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You Will Never Be Able To Have Perfect Interior Peace And Recollection Unless You Are Detached Even From The Desire Of Peace And Recollection. You Will Never Be Able To Pray Perfectly Until You Are Detached From The Pleasures Of Prayer.

-Thomas Merton

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You Will Never Be

Thomas Merton

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You Will Never Be Able To Have Perfect Interior Peace And Recollection Unless You Are Detached Even From The Desire Of Peace And Recollection. You Will Never Be Able To Pray Perfectly Until You Are Detached From The Pleasures Of Prayer.

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October Is A Fine And Dangerous Season In America. It Is Dry And Cool And The Land Is Wild With Red And Gold And Crimson, And All The Lassitudes Of August Have Seeped Out Of Your Blood, And You Are Full Of Ambition. It Is A Wonderful Time To Begin Anything At All.

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.

Once You Have Grace," I Said To Him, "you Are Free. Without It, You Cannot Help Doing The Things You Know You Should Not Do, And That You Know You Don't Really Want To Do. But Once You Have Grace, You Are Free. When You Are Baptized, There Is No Power In Existence That Can Force You To Commit A Sin-nothing That Will Be Able To Drive You To It Against Your Own Conscience. And If You Merely Will It, You Will Be Free Forever, Because The Strength Will Be Given You, As Much As You Need, And As Often As You Ask, And As Soon As You Ask, And Generally Long Before You Ask For It, Too.

It Is True That Neither The Ancient Wisdoms Nor The Modern Sciences Are Complete In Themselves. They Do Not Stand Alone. They Call For One Another. Wisdom Without Science Is Unable To Penetrate The Full Sapiential Meaning Of The Created And The Material Cosmos. Science Without Wisdom Leaves Man Enslaved To A World Of Unrelated Objects In Which There Is No Way Of Discovering (or Creating) Order And Deep Significance In Man's Own Pointless Existence. (p. 4)

For The Birds There Is Not A Time That They Tell, But The Point Vierge Between Darkness And Light, Between Being And Nonbeing. You Can Tell Yourself The Time By Their Waking, If You Are Experienced. But That Is Your Folly, Not Theirs.

Contemplation Is Not And Cannot Be A Function Of This External Self. There Is An Irreducible Opposition Between The Deep Transcendent Self That Awakens Only In Contemplation, And The Superficial, External Self Which We Commonly Identify With The First Person Singular.

To Be Unknown To God Is Altogether Too Much Privacy.

The Man Who Sweats Under His Mask, Whose Role Makes Him Itch With Discomfort, Who Hates The Division In Himself, Is Already Beginning To Be Free.

We Must Be True Inside, True To Ourselves, Before We Can Know A Truth That Is Outside Us. But We Make Ourselves True Inside By Manifesting The Truth As We See It.

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

Unconditional Love

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

A Tree Gives Glory To God By Being A Tree. For In Being What God Means It To Be It Is Obeying [god]. It “consents,” So To Speak, To [god's] Creative Love. It Is Expressing An Idea Which Is In God And Which Is Not Distinct From The Essence Of God, And Therefore A Tree Imitates God By Being A Tree

Since No Man Ever Can, Or Could, Live By Himself And For Himself Alone, The Destinies Of Thousands Of Other People Were Bound To Be Affected, Some Remotely, But Some Very Directly And Near-at-hand, By My Own Choices And Decisions And Desires, As My Own Life Would Also Be Formed And Modified According To Theirs.

God Utters Me Like A Word Containing A Partial Thought Of Him. A Word Will Never Be Able To Comprehend The Voice That Utters It. But If I Am True To The Concept That God Utters In Me, If I Am True To The Thought Of Him That I Was Meant To Embody, I Shall Be Full Of His Actuality And Find Him Everywhere In Myself, And Find Myself Nowhere.

We Must Make The Choices That Enable Us To Fulfill The Deepest Capacities Of Our Real Selves.

Decisions You Make

Infinite Sharing Is The Law Of God S Inner Life.

The Solution Of The Problem Of Life Is Life Itself. Life Is Not Attained By Reasoning And Analysis, But First Of All By Living. For Until We Have Begun To Live Our Prudence Has No Material To Work On. And Until We Have Begun To Fail We Have No Way Of Working Out Our Success.

In Our Creation, God Asked A Question And In Our Truly Living; God Answers The Question.

