Filed under: Thomas Merton, prayers | Tags: Celtic Christianity, christian spirituality, Christianity, contemplative prayer, Discipleship, Emergent Church, Evangelicalism, God, Jesus, Mysticism, prayer, Religion, spiritual discipline, spiritual disciplines, spirituality, Thomas Merton
One of our great problems is to see clearly what we have to resist. I would say that at the moment we have to understand better than we do the war mentality. If we do not understand it, we will run the risk of contributing to its confusions and thereby helping the enemies of man and of peace. The great danger is that under the pressures of anxiety and fear, the alternation of crisis and relaxation and new crisis, the people of the world will come to accept gradually the idea of war, the idea of submission to total power, and the abdication of reason, spirit and individual conscience. The great peril is the deadening of conscience.
Thomas Merton, The Book of Hours (Notre Dame: Sorin Books) 124.
Filed under: Poetry, Thomas Merton | Tags: Ash Wednesday, Easter, Thomas Merton
“Ash Wednesday”
The naked traveler,
Stretching against the iron dawn, the bowstrings of his eyes,
Starves on the mad sierra.
But the sleepers,
Prisoners in a lovely world of weeds,
Make a small, red cry,
And change their dreams.
Proud as the mane of the whinnying air,
Yet humble as the flakes of water
Or the chips of the stone sun, the traveler
Is nailed to the hill by the light of March’s razor;
And when the desert barks, in a rage of love
For the noon of the eclipse,
He lies with his throat cut, in a frozen crater.
The she sleepers,
Prisoners of the moonward power of tides,
Slain by the stillness of their own reflections,
Sit up, in their graves, with a white cry,
And die of terror at the traveller’s murder.
Thomas Merton, Selected Poems (New Direction Publishing Corporation: 1959) 24.
Filed under: Thomas Merton, monasticism | Tags: contemplative life, monasticism, spirituality, Thomas Merton
It seems to me that monks are not the only ones who can take part in the ‘contemplative life’….and this life is not defined by becoming a monk. Rather, this sort of life is one that is characterized by a “life totally abondoned to the Holy Spirit”.
There can be no doubt that the monastic vocation is one of the most beautiful in the Church of God. The ‘contemplative life’, as the life of the monastic orders are usually called, is a life entirely devoted to the mystery of Christ, to living the life of God Who gives Himself to us in Christ. It is a life totally abondonded to the Holy Spirit, a life of humility, obedience, solitude, silence, prayer, in which we renounce our own desires and our own ways in order to live in the liberty of the sons of God, guided by the Holy Spirit speaking through our Superiors, our Rule, and in the oblation to God, in union with Jesus Who was crucified for us and rose from the dead and lives in us by His Holy Spirit.
Thomas Merton, The Monastic Journey (Sheldon Press: 1977) 11.
