Lent 2006: Reflections with Thomas Merton
March 1, 2006: Ash Wednesday
“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 a be a man his very humanity continues to tell him that life has a meaning…our purpose in life is to discover this meaning, and live according to it. We have, therefore, something to live for. The process of living, of growing up, and becoming a person, is precisely the gradually increasing awareness of what that something is. First of all, although men have a common destiny, each individual also has to work out his own personal salvation in fear and trembling. We can help one another to find out the meaning of life, no doubt. But in the last analysis the individual person is responsible for living his faith and for “finding himself.” You cannot tell me who I am, and I cannot tell you who you are. Others can give you a name or a number, but they can never tell you who you really are. That is something you yourself can only discover from within.”
The monk, Thomas Merton, wrote those words in his book, No Man Is an Island, back in 1955 at his Abbey of Gethsemani. Since I re-read them a month ago they have haunted me and have given me my perspective on Lent. Lent is a time for us to enter into our own individual desert, discover the meaning of our life, and live according to it. Prayer, fasting and almsgiving may have a place, but not as an annual observance, rather, as a means to an end: discovering the meaning of our life and living according to it. The demands of our life are clear, they are present themselves constantly. The meaning of life may be less clear, and less often lived. These are the days set aside for us to discover our life all over again.
During this season I will continue to share my reflections on this book in hopes that they may assist you in your Lenten pilgrimage into yourself.
March 2, 2006
"I cannot discover God in myself and myself in Him unless I have the courage to face myself exactly as I am, with all my limitations, and to accept others as they are, with all their limitations" - Thomas Merton, No Man Is An Island.
March 3, 2006
" Man is divided against himself and against God by his own selfishness, which divides him against his brother. This division cannot be healed by a love that places itself only on one side of the rift. Love must reach over to both sides and draw them together. we cannot love ourselves unless we love others, and we cannot love others unless we love ourselves but a selfish love of others makes us incapable of loving others. The difficulty of this commandment lies in the paradox that it would have us love ourselves unselfishly, because even our love of ourselves is something we owe to others." -Thomas Merton, No Man Is An Island
There is a difference between loving our selves and selfishness. Loving ourselves involves doing what is good for us, caring for ourselves, loving those pats of us that are unlovable, and challenging ourselves to heal and excel. Loving myself leads me out of myself into the lives of others who I can love and who can love me. Selfishness is onlyself indulgence, it is an anesthetic that keeps me comfortable right where I am, never moving me forward, never encouraging me to sacrifice in order to achieve, and only leading me into the lives of other people when they can take care of my needs, not loving them for their own sake. If there is anything that troubles my conscience it is the realization of all of those people I have "loved" just so they can take care of my needs. Merton writes in another place, "If my gift is intended to bind him to me, to put him under an obligation, to exercise a kind of hidden moral tyranny over his soul, then in loving him I am really loving myself. And this is a greater and more insidious selfishness, since it traffics not in flesh and blood but in other person's souls." How hard it is to love with no strings attached, how hard it is to love myself. Maybe this lent can make a difference, in me.
March 4, 2005
My successes are not my on. The way to them was prepared by others. The fruits of my labors are not m y own: for I am preparing the way for the achievements of another. nor are my failures my own. they may spring from the failure of another, but they are also compensated for by another's achievement. there for the meaning of my life is not to be looked for in the sum total of my own achievements. It is only seen in the complete integration of my achievements and failures with the achievements and failures of my own generation, and society, and time...
Every other man is a piece of myself, for I am a part and member of mankind. Every Christian is part of my own body, because we are members of Christ. what I do is also done for them and with them and by them. What they do is done in me and by me and for me. But each one of us remains responsible for his own share in the life of the whole body. Charity cannot be what it is supposed to be as long as I do not see that my life represents my own allotment in the life of a whole supernatural organism to which I belong."
- Thomas Merton, No Man Is An Island
March 5, 2005
There is no end to the sharing of love, and, therefore, the potential happiness of such love is without limit. infinite sharing is the law of God's inner life. he has made the sharing of ourselves the law of our own being, so that it is in loving others that we best love ourselves.
-Thomas Merton, No Man Is An Island
March 6, 2005
A selfish love seldom respects the rights of the beloved to be an autonomous person. far from respecting the true being of another and granting his personality room to grow and expand in its original way, this love seeks to keep him in subjection to ourselves. It insists that he conform himself to us, and it works in every possible way to make him do so ... In loving them we seek to make pets of them, to keep them tame. Such love fears nothing more than the escape of the beloved...selfish love often appears to be unselfish, because it is willing to make any concessions to the beloved one in order to keep him prisoner. but it is supreme selfishness to buy what is best in a person, his liberty, his integrity, his autonomous dignity as a person, at the price of far lesser goods.