I Cannot Make The Universe Obey Me. I Cannot Make Other People Conform To My Own Whims And Fancies. I Cannot Make Even My Own Body Obey Me.

First Of All, Although Men Have A Common Destiny, Each Individual Also Has To Work Out His Own Personal Salvation For Himself In Fear And Trembling. We Can Help One Another To Find The Meaning Of Life No Doubt. But In The Last Analysis, The Individual Person Is Responsible For Living His Own Life And For "finding Himself." If He Persists In Shifting His Responsibility To Somebody Else, He Fails To Find Out The Meaning Of His Own Existence. You Cannot Tell Me Who I Am And I Cannot Tell You Who You Are. If You Do Not Know Your Own Identity, Who Is Going To Identify You?

I Shall Lead You Through The Loneliness, The Solitude You Will Not Understand; But It Is My Shortcut To Your Soul.

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.

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.

Humility Is The Surest Sign Of Strength.

All Men Who Live Only According To Their Five Senses, And Seek Nothing Beyond The Gratification Of Their Natural Appetites For Pleasure And Reputation And Power, Cut Themselves Off From That Charity Which Is The Principle Of All Spiritual Vitality And Happiness Because It Alone Saves Us From The Barren Wilderness Of Our Own Abominable Selfishness.

There Were Only A Few Shepherds At The First Bethlehem. The Ox And The Donkey Understood More Of The First Christmas Than The High Priests In Jerusalem. And It Is The Same Today.

The Silence Of The Forest Is My Bride And The Sweet Dark Warmth Of The Whole World Is My Love, And Out Of The Heart Of That Dark Warmth Comes The Secret That Is Heard Only In Silence, But It Is The Root Of All The Secrets That Are Whispered By All The Lovers In Their Beds All Over The World.

It Might Be Good To Open Our Eyes And See.

As Long As I Am Content To Know That He Is Infinitely Greater Than I, And That I Cannot Know Him Unless He Shows Himself To Me, I Will Have Peace, And He Will Be Near Me And In Me, And I Will Rest In Him.

Lovely Morning! How Lovely Life Can Be!

If A Writer Is So Cautious That He Never Writes Anything That Cannot Be Criticized, He Will Never Be Able To Write Anything That Can Be Read. If You Want To Help Other People You Have Got To Make Up Your Mind To Write Things That Some Men Will Condemn.

Each Particular Being, In Its Individuality, Its Concrete Nature And Entity, With All Its Own Characteristics And Its Private Qualities And Its Own Inviolable Identity, Gives Glory To God By Being Precisely What He Wants It To Be Here And Now, In The Circumstances Ordained For It By His Love And His Infinite Art.

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.

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

For Power Can Guarantee The Interests Of Some Men But It Can Never Foster The Good Of Man. Power Always Protects The Good Of Some At The Expense Of All The Others. Only Love Can Attain And Preserve The Good Of All. Any Claim To Build The Security Of All On Force Is A Manifest Imposture.

Jesus Lived And Died In Vain If He Did Not Teach Us To Regulate The Whole Of Life By The Eternal Law Of Love. Gandhi, Quoted In Merton, P. 38

A Man Knows When He Has Found His Vocation When He Stops Thinking About How To Live And Begins To Live.

It Is Both Dangerous And Easy To Hate Man As He Is Because He Is Not What He Ought To Be. If We Do Not First Respect What He Is We Will Never Suffer Him To Become What He Ought To Be: In Our Impatience We Do Away With Him Altogether.

Advertising Treats All Products With The Reverence And The Seriousness Due To Sacraments.

Our Christian Destiny Is, In Fact, A Great One: But We Cannot Achieve Greatness Unless We Lose All Interest In Being Great. For Our Own Idea Of Greatness Is Illusory, And If We Pay Too Much Attention To It We Will Be Lured Out Of The Peace And Stability Of The Being God Gave Us, And Seek To Live In A Myth We Have Created For Ourselves. And When We Are Truly Ourselves We Lose Most Of The Futile Self-consciousness That Keeps Us Constantly Comparing Ourselves With Others In Order To See How Big We Are.

Action Is The Stream, And Contemplation Is The Spring.

Every Breath We Draw Is A Gift Of God's Love; Every Moment Of Existence Is A Grace.

