Champion Idolaters of all History
Reading the Vulgate I run across the Latin word simulacrum which has implications of a mask-like deceptiveness, of intellectual cheating, of an ideological shell-game. The word simulacrum, it seems to me, presents itself as a very suggestive one to describe an advertisement, or an over-inflated political presence, or that face on the TV screen. The… Read More ›
Spiritual birth
He who is spiritually “born” as a mature identity is liberated from the enclosing womb of myth and prejudice. He learns to think for himself, guided no longer by the dictates of need and by the systems and processes designed to create artificial needs and then “satisfy” them. This emancipation can take two forms: first… Read More ›
Renouncing Resentment
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… Read More ›
Struggle with the eight main passions: Gluttony
XI. For it is impossible for the fiery impulses of the body to be extinguished until the shoots of the other principle vices have themselves been cut off at the root… Whoever is unable to check the desire to gormandize (to eat gluttonously) will be incapable of curbing the urges of burning lust. The chastity… Read More ›
Struggle with the eight main passions: Fasting
V.1. … a uniform rule concerning the manner of fasting cannot easily be kept because not all bodies have the same strength, nor is it, like the other virtues, achieved by firmness of mind alone… 2. Nonetheless there is one end of abstinence in all these instances — that no one, according to the measure… Read More ›