“We have more power at our disposal today than we have ever had, and yet we are more alienated and estranged from the inner ground of meaning and of love than we have ever been.”
contemplation in a world of action
From Thomas Merton
“When you are by yourself, you soon get tired of your craziness. It is too exhausting. It does not fit in with the eminent sanity of trees, birds, water, sky. You have to shut up and go about the business of living. The silence of the woods forces you to make a decision which the tensions and artificialities of society may help you evade forever. Do you want to be yourself or don’t you?…Are you going to stand on your own feet before God and the world and take full responsibility for your own life?”
- Thomas Merton, from Contemplation in a World of Action
Thomas Merton, from "Contemplation in a World of Action"
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”