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The Thoughts, They Are Provoked
While reading Thomas Merton this morning, a passage took hold of me: Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self. This is the man that I want myself to be but who cannot exist, because God does not know anything about him. … My false and private self is the one who wants to exist outside the reach of God’s will and God’s love — outside of reality and outside of life. And such a life cannot help but be an illusion. … The secret of my identity is hidden in the love and mercy of God. … Therefore I cannot hope to find myself…
- Church Life, Daily Life, Holy Days, I Never Thought I'd Be In This Situation, Photographs, Prayers, Reflections
Easter Sunday
The sun will set in a little while, and another holy day will be memory and history. We sat outside as much as we could today, but the brisk breeze kept forcing us to retreat inside. Sitting directly in the sun helped a bit, but it was still chilly, so we didn’t get as many outdoor hours as we had hoped. The dogs romped and rolled in the grass, and the birds were so numerous and so active, we were in awe. We watched all day for a hummingbird — a year ago today, we got our first hummingbird of the spring –but none ever appeared. We had a fine…
- Church Life, Daily Life, Holy Days, I Never Thought I'd Be In This Situation, Lectio Divina, Mrs. Orr, Photographs, Prayers, Reflections, Saints
Holy Week
The days have unspooled quickly in this early part of springtime. My interior life has been not in turmoil but in flux, an almost palpable ebb and flow, and through all my misgivings and doubts and ragings and grim, silent musings, I have felt like some sort of antenna, unmoored but still grounded, with invisible signals popping and whizzing around me during my hours. A good friend, who roves across much of the same rocky spiritual landscape I do, recently mentioned in passing how he just might be holding onto a hope that he will one day believe again. That sentiment sang in me like a tuning fork when a…
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The Second Sunday Of Advent
“Into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for him at all, Christ has come uninvited. But because he cannot be at home in it, because he is out of place in it, and yet he must be in it, his place is with those others for whom there is no room. His place is with those who do not belong, who are rejected by power because they are regarded as weak, those who are discredited, who are denied the status of persons, tortured, exterminated. With those for whom there is no room, Christ is present in this world.” — Thomas Merton This is the…
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Such Will Not Be Found In A Church
One of the first signs of a saint may well be the fact that other people do not know what to make of him. In fact, they are not sure whether he is crazy or only proud; but it must at least be pride to be haunted by some individual ideal which nobody but God really comprehends. And he has inescapable difficulties in applying all the abstract norms of ‘perfection’ to his own life. He cannot seem to make his life fit in with the books. Sometimes his case is so bad that no monastery will keep him. He has to be dismissed, sent back to the world like Benedict…
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A Deep Failure
“I am more and more impressed by the fact that it is largely futile to get up and make statements about current problems. At the same time, I know that silent acquiescence in evil is also out of the question. I know too that there are times when protest is inescapable, even when it seems as useless as beating your head up against a brick wall. At the same time, when protest simply becomes an act of desperation, it loses its power to communicate anything to anyone who does not share the same feelings of despair. There is of course no need to comment on the uselessness of false optimism,…
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Forgotten Men
I’ve finished reading Thomas Merton’s history of the Trappist order, The Waters of Siloe (1949 by Harcourt, Brace, and Company, Inc., New York, NY) and have thoroughly enjoyed it. Merton — or Father Louis, as he was known at Gethsemani Abbey — certainly deserved his reputation as a formidable writer. I wanted to share a couple of sections from this book. One for a rather whimsical reason, and the other a more serious point I wanted to highlight. First, the whimsical section. I offer these paragraphs from pages 132-133 in hopes that my friend Francis Berger might see them: We can see what was the mentality of the monks of Gethsemani…
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H.M.S Cistercian
My recent pilgrimage to the monastery of Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky has deepened my appreciation for the writings of the abbey’s most famous monk, Thomas Merton. I have been reading with much enjoyment Merton’s lively history of the Order of the Cisterians of the Strict Observance, also known as the Trappists. The book, The Waters of Siloe, describes the origin of the order and how persecuted French monks came to the shores of the United States to establish the monastery where Merton spent his hidden contemplative life. Having been inspired by Bruce Charlton and the writers at the Junior Ganymede blog to read a bit of Mormon history, I have…