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Merely To Resist Evil With Evil By Hating Those Who Hate Us And Seeking To Destroy Them, Is Actually No Resistance At All. It Is Active And Purposeful Collaboration In Evil That Brings The Christian Into Direct And Intimate Contact With The Same Source Of Evil And Hatred Which Inspires The Acts Of His Enemy. It Leads In Practice To A Denial Of Christ And To The Service Of Hatred Rather Than Love.

-Thomas Merton

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Merely To Resist Evil

Thomas Merton

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Merely To Resist Evil With Evil By Hating Those Who Hate Us And Seeking To Destroy Them, Is Actually No Resistance At All. It Is Active And Purposeful Collaboration In Evil That Brings The Christian Into Direct And Intimate Contact With The Same Source Of Evil And Hatred Which Inspires The Acts Of His Enemy. It Leads In Practice To A Denial Of Christ And To The Service Of Hatred Rather Than Love.

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Let No One Hope To Find In Contemplation An Escape From Conflict, From Anguish Or From Doubt. On The Contrary, The Deep Inexpressible Certitude Of The Contemplative Experience Awakens A Tragic Anguish And Opens Many Questions In The Depths Of The Heart Like Wounds That Cannot Stop Bleeding.

Indeed, It Is A Kind Of Quintessence Of Pride To Hate And Fear Even The Kind And Legitimate Approval Of Those Who Love Us! I Mean, To Resent It As A Humiliating Patronage.

Everybody Has An Instinctive Desire To Do Good Things And Avoid Evil. But That Desire Is Sterile As Long As We Have No Experience Of What It Means To Be Good.

For Me To Be A Saint Means To Be Myself. Therefore The Problem Of Sanctity And Salvation Is In Fact The Problem Of Finding Out Who I Am And Of Discovering My True Self.

When We Are Alone On A Starlit Night, When By Chance We See The Migrating Birds In Autumn Descending On A Grove Of Junipers To Rest And Eat; When We See Children In A Moment When They Are Really Children, When We Know Love In Our Own Hearts; Or When, Like The Japanese Poet, Basho, We Hear An Old Frog Land In A Quiet Pond With A Solitary Splash - At Such Times The Awakening, The Turning Inside Out Of All Values, The "newness," The Emptiness And The Purity Of Vision That Make Themselves Evident, All These Provide A Glimpse Of The Cosmic Dance.

There Are Crimes Which No One Would Commit As An Individual Which He Willingly And Bravely Commits When Acting In The Name Of His Society, Because He Has Been (too Easily) Convinced That Evil Is Entirely Different When It Is Done 'for The Common Good.'...one Might Point To The Way In Which Racial Hatreds And Even Persecution Are Admitted By People Who Consider Themselves, And Perhaps In Some Sense Are, Kind, Tolerant, Civilized And Even Humane.

There Is In Us An Instinct For Newness, For Renewal, For A Liberation Of Creative Power. We Seek To Awaken In Ourselves A Force Which Really Changes Our Lives From Within. And Yet The Same Instinct Tells Us That This Change Is A Recovery Of That Which Is Deepest, Most Original, Most Personal In Ourselves. To Be Born Again Is Not To Become Somebody Else, But To Become Ourselves.

Self-conquest Is Really Self-surrender. Yet Before We Can Surrender Ourselves We Must Become Ourselves. For No One Can Give Up What He Does Not Possess.

Love Is Its Own Reward.

Unconditional Love

Violence Is Essentially Wordless. And It Can Begin Only Where Thought And Rational Communication Have Broken Down.

Our Minds Are Like Crows. They Pick Up Everything That Glitters, No Matter How Uncomfortable Our Nests Get With All That Metal In Them.

We Are Not Converted Only Once In Our Lives But Many Times And This Endless Series Of Conversions And Inner Revolutions Leads To Our Transformation.

We Love The Things We Pretend To Laugh At.

There Is Only One Problem On Which All My Existence, My Peace, My Happiness Depend: To Discover Myself In Discovering God. If I Find Him I Will Find Myself And If I Find My True Self I Will Find Him.

His Justice Is The Love That Gives To Each One Of His Creatures The Gifts That His Mercy Has Previously Decreed. And His Mercy Is His Love, Doing Justice To Its Own Exigencies, And Renewing The Gift Which We Had Failed To Accept.

The Importance Of Detachment From Things, The Importance Of Poverty, Is That We Are Supposed To Be Free From Things That We Might Prefer To People. Wherever Things Have Become More Important Than People, We Are In Trouble. That Is The Crux Of The Whole Matter.

If We Wait For Some People To Become Agreeable Or Attractive Before We Begin To Love Them, We Will Never Begin. If We Are Content To Give Them A Cold Impersonal 'charity' That Is Merely A Matter Of Obligation, We Will Not Trouble To Understand Them Or To Sympathize With Them At All. And In That Case We Will Not Really Love Them, Because Love Implies An Efficacious Will Not Only To Do Good To Others Exteriorly But Also To Find Some Good In Them To Which We Can Respond."

The Gate Of Heaven Is Everywhere.

Gates Of Heaven

The Beginning Of Love Is The Will To Let Those We Love Be Perfectly Themselves.

Unconditional Love

No Writing On The Solitary, Meditative Dimensions Of Life Can Say Anything That Has Not Already Been Said Better By The Wind In The Pine Trees.