A Humble Man Is Not Afraid Of Failure. In Fact, He Is Not Afraid Of Anything, Even Himself, Since Perfect Humility Implies Perfect Confidence In The Power Of God.

How Do You Expect To Arrive At The End Of Your Own Journey If You Take The Road To Another Man's City?

The Truth That Many People Never Understand Until It Is Too Late Is That The More You Try To Avoid Suffering, The More You Suffer.

World Suffering

Peace Cannot Be Built On Exclusivism, Absolutism, And Intolerance. But Neither Can It Be Built On Vague Liberal Slogans And Pious Programs Gestated In The Smoke Of Confabulation. There Can Be No Peace On Earth Without The Kind Of Inner Change That Brings Man Back To His "right Mind." P. 31

The Biggest Disease In North America Is Busyness.

There Should Be At Least A Room Or Some Corner Where No One Will Find You And Disturb You Or Notice You.

To Those Who Have No Personal Experience Of This Revolutionary Aspect Of Christian Truth, But Who See Only The Outer Crust Of Dead, Human Conservatism That Tends To Form Around The Church The Way Barnacles Gather On The Hull Of A Ship, All This Talk About Dynamism Sounds Foolish.

Nonviolence Seeks To ‘win’ Not By Destroying Or Even By Humiliating The Adversary, But By Convincing [the Adversary] That There Is A Higher And More Certain Common Good Than Can Be Attained By Bombs And Blood. Nonviolence, Ideally Speaking, Does Not Try To Overcome The Adversary By Winning Over [them], But To Turn [them] From An Adversary Into A Collaborator By Winning [them] Over.

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.

Before We Can Realize Who We Really Are, We Must Become Conscious Of The Fact That The Person We Think We Are, Here And Now, Is At Best An Impostor And A Stranger.

But It Certainly Is A Wonderful Thing To Wake Up Suddenly In The Solitude Of The Woods And Look Up At The Sky And See The Utter Nonsense Of Everything Including All The Solemn Stuff Given Out By Professional Asses About The Spiritual Life; And Simply To Burst Out Laughing, And Laugh And Laugh, With The Sky And The Trees Because God Is Not In Words, And Not In Systems, And Not In Liturgical Movements, And Not In "contemplation" With A Big "c," Or In Asceticism Or In Anything Like That, Not Even In The Apostolate.

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.

My Life Is ... A Mystery Which I Do Not Attempt To Really Understand, As Though 1 Were Led By The Hand In A Night Where I See Nothing, But Can Fully Depend On The Love And Protection Of Him Who Guides Me.

Life Is Not Accomplishing Some Special Work But Attaining To A Degree Of Consciousness And Inner Freedom Which Is Beyond All Works And Attainments.

We Cannot Possess The Truth Fully Until It Has Entered Into The Very Substance Of Our Life By Good Habits, And By A Certain Perfection Of Moral Activity.

The Holy Spirit Is The Most Perfect Gift Of The Father To Men, And Yet He Is The One Gift Which The Father Gives Most Easily.

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.

The True Inner Self Must Be Drawn Up Like A Jewel From The Bottom Of The Sea, Rescued From Confusion, From Indistinction, From Immersion In The Common, The Nondescript, The Trivial, The Sordid, The Evanescent.

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

The Man Who Lives In Division Is Living In Death. He Cannot Find Himself Because He Is Lost; He Has Ceased To Be A Reality. The Person He Believes Himself To Be Is A Bad Dream.

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.

We Must Slow Down To A Human Tempo And We’ll Begin To Have Time To Listen.

God Himself Begins To Live In Me Not Only As My Creator But As My Other And True Self.

The Rush And Pressure Of Modern Life Are A Form, Perhaps The Most Common Form, Of Contemporary Violence. To Allow Oneself To Be Carried Away By A Multitude Of Conflicting Concerns, To Surrender To Too Many Demands, To Commit Oneself To Too Many Projects, To Want To Help Everyone In Everything, Is To Succumb To Violence. The Frenzy Of Our Activity Neutralizes Our Work For Peace. It Destroys Our Own Inner Capacity For Peace. It Destroys The Fruitfulness Of Our Own Work, Because It Kills The Root Of Inner Wisdom Which Makes Work Fruitful.

