Thomas Merton's 91st Birthday
"On the last day of January 1915, under the sign of the Water Bearer, in a year of a great war, and down in the shadow of some French mountains on the borders of Spain, I came into the world." (Seven Storey Mountain- Thomas Merton)
My Favorite Thomas Merton Quote:
"The things I thought were so important - because of the effort I put into them - have turned out to be of small value. And the things I never thought about, the things I was never able either to measure or to expect, were the things that mattered." (From Firewatch, July 4, 1952)
WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE THOMAS MERTON QUOTE? WHY NOT PUT IT DOWN AS A GIFT TO OTHERS ON THIS, HIS 91ST BIRTHDAY.
Happy Birthday Tom from Bryan Sherwood
Merton by Alan Creech
Technorati tag: thomas merton
posted by Dan Phillips @ 12:11 AM
3 comments
3 Comments:
This is a hard one Dan, but my favorite Merton quote - for the world today - is this statement made in his informal talk delivered in Calcutta, October 1968:
"And the deepest level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless. It is beyond words, and it is beyond speech, and it is beyond concept. Not that we discover a new unity. We discover an older unity. My dear brothers, we are already one. But we imagine that we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are."
the freedom that is in our nature is our ability to love something, someone besides ourselfves, and for the sake, not of ourselves, but of the one we love. There is in the human will an innate tendency, an inborn capacity for disinterested love. This power to love another for his own sake is one the things that makes us like God, because this powere is the one
Thanks for the link Dan. I don't know that I can narrow it down to one favorite quote. Merton seems to speak to me over and over. Anyone who checks out my blog will see many Merton quotes that are significant to me.
One of the most recent quotes:
We do not see the way that lies ahead of us. It seems dark, but God is the Master of all destinies and His will is love. Let us then put aside everything else and trust ourselves completely to Him, giving ourselves to His love, asking Him to enlighten and guide us in the way of positive action, if any such action is feasible. For the rest, we must have great patience and sustained fidelity to His will and to our ideals.
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