We Are Not At Peace With Others Because We Are Not At Peace With Ourselves, And We Are Not At Peace With Ourselves Because We Are Not At Peace With God

Every Moment And Every Event Of Everyman's Life On Earth Plants Something In His Soul. For Just As The Wind Carries Thousands Of Winged Seeds, So Each Moment Brings With It Germs Of Spiritual Vitality That Come To Rest Imperceptibly In The Minds And Wills Of Men.

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The Friends Of Job Appear On The Scene As Advisers And "consolers," Offering Job The Fruits Of Their Moral Scientia. But When Job Insists That His Sufferings Have No Explanation And That He Cannot Discover The Reason For Them Through Conventional Ethical Concepts, His Friends Turn Into Accusers, And Curse Job As A Sinner. Thus, Instead Of Consolers, They Become Torturers By Virtue Of Their Very Morality, And In So Doing, While Claiming To Be Advocates Of God, They Act As Instruments Of The Devil.

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The Simplest And Most Effective Way To Sanctity Is To Disappear Into The Background Of Ordinary Every Day Routine.

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On Pride: This Sickness Is Most Dangerous When It Succeeds In Looking Like Humility. When A Proud Man Thinks He Is Humble His Case Is Hopeless.

When I Pray For Peace, I Pray Not Only That The Enemies Of My Own Country May Cease To Want War, But Above All That My Country Will Cease To Do The Things That Make War Inevitable.

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Art Enables Us To Find Ourselves And Lose Ourselves At The Same Time.

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Wheels Of Fire, Cosmic, Rich, Full-bodied Honest Victories Over Desperation.

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Surrender Your Own Poverty And Acknowledge Your Nothingness To The Lord. Whether You Understand It Or Not, God Loves You, Is Present In You, Lives In You, Dwells In You, Calls You, Saves You And Offers You An Understanding And Compassion Which Are Like Nothing You Have Ever Found In A Book Or Heard In A Sermon.

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Today Will Never Come Again.

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In All His Acts God Orders All Things, Whether Good Or Evil, For The Good Of Those Who Know Him And Seek Him And Who Strive To Bring Their Own Freedom Under Obedience To His Divine Purpose. All That Is Done By The Will Of God In Secret Is Done For His Glory And For The Good Of Those Whom He Has Chosen To Share In His Glory.

Ash Wednesday Is Full Of Joy...the Source Of All Sorrow Is The Illusion That Of Ourselves We Are Anything But Dust.

When We Are Alone On A Starlit Night, When By Chance We See The Migrating Birds In Autumn Descending On A Grove Of Junipers To Rest And Eat; When We See Children In A Moment When They Are Really Children.

My Best Writing Has Always Been In Journals.

I Just Remember Their Kindness And Goodness To Me, And Their Peacefulness And Their Utter Simplicity. They Inspired Real Reverence, And I Think, In A Way, They Were Certainly Saints. And They Were Saints In That Most Effective And Telling Way: Sanctified By Leading Ordinary Lives In A Completely Supernatural Manner, Sanctified By Obscurity, By Usual Skills, By Common Tasks, By Routine, But Skills, Tasks, Routine Which Received A Supernatural Form From Grace Within.

Love Is...like A Spring Coming Up Out Of The Ground Of Our Own Depths. "i Am Gift." All That I Am Is Something That's Given, And Given Freely. Being Doesn't Cost Anything. There's No Price Tag, No Strings Attached.

We Are Obliged To Love One Another. We Are Not Strictly Bound To 'like' One Another. Love Governs The Will: 'liking' Is A Matter Of Sense And Sensibility. Nevertheless, If We Really Love Others It Will Not Be Too Hard To Like Them Also.

Love One Another

I Have Only One Desire, And That Is The Desire For Solitude-to Disappear Into God, To Be Submerged In His Peace, To Be Lost In The Secret Of His Face.

I Believe We Are Going To Have To Prepare Ourselves For The Difficult And Patient Task Of Outgrowing Rigid And Intransigent Nationalism, And Work Slowly Towards A World Federation Of Peaceful Nations. How Will This Be Possible? Don't Ask Me. I Don't Know. But Unless We Develop A Moral, Spiritual, And Political Wisdom That Is Proportionate To Our Technological Skill, Our Skill May End Us.

How Deluded We Sometimes Are By The Clear Notions We Get Out Of Books. They Make Us Think That We Really Understand Things Of Which We Have No Practical Knowledge At All.

A Man Can Radically Change His Life And Attain To A Deeper Meaning, A More Perfect Integration, A More Complete Fulfillment, A More Total Liberty Of Spirit Than Are Possible In The Routines Of A Purely Active Existence Centered On Money-making.

We Stumble And Fall Constantly Even When We Are Most Enlightened. But When We Are In True Spiritual Darkness, We Do Not Even Know That We Have Fallen.

Finally I Am Coming To The Conclusion That My Highest Ambition Is To Be What I Already Am. That I Will Never Fulfill My Obligation To Surpass Myself Unless I First Accept Myself, And If I Accept Myself Fully In The Right Way, I Will Already Have Surpassed Myself.

The Root Of War Is Fear.