What Does It Mean To Know And Experience My Own “nothingness?” It Is Not Enough To Turn Away In Disgust From My Illusions And Faults And Mistakes, To Separate Myself From Them As If They Were Not, And As If I Were Someone Other Than Myself. This Kind Of Self-annihilati On Is Only A Worse Illusion, It Is A Pretended Humility Which, By Saying “i Am Nothing” I Mean In Effect “i Wish I Were Not What I Am.

A Life That Is Without Problems May Literally Be More Hopeless, Than One That Always Verges On Despair.

Teach Me To Take All Grace / And Spring It Into Blades Of Act, / Grow Spears And Sheaves Of Charity, / While Each New Instant, (new Eternity) / Flowering With Clean And Individual Circumstance, / Speaks Me The Whisper Of [god's] Consecrating Spirit. / Then Will Obedience Bring Forth New Incarnations / Shining To God With The Features Of [the Lord's] Christ.

The Very Contradictions In My Life Are In Some Ways Signs Of God's Mercy To Me.

The Artistic Experience, At Its Highest, Was Actually A Natural Analogue Of Mystical Experience. It Produced A Kind Of Intuitive Of Perception.

Mystical Experiences

For Me To Be A Saint Means To Be Myself.

The Sky Is My Prayer, The Birds Are My Prayer, The Wind In The Trees Is My Prayer, For God Is All In All.

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.

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.

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 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".

It Is Not Humility To Insist On Being Someone That You Are Not. It Is As Much As Saying That You Know Better Than God Who You Are And Who You Ought To Be. How Do You Expect To Arrive At The End Of Your Own Journey If You Take The Road To Another Man's City? How Do You Expect To Reach Your Own Perfection By Leading Somebody Else's Life? His Sanctity Will Never Be Yours; You Must Have The Humility To Work Out Your Own Salvation In A Darkness Where You Are Absolutely Alone.

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

I Believe That The Desire To Please You Does In Fact Please You.

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.

To Consider Persons And Events And Situations Only In The Light Of Their Effect Upon Myself Is To Live On The Doorstep Of Hell.

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

Saints Are What They Are Not Because Their Sanctity Makes Them Admirable To Others, But Because The Gift Of Sainthood Makes It Possible For Them To Admire Everyone Else.

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.

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

... Nothing Resembles Reality Less Than The Photograph. Nothing Resembles Substance Less Than Its Shadow. To Convey The Meaning Of Something Substantial You Have To Use Not A Shadow But A Sign, Not The Limitation But The Image. The Image Is A New And Different Reality, And Of Course It Does Not Convey An Impression Of Some Object, But The Mind Of The Subject; And That Is Something Else Again.

But There Is No Substance Under The Things I Have Gathered Together About Me. I Am Hollow, And My Structure Of Pleasures And Ambitions Has No Foundation. I Am Objectified In Them. But They Are All Destined By Their Very Contingency To Be Destroyed. And When They Are Gone There Will Be Nothing Left Of Me But My Own Nakedness And Emptiness And Hollowness, To Tell Me That I Am A Mistake.

May God Prevent Us From Becoming "right-thinking Men"-that Is To Say Men Who Agree Perfectly With Their Own Police.

Each Individual Christian And Each New Age Of The Church Has To Make This Rediscovery, This Return To The Source Of Christian Life.

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.

My Spiritual Goal Is To One Day Walk Into God And Disappear.

Love Is Its Own Reward.

Unconditional Love

The Christian Life, And Especially The Contemplative Life, Is A Continual Discovery Of Christ In New And Unexpected Places.

Contemplative Life

Let Us Come Alive To The Splendor That Is All Around Us And See The Beauty In Ordinary Things.

Ordinary Things

If We Are To Love Sincerely, And With Simplicity, We Must First Of All Overcome The Fear Of Not Being Loved.

It Is In The Ordinary Duties And Labors Of Life That The Christian Can And Should Develop His Spiritual Union With God.

No Matter How Ruined Man And His World May Seem To Be, And No Matter How Terrible Man's Despair May Become, As Long As He Continues To Be A Man His Very Humanity Continues To Tell Him That Life Has A Meaning.

The Artist Should Preach Nothing-not Even His Own Autonomy. His Art Should Speak Its Own Truth, And In So Doing It Will Be In Harmony With Every Other Kind Of Truth- Moral, Metaphysical, Mystical.

Peace Demands The Most Heroic Labor And The Most Difficult Sacrifice.

