Tag: Merton
We Live in the Time of the Two Advents of Christ
History itself acquired a new meaning, or rather its hidden meaning was revealed, when the Word of God became incarnate and entered into history. Time itself was now an Epiphany of the Creator and of the Redeemer, the “Lord of Ages.” And yet time also acquired a new solemnity, a new urgency, since the Lord… Read More ›
Truth lives and is embodied in men
A sincere man is not so much one who sees the truth and manifests it as he sees it, but one who loves the truth with pure love. But truth is more than an abstraction. It lives and is embodied in men and things that are real. And the secret of sincerity is, therefore, not… Read More ›
Bear in ourselves the fury of the world against Christ
The great question then is how do we communicate with the modern world? If in fact communication has been reduced to pseudo-communication, to the celebration of pseudo-events and the irate clashing of incompatible myth-systems, how are we to avoid falling into this predicament? How are we to avoid the common obsession with pseudo-events in order… Read More ›
Pope Francis: Praise For Dorothy Day And Thomas Merton
NPR: He praised one as a man of prayer, the other for her “passion for justice.” But many Americans might need a reminder about two of the people Pope Francis discussed in Congress on Thursday: philosopher Thomas Merton and activist Dorothy Day. The two Catholics were mentioned alongside two other, more famous names: Abraham Lincoln… Read More ›
Pope Francis: Address to Congress
Mr. Vice President, Mr. Speaker, Honorable Members of Congress, Dear Friends, I am most grateful for your invitation to address this Joint Session of Congress in “the land of the free and the home of the brave”. I would like to think that the reason for this is that I too am a son of… Read More ›
Have you turned a deaf ear?
We ought to have the humility to admit we do not know all about ourselves, that we are not experts at running our own lives. We ought to stop taking our conscious plans and decisions with such infinite seriousness. It may well be that we are not the martyrs or the mystics or the apostles… Read More ›
Life closes the ego upon itself
The tragedy of a life centered on “things,” on the grasping and manipulation of objects, is that such a life closes the ego upon itself as though it were an end in itself, and throws it into a hopeless struggle with other perverse and hostile selves competing together for the possessions which will give them… Read More ›
God has manifested His glory and His love in Mary
The genuine significance of Catholic devotion to Mary is to be seen in the light of the Incarnation itself. The Church cannot separate the Son and the Mother. Because the Church conceived of the Incarnation as God’s descent into flesh and into time, and His great gift of Himself to His creatures, she also believes… Read More ›
The General Dance
For the world and time are the dance of the Lord in emptiness. The silence of the spheres is the music of a wedding feast. The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of life, the more we analyze them out into strange finalities and complex purposes of our own, the more we involve ourselves in… Read More ›
All is “Zero”
All has become one, all has become indifferent, all has been leveled to equal meaninglessness…. It is not that all is “one” but all is “zero.” Everything adds up to zero. Indeed, even the state, in the end, is zero. Freedom is then to live and die for zero. Is that what I want: to… Read More ›