Our God...is A Consuming Fire. And If We, By Love, Become Transformed Into Him And Burn As He Burns, His Fire Will Be Our Everlasting Joy. But If We Refuse His Love And Remain In The Coldness Of Sin And Opposition To Him And To Other Men Then Will His Fire (by Our Own Choice Rather Than His) Become Our Everlasting Enemy, And Love, Instead Of Being Our Joy, Will Become Our Torment And Our Destruction.

In Order To Find God In Ourselves, We Must Stop Looking At Ourselves, Stop Checking And Verifying Ourselves In The Mirror Of Our Own Futility, And Be Content To Be In Him And To Do Whatever He Wills, According To Our Limitations, Judging Our Acts Not In The Light Of Our Own Illusions, But In The Light Of His Reality Which Is All Around Us In The Things And People We Live With.

Contemplation Is The Loving Sense Of This Life, This Presence And This Eternity.

Contemplation In The Age Of Auschwitz And Dachau, Solovky And Karaganda Is Something Darker And More Fearsome Than Contemplation In The Age Of The Church Fathers. For That Very Reason, The Urge To Seek A Path Of Spiritual Light Can Be A Subtle Temptation To Sin. It Certainly Is Sin If It Means A Frank Rejection Of The Burden Of Our Age, An Escape Into Unreality And Spiritual Illusion, So As Not To Share The Misery Of Other Men.

How Far Have I To Go To Find You In Whom I Have Already Arrived.

While Some Men See Ordinary Happenings, Others See Divine Light And Guidance.

It Is Easy Enough To Tell The Poor To Accept Their Poverty As Gods Will When You Yourself Have Warm Clothes And Plenty Of Food And Medical Care And A Roof Over Your Head And No Worry About The Rent. But If You Want Them To Believe Youtry To Share Some Of Their Poverty And See If You Can Accept It As Gods Will Yourself!

Roof Over Your Head

The Danger Of Education, I Have Found, Is That It So Easily Confuses Means With Ends. Worse Than That, It Quite Easily Forgets Both And Devotes Itself Merely To The Mass Production Of Uneducated Gradtuates - People Literaly Unfit For Anything Except To Take Part In An Elaborate And Completely Artificial Charade Which They And Their Contemporaries Have Conspired To Call "life".

The Geographical Pilgrimage Is The Symbolic Acting Out An Inner Journey. The Inner Journey Is The Interpolation Of The Meanings And Signs Of The Outer Pilgrimage. One Can Have One Without The Other. It Is Best To Have Both.

The Pleasure Of A Good Act Is Something To Be Remembered - Not In Order To Feed Our Complacency But In Order To Remind Us That Virtuous Actions Are Not Only Possible And Valuable, But That They Can Become Easier And More Delightful And More Fruitful Than The Acts Of Vice Which Oppose And Frustrate Them.

O God, Teach Me To Be Satisfied With My Own Helplessness In The Spiritual Life. Teach Me To Be Content With Your Grace That Comes To Me In Darkness And That Works Things I Cannot See. Teach Me To Be Happy That I Can Depend On You. To Depend On You Should Be Enough For An Eternity Of Joy. To Depend On You By Itself Ought To Be Infinitely Greater Than Any Joy Which My Own Intellectual Appetite Could Desire.

When Your Tongue Is Silent, You Can Rest In The Silence Of The Forest. When Your Imagination Is Silent, The Forest Speaks To You. It Tells You Of Its Unreality And Of The Reality Of God. But When Your Mind Is Silent, Then The Forest Suddenly Becomes Magnificently Real And Blazes Transparently With The Reality Of God.

Are They Moved By A Sense Of Human Need For Silence, For Reflection, For Inner Seeking? So They Want To Get Away From The Noise And Tension Of Modern Life, At Least For A Little While, In Order To Relax Their Minds And Wills And Seek A Blessed Healing Sense Of Inner Unity, Reconciliation, Integration?

I Can Depend Less And Less On My Own Power And Sense Of Direction...it Is So Strange To Advance Backwards And Get Where You Are Going In A Totally Unexpected Way

The Logic Of Worldly Success Rests On A Fallacy: The Strange Error That Our Perfection Depends On The Thoughts And Opinions And Applause Of Other Men! A Weird Life It Is, Indeed, To Be Living Always In Somebody Else's Imagination, As If That Were The Only Place In Which One Could At Last Become Real!

We Are Already One. We Just Think We Are Separate.

Do Not Look For Rest In Any Pleasure, Because You Were Not Created For Pleasure: You Were Created For Joy. And If You Do Not Know The Difference Between Pleasure And Joy You Have Not Yet Begun To Live.

We Have To Have A Deep, Patient Compassion For The Fears Of Others And Irrational Mania Of Those Who Hate Or Condemn Us.

Very Well, Then: Why Are You Attached To Any One Book, Or To The Words And Ways Of One Saint When He Himself Tells You To Let Them Go And Walk In Simplicity? To Hang On To Him As If To Make A Method Of Him Is To Contradict Him And To Go In The Opposite Direction To The One In Which He Would Have You Travel.

We Assume That Others Are Receiving The Kind Of Appreciation We Want For Ourselves, And We Proceed On The Assumption That Since We Are Not Loveable As We Are, We Must Become Lovable Under False Pretenses, As If We Were Something Better Than We Are.