Charity Is Without Fear: Having Given All That It Has, It Has Nothing Left To Lose.

One Of The Most Important-and Most Neglected-elements In The Beginning Of The Interior Life Is The Ability To Respond To Reality, To See The Value And The Beauty In Ordinary Things, To Come Alive To The Splendour That Is All Around Us.

Words Stand Between Silence And Silence: Between The Silence Of Things And The Silence Of Our Own Being. Between The Silence Of The World And The Silence Of God. When We Have Really Met And Known The World In Silence, Words Do Not Separate Us From The World Nor From Other Men, Nor From God, Nor From Ourselves Because We No Longer Trust Entirely In Language To Contain Reality.

Every Other Man Is A Piece Of Myself, For I Am A Part And A Member Of Mankind.

Faith Is The Door To The Full Inner Life Of The Church, A Life Which Includes Not Only Access To An Authoritative Teaching But Above All To A Deep Personal Experience Which Is At Once Unique And Yet Shared By The Whole Body Of Christ, In The Spirit Of Christ.

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

To Know The Cross Is Not Merely To Know Our Own Sufferings. For The Cross Is The Sign Of Salvation, And No Man Is Saved By His Own Sufferings. To Know The Cross Is To Know That We Are Saved By The Sufferings Of Christ; More, It Is To Know The Love Of Christ Who Underwent Suffering And Death In Order To Save Us. It Is, Then, To Know Christ.

This Act Of Total Surrender Is Not Merely A Fantastic Intellectual And Mystical Gamble; It Is Something Much More Serious. It Is An Act Of Love For This Unseen Person, Who, In The Very Gift Of Love By Which We Surrender Ourselves To His Reality Also Makes His Presence Known To Us.

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.

Our Thought Should Not Merely Be An Answer To What Someone Else Has Just Said. Or What Someone Else Might Have Said. Our Interior World 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 For Our Being Moons Of One Another, And Hence Darkness To One Another, Not One Of Us Being A True Sun.

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

Weaknesses And Deficiencies . . . Play A Most Important Part In All Our Lives. It Is Because Of Them That We Need Others And Others Need Us. We Are Not All Weak In The Same Spots, And So We Supplement And Complete One Another, Each One Making Up In Himself For The Lack In Another.

When I Am Liberated By Silence, When I Am No Longer Involved In The Measurement Of Life, But In The Living Of It, I Can Discover A Form Of Prayer In Which There Is Effectively No Distraction. My Whole Life Becomes A Prayer. My Whole Silence Is Full Of Prayer. The World Of Silence In Which I Am Immersed Contributes To My Prayer.

We Who Claim To Love Peace And Justice Must Always Be Careful That We Do Not Use Our Righteousness To Provoke The Violent, And In This Way Bring About The Conflict For Which We, Too, Like Other Men, Are Hungering In Secret, And With Suppressed Barbarity.

The Problem Today Is That There Are No Deserts, Only Dude Ranches.

Stop Thinking And Start Looking.

Love Winter When The Plant Says Nothing.

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

The Soul Of Man, Left To Its Own Natural Level, Is A Potentially Lucid Crystal Left In Darkness. It Is Perfect In Its Own Nature, But It Lacks Something That It Can Only Receive From Outside And Above Itself. But When The Light Shines In It, It Becomes In A Manner Transformed Into Light And Seems To Lose Its Nature In The Splendor Of A Higher Nature, The Nature Of The Light That Is In It.

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.

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

The Fact Remains That We Are Invited To Forget Ourselves On Purpose, Cast Our Awful Solemnity To The Wind, And Join In The General Dance.

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.

Memory Is Corrupted And Ruined By A Crowd Of Memories. If I Am Going To Have A True Memory, There Are A Thousand Things That Must First Be Forgotten. Memory Is Not Fully Itself When It Reaches Only Into The Past. A Memory That Is Not Alive To The Present Does Not Remember The Here And Now, Does Not Remember Its True Identity, Is Not Memory At All. He Who Remembers Nothing But Facts And Past Events, And Is Never Brought Back Into The Present, Is A Victim Of Amnesia.

God Must Be Allowed The Right To Speak Unpredictably.... We Must Find Him In Our Enemy, Or We May Lose Him Even In Our Friend. We Must Find Him In The Pagan Or We Will Lose Him In Our Own Selves, Substituting For His Living Presence An Empty Abstraction.