May God preserve me from the love of a friend who will never dare to rebuke me. may he preserve me from a friend who seeks to do nothing but change and correct me. May he preserve me still more from one whose love is only satisfied by being rebuked.
-Thomas Merton, No Man Is An Island
March 7, 2006
When all this has been said, the truth remains that our destiny is to love one another as Christ has loved us. Jesus had very few close friends when he was on earth, and yet he loved and loves all men and is, to every soul born into this world, that soul's most intimate friend. The lives of all the men we met and know are woven into our own destiny, together with the lives of many we shall never know on earth. but certain ones, very few, are our close friends. because we have more in common with them, we are able to love them with a special selfless perfection, since we have more to share. they are inseparable from our own destiny, and, therefore, our love for them is especially holy: it is a manifestation of God in our lives
-Thomas Merton, No Man Is An Island
March 10, 2006
If, instead of trusting God, I trust my own intelligence, my own strength, and my own prudence, the means God has given me to find my way to Him will all fail me. Nothing created is of any ultimate use without hope. To place your trust in visible things is to live in despair.
And yet, if I hope in God, I must also make confident use of the natural aids which, with grace, enable me to come to Him. If He is good, and if my intelligence is His gift, then I show my trust in God by making use of my intelligence...Some who think they trust in God actually sin against hope because they do not use the will and judgment he has given them.
-Thomas Merton, No Man Is An Island
March 11, 2006
We can either Love God because we hope for something from Him, or we can hope in Him knowing that he loves us. Sometimes we begin with the first kind of hope and grow into the second.
-Thomas Merton, No Man Is An Island
March 12, 2006
Only the man who has had to face despair is really convinced that he needs mercy. those who do not want mercy never seek it. t is better to find God on the threshold of despair than to risk our lives in a complacency that has never felt the need of forgiveness.
-Thomas Merton, No Man Is An Island
March 13, 2006
To consider persons and events and situations only in light of their effect on myself is to live on the doorstop of hell. -Thomas Merton, No Man Is An Island
March 14, 2006
Our free acts must not only have a purpose, they must have the right purpose. And we must have a conscience that teaches us how to choose a right purpose. conscience is the light by which we interpret the will of God in our lives. -Thomas Merton, No Man Is An Island
March 15, 2006
We do not have to create a conscience for ourselves . We are born with one, and no matter how much we may ignore it, We cannot silence its insistent demand that we do good and avoid evil...the first duty of every man is to seek the enlightenment and discipline without which his conscience cannot solve the problems of life. -Thomas Merton, No Man Is An Island
March 16, 2006
The Christian must not only accept suffering: he must make it holy. nothing so easily becomes unholy as suffering. Merely accepted, suffering does nothing for our souls except, perhaps to harden them. Endurance alone is no consecration. true asceticism is not a mere cult of fortitude. We can deny ourselves rigorously for the wrong reason and end up pleasing ourselves mightily with our self denial. -Thomas Merton, No Man Is An Island
March 19, 2006
"The saint, therefore, is sanctified not only by fasting when he should fast but also by eating when he should eat. He is not only sanctified by his prayers in the darkness of the night, but by the sleep he takes in obedience to God, who made us what we are. Not only his solitude contributes to his union with God, but also his supernatural love for his friends and his relatives and those with whom he lives and works." -Thomas Merton, No Man Is An Island
March 20, 2006
The man who loves himself more than God, loves things and persons for the good he himself can get out of them. his selfish loves tends to destroy them, to consume them, to absorb them into his own being. his love for them is only one aspect of his selfishness. It is only a kind of prejudice in his own favor. -Thomas Merton, No Man Is An Island
March 21, 2006
The real purpose of asceticism is to disclose the difference between the evil use of created things, which is sin, and their good use, which is virtue. It is true that self denial teaches us to realize that sin, which appears to be good from a certain point of view, is really evil. but self denial should not make us forget the essential distinction between sin, which is a negation, and pleasure, which is a positive good. In fact, it should make that distinction clearly known. true asceticism shows us that there is no necessary connection between sin and pleasure: that there can be sins that seek no pleasure, and other sins that find none.
Pleasure, which is good, has more to do with virtue than with sin. the virtue that is sufficiently resolute to pay the price of self denial will eventually taste greater pleasure in the things it has renounced than could ever be enjoyed by the sinner who clings to those same things as desperately as if they were his god. -Thomas Merton, No Man Is An Island
March 23, 2006
Good habits are only developed by repeated acts, and we cannot discipline ourselves to do the same things over again with any degree of intelligence unless we go about it systematically. it is necessary, above all in the the beginning of our spiritual life to do certain things at fixed times: fasting on certain days, prayer and meditation at certain hours of the day, regular examinations of conscience, regularity in frequenting the sacraments, systematic application to our duties of state, particular attention to virtues which are most necessary for us.
