Thomas Merton SocGBI

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

The Springs of Contemplation

Love is not just a sentiment. Love is being itself. It's like a spring coming up out of the ground of our own depths. “I am gift.” All that I am is something that's given, and given freely. Being doesn't cost anything. There's no price tag, no strings attached. It's simply given.

Man’s unhappiness seems to have grown in proportion to his power over the exterior world. And anyone who claims to have a glib explanation of this fact had better take care that he too is not the victim of a delusion. For after all, this should not necessarily be so.

The Power and Meaning of Love

The life of solitude must be a continual communion and thanksgiving in which we behold by faith all that goes on in the depths of God, and lose our taste for any other life or any other spiritual food.

Thoughts in Solitude

And there we meet hope most perfectly, when we are stripped of our own confidence, our own strength, when we almost no longer exist. "A hope that is seen," says St. Paul, "is no hope." No hope. Therefore despair. To see your hope is to abandon hope.

The New Man

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.

Congratulations to Gary Hall, committee member of the TMSGBI and past editor of The Merton Journal, who has just been awarded The International "Louie" Award at the ITMS conference in Denver, Colorado, for 40 years of researching and publishing on Merton.

The saint knows that the world and everything made by God is good, while those who are not saints either think that created things are unholy, or else they don’t bother about the question one way or another because they are only interested in themselves.

New Seeds of Contemplation

and if you bring the law into the intimate relationships of your heart with God, you mess things up. Between the soul and God there are no laws.

The 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,

Thomas Merton with Chatral Rinpoche in the Himalayas, 1968.
"If I were going to settle down with a Tibetan guru, I think Chatral would be the one." We talked about "Christian doctrine compared with Buddhist...but all leading back to dzogchen, the ultimate emptiness." (The Asian Journal)

We must contain all divided worlds in ourselves and transcend them in Christ.

Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

If we want to bring together what is divided, we can not do so by imposing one division upon the other or absorbing one division into the other. But if we do this, the union is not Christian. It is political, and doomed to further conflict.

And this return is only possible by detachment and “death” in the exterior self, so that the inner self, purified and renewed, can fulfill its function as image of the Divine Trinity.

The Inner Experience

The Christian life is a return to the Father, the Source, the Ground of all existence, through the Son, the Splendor and the Image of the Father, in the Holy Spirit, the Love of the Father and the Son.

the pointed one, the woods, of which I never tire. Is it really true that I have no "place"?

Journal 13 June 1964

Rain in the night, at bedtime. Rain this morning during my early Mass, Mass of Our Lady. At the last Gospel I could see the blue vineyard knob in the grey
west with a scapular of mist on it, and then during thanksgiving those other
knobs,

When God reveals Himself to us in contemplation we must accept Him as He comes to us, in His own obscurity, in His own silence, not interrupting Him with arguments or words, conceptions or activities that belong to the level of our own tedious and labored existence.

New Seeds of Contemplation

to transform the created and redeemed world, and to re-establish all things in Christ.
The Climate of Monastic Prayer