Instead Of Hating The People You Think Are War-makers, Hate The Appetites And Disorder In Your Own Soul, Which Are The Causes Of War. If You Love Peace, Then Hate Injustice, Hate Tyranny, Hate Greed - But Hate These Things In Yourself, Not In Another.

If We Examine Ourselves Carefully We Shall See Most Of Us Have An Enormous Amount Of Unfinished Business...we Have To Be Free So That We Can Just Step Across The Line And That's It. That Is What Real Freedom Is.

Unfinished Business

But Precisely This Illusion That Everything Is "clear" Is What Is Blinding Us All. It Is A Serious Temptation, And It Is A Subtle Form Of Pride And Worldly Love Of Power And Revenge.

Our Idea Of God Tells Us More About Ourselves Than About Him.

....it Is Of The Very Essence Of Christianity To Face Suffering And Death Not Because They Are Good, Not Because They Have Meaning, But Because The Resurrection Of Jesus Has Robbed Them Of Their Meaning.

At The Center Of Our Being Is A Point Of Nothingness Which Is Untouched By Illusion, A Point Of Pure Truth, A Point Or Spark Which Belongs Entirely To God, Which Is Never At Our Disposal, From Which God Disposes Of Our Life, Which Is Inaccessable To The Fantasies Of Our Own Mind Or The Brutalities Of Our Own Will. This Little Point Of Nothingness And Of Absolute Poverty Is The Pure Glory Of God In Us.

To Be Risen With Christ Means Not Only That One Has A Choice And That One May Live By A Higher Law - The Law Of Grace And Love - But That One Must Do So. The First Obligation Of The Christian Is To Maintain Their Freedom From All Superstitions, All Blind Taboos And Religious Formalities, Indeed From All Empty Forms Of Legalism.

The Only True Liberty Is In The Service Of That Which Is Beyond All Limits, Beyond All Definitions, Beyond All Human Appreciation: That Which Is All, And Which Therefore Is No Limited Or Individual Thing: The All Is No-thing, For If It Were To Be A Single Thing Separated From All Other Things, It Would Not Be All.

A Man Searching For Enlightenment Is Like A Man Sitting On An Ass In Search Of An Ass

To Be A Saint Is To Be Yourself.

For Perfect Hope Is Achieved On The Brink Of Despair, When Instead Of Falling Over The Edge, We Find Ourselves Walking On Air.

Reason Is In Fact The Path To Faith, And Faith Takes Over When Reason Can Say No More.

I Am Earth, Earth My Heart's Love Bursts With Hay And Flowers. I Am A Lake Of Blue Air In Which My Own Appointed Place Field And Valley Stand Reflected

The Lights Of Prayer That Make Us Imagine We Are Beginning To Be Angels Are Sometimes Only Signs That We Are Finally Beginning To Be Men. We Do Not Have A High Enough Opinion Of Our Own Nature. We Think We Are At The Gates Of Heaven And We Are Only Just Beginning To Come Into Our Own Realm As Free And Intelligent Beings.

‎"our Job Is To Love Others Without Stopping To Inquire Whether Or Not They Are Worthy.

When We Are Strong, We Are Always Much Greater Than The Things That Happen To Us.

True Contemplation Is Not A Psychological Trick But A Theological Grace. It Can Come To Us Only As A Gift, And Not As A Result Of Our Own Clever Use Of Spiritual Techniques.

To Consider Persons And Events And Situations Only In The Light Of Their Effect On Me Is To Live On The Doorstep Of Hell. Selfishness Is Doomed To Frustration Centered As It Is Upon A Lie. To Live Exclusively For Myself, I Must Make All Things Bend Themselves To My Will As If I Were A God.

What Do You Want To Want To Be, Anyway?" "i Don't Know; I Guess What I Want To Be Is A Good Catholic." "what You Should Say"--he Told Me--"what You Should Say Is That You Want To Be A Saint.

Perhaps Peace Is Not, After All, Something You Work For, Or 'fight For.' It Is Indeed 'fighting For Peace' That Starts All The Wars. What, After All, Are The Pretexts Of All These Cold War Crises, But 'fighting For Peace?' Peace Is Something You Have Or Do Not Have. If You Are Yourself At Peace, Then There Is At Least Some Peace In The World. Then Share Your Peace With Everyone, And Everyone Will Be At Peace.

What Can We Gain By Sailing To The Moon If We Cannot Cross The Abyss That Separates Us From Ourselves?

The Simplicity That All This Presupposes Is Not Easy To Attain. I Find That My Life Constantly Threatens To Become Complex And Divisive. A Life Of Prayer Is Basically A Very Simple Life. This Simplicity, However, Is The Result Of Asceticism And Effort: It Is Not A Spontaneous Simplicity.

Good Moral Actions Are Not Enough. Everything In Us, From The Very Depths, Must Be Cleansed And Reordered.

Learn How To Meditate On Paper. Drawing And Writing Are Forms Of Meditation. Learn How To Contemplate Works Of Art. Learn How To Pray In The Streets Or In The Country. Know How To Meditate Not Only When You Have A Book In Your Hand But When You Are Waiting For A Bus Or Riding In A Train.

Fear Narrows The Little Entrance Of Our Heart. It Shrinks Up Our Capacity To Love. It Freezes Up Our Power To Give Ourselves.