To desire a spiritual life is, thus, to desire discipline. Otherwise our desire is an illusion. it is true that discipline is supposed to bring us, eventually, to spiritual liberty. therefore our asceticism should make us spiritually flexible, not rigid, for rigidity and liberty never agree. But discipline must, nevertheless, have a certain element of severity about it. Otherwise it will never set us free from our passions. If we are not strict with ourselves, our own flesh will soon deceive us. If we do not command ourselves severely to pray and do penance at certain definite times, and make up our mind to keep our resolutions in spite of notable inconveniences and difficulty, we will quickly be deluded by our own excuses and let ourselves be led away by weakness and caprice.
-Thomas Merton, No Man Is An Island
March 24, 2006
A ll nature is meant to make us think of paradise...All God's creatures invite us to forget our vain cares and enter into our own hearts, which God Himself has made to be His paradise, and our own. If we have God dwelling within us, making our souls His paradise, then the world around us can also become for us what it was meant to be for Adam-his paradise.
-Thomas Merton, No Man Is An Island
March 25, 2006
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. It is, therefore, a very great thing to be little, which is to say: to be ourselves. And when we are truly ourselves we lose most of the futile self consciousness that keep us constantly comparing ourselves with others in order to see how big we are.
-Thomas Merton, No Man Is An Island
March 26, 2006
My idea of what I am is falsified by my admiration for what I do. And my illusions about myself are bred by contagion from the illusions of other men. We all seek to imitate one another's imagined greatness....If I do not know who I am, it is because I think I am the sort of person everyone around me wants me to be. perhaps I have never asked myself whether I anted to become what everybody else seems to want to become. perhaps if I only realized that I do not admire what everyone seem to admire, I would really begin to live after all.
-Thomas Merton, No Man Is An Island
March 27, 2006
Gratitude shows reverence to God in the way it makes use of his gifts.
-Thomas Merton, No Man Is An Island
March 28, 2006
We do not live merely in order to "do something" no matter what...We do not live more fully merely by doing more, tasting more, and experiencing more than we ever have before. on the contrary, 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...There are times, then, when in order to keep ourselves in existence at all we simply have to sit back for a while and do nothing. 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: and often it is quite beyond his power.
-Thomas Merton, No Man Is An Island
March 29, 2006
It is true that we make many mistakes. But the biggest of them all is to be surprised at them: as if we had any hope of never making any. Mistakes are part of our life, and not the least important part. If we are humble, and if we believe in the providence of God, we will see that our mistakes are nor merely a necessary evil, something we must lament and count as lost: they enter into the very structure of our existence. It is by making mistakes that we gain experience, not only for ourselves but for others. and although our experience prevents neither ourselves nor others from making the same mistake many times, the repeated experience still has positive value.
-Thomas Merton, No Man Is An Island
April 4, 2006
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 his 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 . -Thomas Merton, No Man Is An Island
April 5, 2006
Every man has a vocation to be someone: but he must understand clearly that in order to fulfill his vocation he can only be one person: himself...What does this mean/ We must be ourselves by being Christ. -Thomas Merton, No Man Is An Island
April 6, 2006
In order to be what we are meant to be, we must know Christ, and love him, and do what he did. Our destiny is in our own hands since God has placed it there, and has given us the grace to do the impossible. It remains for us to take up courageously and without hesitation the work he has given us, which is the task of living our own life as Christ would live it is us. It takes intrepid courage to live the truth, and there is something of martyrdom in every Christian life, if we take martyrdom in in its original sense as a testimony to the truth, sealed in our own sufferings, in our own blood . -Thomas Merton, No Man Is An Island
April 7, 2006
In the economy of divine charity we have only as much as we give .
-Thomas Merton, No Man Is An Island
April 8, 2006
We tend to identify ourselves with those we love. We try to enter into their own souls and become what they are, thinking as they think, feeling as they feel, and experiencing what they experience. But there is no true intimacy between souls who do not know how to respect one another's solitude. I cannot be united in love with a person whose very personality my love tends to obscure, to absorb, and to destroy. nor can I awaken true love in a person who is invited by my love, to be drowned in the act of drowning me with love.
-Thomas Merton, No Man Is An Island
April 9, 2006
Jesus did not come to seek God in men, he drew men to himself by dying for them on the cross, in order that He might become God in them. All charity comes to a focus in Christ, because charity is his life in us. He draws us to Himself, unites us to one another in his Holy Spirit, and raises us up with Himself to union with the Father. -Thomas Merton, No Man Is An Island