What A Thing It Is To Sit Absolutely Alone, In The Forest, At Night, Cherished By This Wonderful, Unintelligible, Perfectly Innocent Speech, The Most Comforting Speech In The World, The Talk That Rain Makes By Itself All Over The Ridges, And The Talk Of The Watercourses Everywhere In The Hollows! Nobody Started It, Nobody Is Going To Stop It. It Will Talk As Long As It Wants This Rain. As Long As It Talks I Am Going To Listen.

What We Have To Be Is What We Are.

Love Is Not A Matter Of Getting What You Want. Quite The Contrary. The Insistence On Always Having What You Want, On Always Being Satisfied, On Always Being Fulfilled, Makes Love Impossible.

Getting What You Want

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.

As A Magnifying Glass Concentrates The Rays Of The Sun Into A Little Burning Knot Of Heat That Can Set Fire To A Dry Leaf Or A Piece Of Paper, So The Mystery Of Christ In The Gospel Concentrates The Rays Of God's Light And Fire To A Point That Sets Fire To The Spirit Of Man. ... Through The Glass Of His Incarnation He Concentrates The Rays Of His Divine Truth And Love Upon Us So That We Feel The Burn, And All Mystical Experience Is Communicated To Men Through The Man Christ.

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.

One Of The Strange Laws Of The Contemplative Life Is That In It You Do Not Sit Down And Solve Problems: You Bear With Them Until They Somehow Solve Themselves. Or Until Life Solves Them For You.

Contemplative Life

I Have Learned That One Cannot Truly Know Hope Unless He Has Found Out How Like Despair Hope Is.

People Are In A Hurry To Magnify Themselves By Imitating What Is Popular- And Too Lazy To Think Of Anything Better.

Technology Is Not In Itself Opposed To Spirituality And To Religion. But It Presents A Great Temptation.

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

The Only Trouble Is That In The Spiritual Life There Are No Tricks And No Shortcuts. Those Who Imagine That They Can Discover Spiritual Gimmicks And Put Them To Work For Themselves Usually Ignore God's Will And His Grace.

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

The Fruitfulness Of Our Lives Depends In Large Measure In Our Ability To Doubt Our Own Words And To Question The Value Of Our Own Work. The Man Who Completely Trusts His Own Estimate Of Himself Is Doomed To Sterility.

But The Man Who Is Not Afraid To Admit Everything That He Sees To Be Wrong With Himself, And Yet Recognizes That He May Be The Object Of God's Love Precisely Because Of His Shortcomings, Can Begin To Be Sincere. His Sincerity Is Based On Confidence, Not In His Own Illusions About Himself, But In The Endless, Unfailing Mercy Of God.

It Is In Deep Solitude That I Find The Gentleness With Which I Can Truly Love My Brothers. The More Solitary I Am, The More Affection I Have For Them. It Is Pure Affection, And Filled With Reverance For The Solitude Of Others. Solitude And Silence Teach Me To Love My Brothers For What They Are, Not For What They Say.

I Would Call The Attention Of The Reader To The Difference Between "reason" And "reasoning." Reason Is A Light, Reasoning A Process. Reason Is A Faculty, Reasoning An Exercise Of That Faculty. Reasoning Proceeds From One Truth To Another By Means Of Argumentation. This Generally Involves The Whole Mind In Labor And Complexity. But Reason Does Not Exist Merely In Order To Engage In Reasoning. The Process Is A Means To An End. The True Fulfillment Of Reason As A Faculty Is Found When It Can Embrace The Truth Simply And Without Labor In The Light Of Single Intuition.

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.

Music And Art And Poetry Attune The Soul To 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.

Be Human In This Most Inhuman Of Ages; Guard The Image Of Man For It Is The Image Of God.

Nothing Has Ever Been Said About God That Hasn't Already Been Said Better By The Wind In The Pine Trees.

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.

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.

God, Have Mercy On Me In The Blindness In Which I Hope I Am Seeking You!

It Is Not Merely Our Own Desire But The Desire Of Christ In His Spirit That Drives Us To Grow In Love. Those Who Seldom Or Never Feel In Their Hearts The Desire For The Love Of God And Other Men, And Who Do Not Thirst For The Pure Waters Of Desire Which Are Poured Out In Us By The Strong, Living God, Are Usually Those Who Have Drunk From Other Rivers Or Have Dug For Themselves Broken Cisterns.

