cloud of unknowing
acceptance
true solitude
Prayer should not only draw God down to us: it should lift us up to God. It should not only rest in God’s reflection (which the soul, still resting in the house of the body, finds within itself). It should rise out of the body and seek to leave this life in order to rest in God. This is true solitude, unimaginably different from any other solitude of body or of soul. But it is hard to find and the pressure of desires that make us heavy and anchor us to earth when we are immersed in the active life of a community.
– Thomas Merton, Journal entry – September 3, 1952
(Photo: Monastery of Christ in The Desert, Abiquiu, NM – September 2018)
#1019
and we’ll understand Him better…
…by and by.
– traditional spiritual, “By and by”
Do You Yourself in kindness dispose of me, my thoughts and actions according to Your good pleasure, so that Your will may always be done by me and in me and concerning me. – St. Anselm
#1014
choose life
God says, “I am offering you life or death, blessing or curse. Choose life, then, so that you and your descendants may live” (Deuteronomy 30:19).
“Choose life.” That’s God’s call for us, and there is not a moment in which we do not have to make that choice. Life and death are always before us. In our imaginations, our thoughts, our words, our gestures, our actions … even in our nonactions. This choice for life starts in a deep interior place. Underneath very life-affirming behaviour I can still harbour death-thoughts and death-feelings. The most important question is not “Do I kill?” but “Do I carry a blessing in my heart or a curse?” The bullet that kills is only the final instrument of the hatred that began being nurtured in the heart long before the gun was picked up. – Henri Nouwen
(Photo: Portland, Maine – 8.30.19)
We are more than our anger
You have to believe this. We are more than our anger; we are more than our suffering. We must recognize that we do have within us the capacity to love, to understand, to be compassionate. If you know this, then when it rains you won’t be desperate. You know that the rain is there, but the sunshine is still there somewhere. Soon the rain will stop, and the sun will shine again. Have hope. If you can remind yourself that the positive elements are still present within you and the other person, you will know that it is possible to break through, so that the best things in both of you can come up and manifest again.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
(photo: Abiquiu, NM – September 2018)
love laughs at the end of the world
Sooner or later the world must burn and all things in it – all the books, the cloister together with the brothel, Fra Angelico together with the Lucky Strike ads…Sooner or later it will all be consumed by fire and nobody will be left, for by that time the last man in the universe will have discovered the bomb capable of destroying the universe and will have been unable to resist the temptation to throw the thing and get it over with.
And here I sit writing a diary.
But Love laughs at the end of the world because Love is the door to eternity. He who loves is playing on the doorstep of eternity, and before anything can happen, Love will have drawn him over the sill and closed the door. He won’t bother about the world burning because he will know nothing but Love.
– Thomas Merton, Journal, October 10, 1948
the past
THE BUDDHA SAID that we should not be afraid of the past; but he did warn us not to lose ourselves in it, either. We should not feed our regret or pain over the past, and we should not get carried away by the past. We do need to study and understand the past, however, because by looking deeply into the past we learn a lot of things that can benefit the present and the future. The past is an object of our study, of our meditation, but the way to study it or meditate on it is by remaining anchored in the present moment.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
Edge of Atlantic 