Hope
Living simply like St. Francis of Assisi
community
if you offer
if you offer your food to the hungry
and satisfy the needs of the afflicted,
then your light shall rise in the darkness
and your gloom be like the noonday.
– Isaiah 58:10
Photo: Prout’s Neck, Maine – November 2016
on Merton’s birthday
But life is a gift I am glad of, and I do not curse the day when I was born. On the contrary, if I had never been born I would never have had friends to love and be loved by, never have made mistakes to learn from, never have seen new countries, and, as for what I may have suffered, it is inconsequential and indeed part of the great good which life has been and will, I hope, continue to be. – Thomas Merton journal entry, January 31, 1960
To say that the world is not worth anything ..
“To say that the world is not worth anything, that this life is of no value and to give evil as the proof is absurd, for if these things are worthless what does evil take from us?
Thus the better we are able to conceive of the fullness of joy, the purer and more intense will be our suffering in affliction and our compassion for others. What does suffering take from him who is without joy?
And if we conceive the fullness of joy, suffering is still to joy what hunger is to food.
It is necessary to have had a revelation of reality through joy in order to find reality through suffering. Otherwise life is nothing but a more or less evil dream,” – Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace.
Edge of Atlantic 