Thomas Merton SocGBI

from Merton's journal entry for Nov 3, 1950

O God, who bestowed on the Priest Saint John Henry Newman the grace to follow your kindly light and find peace in your Church; graciously grant that, through his intercession and example, we may be led out of shadows and images into the fulness of your truth.

Man’s greatest dignity, his most essential and peculiar power, the most intimate secret of his humanity is his capacity to love. This power in the depths of man’s soul stamps him in the image and likeness of God.

The Power and Meaning of Love

It is always hard to talk about prayer because everybody prays in private, and everybody is different, and we have to learn to respect our differences and to understand that each one of us is going to have an individual approach.

The Alaskan Journal

Man is truly alive when he is aware of himself as the master of his own destiny to life or to death, aware of the fact that his ultimate fulfilment or destruction depend on his own free choice and aware of his ability to decide for himself. This is the beginning of true life.

The New Man

I am convinced that communication in depth, across the lines that have hitherto divided religious and monastic traditions, is now not only possible and desirable, but most important for the destinies of Twentieth-Century Man.

Monastic Experience and East-West Dialogue

YouTube video by C-SPAN Pope Francis addresses Joint Session of Congress – FULL SPEECH (C-SPAN)

Ten years ago today Pope Francis addressed the US Congress. In his speech he cited Lincoln, MLK, Dorothy Day & Thomas Merton as Americans who represent the finest of us.
m.youtube.com/watch?v=oBM7...

In the morning, after Mass, realization how true it is that prayer really "has power" over the heart of God, really reaches the sanctuary of His heart – starting from the sanctuary of my own: and they are one sanctuary.
Journal 20 Oct 1961

We are reaching a moment of greatest crisis, through blindness and stupidity of our leaders and all who believe in them and in the society we have set up for ourselves and which is falling apart.

Letter to Etta Gullick - Oct 1961

The grip the present has on me. That is the one thing that has grown most noticeable in the spiritual life - nothing much else has. The rest dims as it should. I am getting older. The reality of now - the unreality of all the rest.

Journal 25/8/58

The surest sign that we have received a spiritual understanding of God's love for us is the appreciation of our own poverty in the light of His infinite mercy.

Thoughts in Solitude

you mess things up. Between the soul and God there are no laws.

Alaskan Journal

You realize that prayer takes us beyond the law. When you are praying you are, in a certain sense, an outlaw. There is no law between the heart and God. The law is outside our intimate relationship with God and if you bring the law into the intimate relationships of your heart with God,

THE biggest paradox about the Church is that she is at the same time essentially traditional and essentially revolutionary. But that is not as much of a paradox as it seems, because Christian tradition, unlike all others, is a living and perpetual revolution.

New Seeds of Contemplation

It really would not be right if everybody was on exactly the same level.

Alaskan Journal

It is always hard to talk about prayer because everybody prays in private, and everybody is different, and we have to learn to respect our differences and to understand that each one of us is going to have an individual approach.

Our God is a consuming fire. And if we, by love, become transformed into Him and burn as He burns, His fire will be our everlasting joy.

New seeds of contemplation

OUR minds are like crows. They pick up everything that glitters, no matter how uncomfortable our nests get with all that metal in them.

New Seeds of Contemplation

Hope is a gift. Like life, it is a gift from God, total, unexpected, incomprehensible, undeserved. It springs out of nothingness, completely free. But to meet it, we have to descend into nothingness.

The New Man

The contemplative and spiritual self, the dormant, mysterious, and hidden self that is always effaced by the activity of our exterior self does not seek fulfillment. It is content to be, and in its being it is fulfilled, because its being is rooted in God.

The Inner Experience

from talk to priests in Alaska

When you are praying you are, in a certain sense, an outlaw. There is no law between the heart and God. The law is outside our intimate relationship with God and if you bring a law into the intimate relationships of your heart with God, you mess things up. Between the soul and God there are no laws.

If Christ became Man, it is because He wanted to be any man and every man. If we believe in the Incarnation of the Son of God, there should be no one on earth in whom we are not prepared to see, in mystery, the presence of Christ.

The General Dance - New Seeds of Contemplation

To live “in Christ” is to live in a mystery equal to that of the Incarnation and similar to it. For as Christ unites in His one Person the two natures of God and of man, so too in making us His friends He dwells in us, uniting us intimately to Himself.

New Seeds of Contemplation

To live “in Christ” is to live in a mystery equal to that of the Incarnation and similar to it. For as Christ unites in His one Person the two natures of God and of man, so too in making us His friends He dwells in us, uniting us intimately to Himself.

New Seeds of Contemplation

I think that if there is one truth that people need to learn, in the world, especially today, it is this: the intellect is only theoretically independent of desire and appetite in ordinary, actual practice.

The Seven Storey Mountain

New Seeds of Contemplation

Contemplation is more than a consideration of abstract truths about God, more even than affective meditation on the things we believe. It is awakening, enlightenment and the amazing intuitive grasp by which love gains certitude of God's creative and dynamic intervention in our daily life.

Christ in the world today is not white, nor black either: but He is certainly present and suffering in the black people and coloured people of the earth. The white world is purely and simply under judgement. And they don't know it.

Letter to Robert Lawrence Williams 5 Sept 1967

Man’s greatest dignity, his most essential and peculiar power, the most intimate secret of his humanity is his capacity to love. This power in the depths of man’s soul stamps him in the image and likeness of God.

The Power and Meaning of Love