Take the enjoyment of our daily bread. Bread is true, isn’t it? Well, I don’t know. Maybe one of the troubles with modern life is that bread is no longer true bread. But around here, in this monastery, we have good bread.
Things that are good are good; and if one is responding to that goodness, one is in contact with a truth from which one is getting something. The truth is doing us good. The truth of the sunshine, the truth of the rain, the truth of fresh air, the truth of the wind in the trees, these are truths. And they are always accessible!
Let us be exposed to these in such a way that they do us good, because they are very accessible forms of truth; and if we allow ourselves to be benefited by the forms of truth that are really accessible to us, instead of rejecting and disparaging and despising them as “merely natural,” we will be in a better position to profit by higher forms of truth when they come our way.
- Thomas Merton, from “Contemplation in a World of Action”