Capacity To Love

If There Is No Silence Beyond And Within The Many Words Of Doctrine, There Is No Religion, Only A Religious Ideology. For Religion Goes Beyond Words And Actions, And Attains To The Ultimate Truth Only In Silence And Love.

Living Is Not Thinking. Thought Is Formed And Guided By Objective Reality Outside Us. Living Is The Constant Adjustment Of Thought To Life And Life To Thought In Such A Way That We Are Always Growing, Always Experiencing New Things In The Old And Old Things In The New. Thus Life Is Always New.

In Silence God Ceases To Be An Object And Becomes An Experience.

Life Reveals Itself To Us Only In So Far As Well Live It.

Either You Look At The Universe As A Very Poor Creation Out Of Which No One Can Make Anything, Or You Look At Your Own Life And Your Own Part In The Universe As Infinitely Rich, Full Of Inexhaustible Interest, Opening Out Into The Infinite Further Responsibilities For Study And Contemplation And Interest And Praise. Beyond All And In All Is God.

What Is The Use Of Praying If At The Very Moment Of Prayer, We Have So Little Confidence In God That We Are Busy Planning Our Own Kind Of Answer To Our Prayer?

We Stumble And Fall Constantly, Even When We Are Most Enlightened.

It Is In Deep Solitude And Silence That I Find The Gentleness With Which I Can Truly Love My Brother And Sister.

Consequently, The Truth Of God Lives In Our Souls More By The Power Of Superior Moral Courage Than By The Light Of An Eminent Intelligence. Indeed, Spiritual Intelligence Itself Depends On The Fortitude And Patience With Which We Sacrifice Ourselves For The Truth, As It Is Communicated To Our Lives Concretely In The Providential Will Of God

Love Is Our True Destiny. We Do Not Find The Meaning Of Life By Ourselves Alone - We Find It With Another.

If You Want To Study The Social And Political History Of Modern Nations, Study Hell.

We Live On The Brink Of Disaster Because We Do Not Know How To Let Life Alone. We Do Not Respect The Living And Fruitful Contradictions And Paradoxes Of Which True Life Is Full.

If It So Happened That I Had Once Written A Best-seller, This Was A Pure Accident, Due To Inattention And Naivete, And I Would Take Very Good Care Never To Do The Same Again. If I Had A Message For My Contemporaries, I Said, It Was Surely This: Be Anything You Like, Be Madmen, Drunks, And Bastards Of Every Shape And Form, But At All Costs Avoid One Thing: Success.

Contradictions Have Always Existed In The Soul Of [individuals]. But It Is Only When We Prefer Analysis To Silence That They Become A Constant And Insoluble Problem. We Are Not Meant To Resolve All Contradictions But To Live With Them And Rise Above Them And See Them In The Light Of Exterior And Objective Values Which Make Them Trivial By Comparison.

You Do Not Need To Know Precisely What Is Happening, Or Exactly Where It Is All Going. What You Need Is To Recognize The Possibilities And Challenges Offered By The Present Moment, And To Embrace Them With Courage, Faith And Hope.

The Biggest Human Temptation Is... To Settle For Too Little.

Solitude Is So Necessary Both For Society And For The Individual That When Society Fails To Provide Sufficient Solitude To Develop The Inner Life Of The Persons Who Compose It, They Rebel And Seek False Solitudes.

Those Who Think They 'know' From The Beginning Will Never In Fact Come To Know Anything.

The Biggest Disease In North America Is Busyness.

The Imagination Should Be Allowed A Certain Amount Of Time To Browse Around.

Love Is Free; It Does Not Depend On The Desirability Of Its Object, But Loves For Love's Sake.

We Are So Obsessed With Doing That We Have No Time And No Imagination Left For Being. As A Result, Men Are Valued Not For What They Are But For What They Do Or What They Have - For Their Usefulness.

A Tree Gives Glory To God By Being A Tree. For In Being What God Means It To Be It Is Obeying Him.... The More A Tree Is Like Itself, The More It Is Like Him.

...love Triumphs, At Least In This Life, Not By Eliminating Evil Once For All, But By Resisting And Overcoming It Anew Every Day.

You Are Made In The Image Of What You Desire.

Spiritual Awakening

We Are Obliged To Love One Another. We Are Not Strictly Bound To "like" One Another.

Love One Another

One Might Say I Have Decided To Marry The Silence Of The Forest. The Sweet Dark Warmth Of The Whole World Will Have To Be My Wife.

The World As Pure Object Is Something That Is Not There. It Is Not A Reality Outside Us For Which We Exist....it Is A Living And Self-creating Mystery Of Which I Am Myself A Part, To Which I Am Myself, My Own Unique Door.

Our Destiny Is To Live Out What We Think, Because Unless We Live What We Know, We Do Not Even Know It.

A Purely Mental Life May Be Destructive If It Leads Us To Substitute Thought For Life And Ideas For Actions. The Activity Proper To Man Is Purely Mental Because Man Is Not Just A Disembodied Mind. Our Destiny Is To Live Out What We Think, Because Unless We Live What We Know, We Do Not Even Know It. It Is Only By Making Our Knowledge Part Of Ourselves, Through Action, That We Enter Into The Reality That Is Signified By Our Concepts.