If A Man Is To Live, He Must Be All Alive, Body, Soul, Mind, Heart, Spirit.

You Are Certainly One Of The Joys Of Life For All Who Have Ever Come Within A Mile Of You.

Be Still: There Is No Longer Any Need Of Comment. It Was A Lucky Wind That Blew Away His Halo With His Cares, A Lucky Sea That Drowned His Reputation.

To Be Alone By Being Part Of The Universe-fitting In Completely To An Environment Of Woods And Silence And Peace. Everything You Do Becomes A Unity And A Prayer. Unity Within And Without.

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

True Happiness Is Not Found In Any Other Reward Than That Of Being United With God. If I Seek Some Other Reward Besides God Himself, I May Get My Reward But I Cannot Be Happy.

I Was Not Sure Where I Was Going, And I Could Not See What I Would Do When I Got [there]. But You Saw Further And Clearer Than I, And You Opened The Seas Before My Ship, Whose Track Led Me Across The Waters To A Place I Had Never Dreamed Of, And Which You Were Even Then Preparing To Be My Rescue And My Shelter And My Home.

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.

Death Is Someone You See Very Clearly With Eyes In The Center Of Your Heart: Eyes That See Not By Reacting To Light, But By Reacting To A Kind Of A Chill From Within The Marrow Of Your Own Life.

The Whole World Is Charged With The Glory Of God And I Feel Fire And Music Under My Feet.

When Society Is Made Up Of Men Who Know No Interior Solitude It Can No Longer Be Held Together By Love: And Consequently It Is Held Together By A Violent And Abusive Authority. But When Men Are Violently Deprived Of The Solitude And Freedom Which Are Their Due, Then Society In Which They Live Becomes Putrid, It Festers With Servility, Resentment And Hate.

Our Whole Life Is A Meditation Of Our Last Decision - The Only Decision That Matters.

Our Knowledge Of God Is Perfected By Gratiitude: We Are Thankful And Rejoice In The Experience Of The Truth That He Is Love.

Knowledge Of God

We Do Not Pray For The Sake Of Praying, But For The Sake Of Being Heard. We Do Not Pray In Order To Listen To Ourselves Praying But In Order That God May Hear Us And Answer Us. Also, We Do Not Pray In Order To Receive Just Any Answer: It Must Be God's Answer.

To Become Attached To The Experience Of Peace Is To Threaten The True And Essential And Vital Union Of Our Soul With God Above Sense And Experience In The Darkness Of A Pure And Perfect Love.

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.

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.

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

The Desire To Kill Is Like The Desire To Attack Another With An Ingot Of Red -hot Iron: I Have To Pick Up The Incandescent Metal And Burn My Own Hand While Burning The Other. Hate Itself Is The Seed Of Death In My Own Heart, While It Seeks The Death Of The Other.

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.

What I Wear Is Pants. What I Do Is Live. How I Pray Is Breathe.

Detachment From Things Does Not Mean Setting Up A Contradiction Between 'things' And 'god' As If God Were Another Thing And As If Creatures Were His Rivals. We Do Not Detach Ourselves From Things In Order To Attach Ourselves To God, But Rather We Become Detached From Ourselves In Order To See And Use All Things In And For God.

In An Age Where There Is Much Talk About "being Yourself," I Reserve To Myself The Right To Forget About Being Myself, Since In Any Case There Is Very Little Chance Of My Being Anybody Else.

When You Expect The World To End At Any Moment, You Know There Is No Need To Hurry. You Take Your Time, You Do Your Work Well.

Every One Of Us Is Shadowed By An Illusory Person: A False Self. We Are Not Very Good At Recognizing Illusions, Least Of All The Ones We Cherish About Ourselves.

We Have The Choice Of Two Identities: The External Mask Which Seems To Be Real...and The Hidden, Inner Person Who Seems To Us To Be Nothing, But Who Can Give Himself Eternally To The Truth In Whom He Subsists. (295)

When Ambition Ends, Happiness Begins.

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.

God Has Left Sin In The World In Order That There May Be Forgiveness: Not Only The Secret Forgiveness By Which He Himself Cleanses Our Souls, But The Manifest Forgiveness By Which We Have Mercy On One Another And So Give Expression To The Fact That He Is Living, By His Mercy, In Our Own Hearts.