By My Monastic Life And Vows I Am Saying No To All The Concentration Camps, The Aerial Bombardments, The Staged Political Trials, The Judicial Murders, The Racial Injustices, The Economic Tyrannies, And The Whole Socioeconomic Apparatus Which Seems Geared For Nothing But Global Destruction In Spite Of All Its Fair Words In Favor Of Peace.

It Is Almost Impossible To Overestimate The Value Of True Humility And Its Power In The Spiritual Life. For The Beginning Of Humility Is The Beginning Of Blessedness And The Consummation Of Humility Is The Perfection Of All Joy. Humility Contains In Itself The Answer To All The Great Problems Of The Life Of The Soul. It Is The Only Key To Faith, With Which The Spiritual Life Begins: For Faith And Humility Are Inseparable. In Perfect Humility All Selfishness Disappears And Your Soul No Longer Lives For Itself Or In Itself For God: And It Is Lost And Submerged In Him And Transformed Into Him.

The God Of Peace Is Never Glorified By Human Violence.

There Is A Pervasive Form Of Contemporary Violence To Which The Idealist Fighting For Peace By Nonviolent Methods Most Easily Succumbs; Activism And Overwork.

Souls Are Like Athletes, That Need Opponents Worthy Of Them, If They Are To Be Tried And Extended And Pushed To The Full Use Of Their Powers, And Rewarded According To Their Capacity.

True Encounter With Christ Liberates Something In Us, A Power We Did Not Know We Had, A Hope, A Capacity For Life, A Resilience, An Ability To Bounce Back When We Thought We Were Completely Defeated, A Capacity To Grow And Change, A Power Of Creative Transformation.

For Each One Of Us, There Is Only One Thing Necessary: To Fulfill Our Own Destiny, According To God's Will, To Be What God Wants Us To Be.

The Reality That Is Present To Us And In Us: Call It Being...silence. And The Simple Fact That By Being Attentive, By Learning To Listen (or Recovering The Natural Capacity To Listen) We Can Find Ourself Engulfed In Such Happiness That It Cannot Be Explained: The Happiness Of Being At One With Everything In That Hidden Ground Of Love For Which There Can Be No Explanations.... May We All Grow In Grace And Peace, And Not Neglect The Silence That Is Printed In The Center Of Our Being. It Will Not Fail Us.

After All, What Is Your Personal Identity? It Is What You Really Are, Your Real Self. None Of Us Is What He Thinks He Is, Or What Other People Think He Is, Still Less What His Passport Says He Is. And It Is Fortunate For Most Of Us That We Are Mistaken. We Do Not Generally Know What Is Good For Us. That Is Because, In St. Bernard's Language, Our True Personality Has Been Concealed Under The 'disguise' Of A False Self, The Ego, Whom We Tend To Worship In Place Of God.

We Too Often Forget That Faith Is A Matter Of Questioning And Struggle Before It Becomes One Of Certitude And Peace. You Have To Doubt And Reject Everything Else In Order To Believe Firmly In Christ, And After You Have Begun To Believe, Your Faith Itself Must Be Tested And Purified. Christianity Is Not Merely A Set Of Forgone Conclusions. Faith Tends To Be Defeated By The Burning Presence Of God In Mystery, And Seeks Refuge From Him, Flying To Comfortable Social Forms And Safe Convictions In Which Purification Is No Longer An Inner Battle But A Matter Of Outward Gesture.

To Be Unknown To God Is Altogether Too Much Privacy.

Because Of Their Enmity You Will Be Left Alone. They Will Cast You Out And Forsake You.

Paradoxically, I Have Found Peace Because I Have Always Been Dissatisfied. My Moments Of Depression And Despair Turn Out To Be Renewals, New Beginnings. If I Were Once To Settle Down And Be Satisfied With The Surface Of Life, With Its Divisions And Its Cliches, It Would Be Time To Call In The Undertaker... So, Then, This Dissatisfaction Which Sometimes Used To Worry Me And Has Certainly, I Know, Worried Others, Has Helped Me In Fact To Move Freely And Even Gaily With The Stream Of Life.

Our Job Is To Love Others Without Stopping To Inquire Whether Or Not They Are Worthy. That Is Not Our Business And, In Fact, It Is Nobody's Business. What We Are Asked To Do Is To Love, And This Love Itself Will Render Both Ourselves And Our Neighbors Worthy.

Discovering Vocation Does Not Mean Scrambling Toward Some Prize Just Beyond My Reach But Accepting The Treasure Of True Self I Already Possess. Vocation Does Not Come From A Voice �out There� Calling Me To Be Something I Am Not. It Comes From A Voice �in Here� Calling Me To Be The Person I Was Born To Be, To Fulfill The Original Selfhood Given Me At Birth By God.

The Deepest Level Of Communication Is Not Communication, But Communion. It Is Wordless. It Is Beyond Words, And It Is Beyond Speech, And It Is Beyond Concept. Not That We Discover A New Unity. We Discover An Older Unity. My Dear Brothers [and Sisters], We Are Already One. But We Imagine That We Are Not. And What We Have To Recover Is Our Original Unity. What We Have To Be Is What We Are.

Perhaps I Am Stronger Than I Think.

They Were In The World And Not Of It--not Because They Were Saints, But In A Different Way: Because They Were Artists. The Integrity Of An Artist Lifts A Man Above The Level Of The World Without Delivering Him From It.

Despair Is The Absolute Extreme Of Self-love. It Is Reached When A Person Deliberately Turns His Back On All Help From Anyone Else In Order To Taste The Rotten Luxury Of Knowing Himself To Be Lost

Even The Darkest Moments Of The Liturgy Are Filled With Joy, And Ash Wednesday, The Beginning Of The Lenten Fast, Is A Day Of Happiness, A Christian Feast.

To Be Ordinary Is Not A Choice: It Is The Usual Freedom Of Men Without Visions.

The Beginning Of Love Is To Let Those We Love Be Perfectly Themselves, And Not To Twist Them To Fit Our Own Image. Otherwise We Love Only The Reflection Of Ourselves We Find In Them.

Inspirational Love

Curiously, The Most Serious Religious People, Or The Most Concerned Scholars, Those Who Constantly Read The Bible As A Matter Of Professional Or Pious Duty, Can Often Manage To Evade A Radically Involved Dialogue With The Book They Are Questioning.

Persons Are Not Known By Intellect Alone, Not By Principles Alone, But Only By Love. It Is When We Love The Other, The Enemy, That We Obtain From God The Key To An Understanding Of Who He Is, And Who We Are. It Is Only This Realization That Can Open To Us The Real Nature Of Our Duty, And Of Right Action.

Some Of Us Need To Discover That We Will Not Begin To Live More Fully Until We Have The Courage To Do And See And Taste And Experience Much Less Than Usual... And For A Man Who Has Let Himself Be Drawn Completely Out Of Himself By His Activity, Nothing Is More Difficult Than To Sit Still And Rest, Doing Nothing At All. The Very Act Of Resting Is The Hardest And Most Courageous Act He Can Perform.

There Is In All Visible Things An Invisible Fecundity, A Dimmed Light, A Meek Namelessness, A Hidden Wholeness.

Place No Hope In The Feeling Of Assurance, In Spiritual Comfort. You May Well Have To Get Along Without This. Place No Hope In The Inspirational Preachers Of Christian Sunshine, Who Are Able To Pick You Up And Set You Back On Your Feet And Make You Feel Good For Three Or Four Days-until You Fold Up And Collapse Into Despair. Self-confidence Is A Precious Natural Gift, A Sign Of Health. But It Is Not The Same Thing As Faith. Faith Is Much Deeper, And It Must Be Deep Enough To Subsist When We Are Weak, When We Are Sick, When Our Self-confidence Is Gone, When Our Self-respect Is Gone.

Teach Me To Go To The Country Beyond Words And Beyond Names.

Let Me Say This Before Rain Becomes A Utility That They Can Plan And Distribute For Money. By "they" I Mean The People Who Cannot Understand That Rain Is A Festival, Who Do Not Appreciate Its Gratuity, Who Think That What Has No Price Has No Value, That What Cannot Be Sold Is Not Real, So That The Only Way To Make Something Actual Is To Place It On The Market. The Time Will Come When They Will Sell You Even Your Rain. At The Moment It Is Still Free, And I Am In It. I Celebrate Its Gratuity And Its Meaninglessness.

The Humble Person Receives Praise The Way A Clean Window Takes The Light Of The Sun. The Truer And More Intense The Light Is, The Less You See Of The Glass.

The Secret Of My Full Identity Is Hidden In Him. He Alone Can Make Me Who I Am, Or Rather Who I Will Be When At Last I Fully Begin To Be. But Unless I Desire This Identity And Work To Find It With Him And In Him, The Work Will Never Be Done

And The Deepest Level Of Communication Is Not Communication, But Communion. It Is Wordless. It Is Beyond Words, And It Is Beyond Speech, And It Is Beyond Concept.

Music Is Pleasing Not Only Because Of The Sound But Because Of The Silence That Is In It: Without The Alternation Of Sound And Silence There Would Be No Rhythm.

Nevertheless, The Liturgy Of Ash Wednesday Is Not Focussed On The Sinfulness Of The Penitent But On The Mercy Of God. The Question Of Sinfulness Is Raised Precisely Because This Is A Day Of Mercy, And The Just Do Not Need A Savior.

The Question Of Love Is One That Cannot Be Evaded. Whether Or Not You Claim To Be Interested In It From The Moment You Are Alive You Are Bound To Be Concerned With Love Because Love Is Not Just Something That Happens To You: It Is A Certain Special Way Of Being Alive. Love Is In Fact An Intensification Of Life A Completeness A Fullness A Wholeness Of Life.

In The Spiritual Life There Is No Such Thing As An Indifference To Love Or Hate.

Meditation Is One Of The Ways In Which The Spiritual Man Keeps Himself Awake.

For Language To Have Meaning, There Must Be Intervals Of Silence Somewhere, To Divide Word From Word And Utterance From Utterance. He Who Retires Into Silence Does Not Necessarily Hate Language. Perhaps It Is Love And Respect For Language Which Imposes Silence Upon Him. For The Mercy Of God Is Not Heard In Words Unless It Is Heard, Both Before And After The Words Are Spoken, In Silence.