The Whole Purpose Of Spiritual Direction Is To Penetrate Beneath The Surface Of A Man's Life, To Get Behind The Façade Of Conventional Gestures And Attitudes Which He Presents To The World, And To Bring Out His Inner Spiritual Freedom, His Inmost Truth, Which Is What We Call The Likeness Of Christ In His Soul.

None Of Our Prayers Should Ever Be Petitions For Our Own Needs: For This Is Only Another Subtle Way Of Trying To Put Ourselves On The Same Plane As God — Acting As If We Had No Needs, As If We Were Not Creatures, Not Dependent On Him.

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.

The Devil Makes Many Disciples By Preaching Against Sin. He Convinces Them That The Great Evil Of Sin, Induces A Crisis Of Guilt By Which “god Is Satisfied," And After That He Lets Them Spend The Rest Of Their Lives Meditating On The Intense Sinfulness And Evident Reprobation Of Other Men.

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 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.

One Has To Be Alone, Under The Sky, Before Everything Falls Into Place And One Finds His Or Her Own Place In The Midst Of It All. We Have To Have The Humility To Realize Ourselves As Part Of Nature.

We Must Suffer. Our Five Sense Are Dulled By Inordinate Pleasure. Penance Makes Them Keen, Gives Them Back Their Natural Vitality, And More. Penance Clears The Eye Of Conscience And Of Reason. It Helps Think Clearly, Judge Sanely. It Strengthens The Action Of Our Will.

For If I Am To Love Truly And Freely, I Must Be Able To Give Something That Is Truly My Own To Another. If My Heart Does Not First Belong To Me, How Can I Give It To Another?

Actions Are The Doors And Windows Of Being. Unless We Act, We Have No Way Of Knowing What We Are.

The Basic Problem Is Not Political, It Is Apolitical And Human. One Of The Most Important Things To Do Is To Keep Cutting Deliberately Through Political Lines And Barriers And Emphasizing The Fact That These Are Largely Fabrications And That There Is Another Dimension, A Genuine Reality, Totally Opposed To The Fictions Of Politics: The Human Dimension Which Politics Pretend To Arrogate Entirely To Themselves. This Is The Necessary First Step Along The Long Way Toward The Perhaps Impossible Task Of Purifying, Humanizing And Somehow Illuminating Politics Themselves.

It's A Risky Thing To Pray And The Danger Is That Our Very Prayers Get Between God And Us. The Great Thing In Prayer Is Not To Pray, But To Go Directly To God. . . . The Fact Is, Though, That If You Descend Into The Depths Of Your Own Spirit And Arrive Somewhere Near The Center Of What You Are, You Are Confronted With The Inescapable Truth That, At The Very Root Of Your Existence, You Are In Constant And Immediate Contact With The Infinite Power Of God.

Each One Of Us Has Some Kind Of Vocation. We Are All Called By God To Share In His Life And In His Kingdom. Each One Of Us Is Called To A Special Place In The Kingdom. If We Find That Place We Will Be Happy. If We Do Not Find It, We Can Never Be Completely Happy. 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.

In The Natural Order No Matter What Ideals May Be Theoretically Possible, Most People More Or Less Live For Themselves And For Their Own Interests And Pleasures Or For Those Of Their Own Family Or Group, And Therefore They Are Constantly Interfering With One Another's Aims, And Hurting One Another And Injuring One Another, Whether They Mean It Or Not.

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

Let Me Rest In Your Will And Be Silent. Then The Light Of Your Joy Will Warm My Life. Its Fire Will Burn In My Heart And Shine For Your Glory. This Is What I Live For. Amen, Amen.

It Seems To Me That The Darkness That Has Troubled You ... Comes From One Very Serious Source. Without Wanting To Be In Conflict With The Truth And With The Will Of God, We Are Actually Going Against God's Will And His Teaching.

We Become Contemplatives When God Discovers Himself In Us.

Not All Of Us Are Called To Be Hermits, But All Of Us Need Enough Silence And Solitude In Our Lives To Enable The Deeper Voice Of Our Own Self To Be Heard At Least Occasionally.

But If You Want To Identify Me, Ask Me Not Where I Live, Or What I Like To Eat, Or How I Comb My Hair, But Ask Me What I Think I Am Living For.

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