To Say That I Am Made In The Image Of God Is To Say That Love Is The Reason For My Existence, For God Is Love. Love Is My True Identity. Selflessness Is My True Self. Love Is My True Character. Love Is My Name.

The Primordial Blessing, 'increase And Multiply', Has Suddenly Become A Hemorrhage Of Terror. We Are Numbered In Billions, And Massed Together, Marshalled, Numbered, Marched Here And There, Taxed, Drilled, Armed, Worked To The Point Of Insensibility, Dazed By Information, Drugged By Entertainment, Surfeited With Everything, Nauseated With The Human Race And With Ourselves, Nauseated With Life.

Zen Enriches No One. There Is No Body To Be Found. The Birds May Come And Circle For A While In The Place Where It Is Thought To Be. But They Soon Go Elsewhere. When They Are Gone, The "nothing," The "no-body" That Was There, Suddenly Appears. That Is Zen. It Was There All The Time But The Scavengers Missed It, Because It Was Not Their Kind Of Prey.

Stop Asking Yourself Questions That Have No Meaning. Or If They Have, You'll Find Out When You Need To -- Find Out Both The Questions And The Answers.

Why Do We Have To Spend Our Lives Striving To Be Something That We Would Never Want To Be, If We Only Knew What We Wanted? Why Do We Waste Our Time Doing Things Which... Are Just The Opposite Of What We Were Made For?

The Speech Of God Is Silence. His Word Is Solitude.

A Superficial Freedom To Wander Aimlessly Here Or There, To Taste This Or That, To Make A Choice Of Distractions, Is Simply A Sham. It Claims To Be A Freedom Of "choice" When It Has Evaded The Basic Task Of Discovering Who It Is That Chooses.

We Have What We Seek, It Is There All The Time, And If We Give It Time, It Will Make Itself Known To Us.

Day After Day I Read Freud, Thinking Myself To Be Very Enlightened And Scientific When, As A Matter Of Fact, I Was About As Scientific As An Old Woman Secretly Poring Over Books About Occultism, Trying To Tell Her Own Fortune, And Learning How To Dope Out The Future Form The Lines In The Palm Of Her Hand. I Don't Know If I Ever Got Very Close To Needing A Padded Cell: But If I Ever Had Gone Crazy, I Think Psychoanalysis Would Have Been The One Thing Chiefly Responsible For It.

To Some Men Peace Merely Means The Liberty To Exploit Other People Without Fear Of Retaliation Or Interference. To Others Peace Means The Freedom To Rob Others Without Interruption. To Still Others It Means The Leisure To Devour The Goods Of The Earth Without Being Compelled To Interrupt Their Pleasures To Feed Those Whom Their Greed Is Starving. And To Practically Everybody Peace Simply Means The Absence Of Any Physical Violence That Might Cast A Shadow Over Lives Devoted To The Satisfaction Of Their Animal Appetites For Comfort And Pleasure.

I Will Not Fear, For You Are Ever With Me And You Will Never Leave Me To Face My Perils Alone.

The Things We Really Need Come To Us Only As Gifts, And In Order To Receive Them As Gifts We Have To Be Open. In Order To Be Open We Have To Renounce Ourselves, In A Sense We Have To Die To Our Image Of Ourselves, Our Autonomy, Our Fixation Upon Our Self-willed Identity.

In A World Of Noise, Confusion And Conflict It Is Necessary That There Be Places Of Silence, Inner Discipline And Peace. In Such Places Love Can Blossom.

I Am Against War, Against Violence, Against Violent Revolution, For Peaceful Settlement Of Differences, For Nonviolent But Nevertheless Radical Changes. Change Is Needed, And Violence Will Not Really Change Anything: At Most It Will Only Transfer Power From One Set Of Bull-headed Authorities To Another.

To Hope Is To Risk Frustration. Make Up Your Mind To Risk Frustration.

The Land Which Thou Goest To Possess Is Not Like The Land Of Egypt From Whence Thou Camest Out... For My Thoughts Are Not Your Thoughts, Nor Your Ways My Ways, Saith The Lord...seek The Lord While He May Be Found, Call Upon Him While He Is Near...why Do You Spend Money For That Which Is Not Bread And Your Labor For That Which Doth Not Satisfy You?

The Purpose Of Our Lives Is To Find The Purpose Of Our Lives.

I Suppose What Makes Me Most Glad Is That We All Recognize Each Other In This Metaphysical Space Of Silence And Happening, And Get Some Sense, For A Moment, That We Are Full Of Paradise Without Knowing It.

Our Technological Society Has No Longer Any Place In It For Wisdom That Seeks Truth For Its Own Sake, That Seeks The Fullness Of Being, That Seeks To Rest In An Intuition Of The Very Ground Of All Being. Without Wisdom, The Apparent Opposition Of Action And Contemplation, Of Work And Rest, Of Involvement And Detachment, Can Never Be Resolved.

I See No Contradiction Between Buddhism And Christianity ... I Intend To Become As Good A Buddhist As I Can.

It Is The Will Of God That We Live Not Only As Rational Beings, But As "new Men" Regenerated By The Holy Spirit In Christ. It Is His Will That We Reach Out For Our Inheritance, That We Answer His Call To Be His Sons. We Are Born Men Without Our Consent, But The Consent To Be Sons Of God Has To Be Elicited By Our Own Free Will.

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