Thomas Merton Eucharist Quotes

When humility delivers a man from attachment to his own works and his own reputation, he discovers that perfect joy is possible only when we have completely forgotten ourselves. And it is only when we pay no more attention to our own deeds and our own reputation and our own excellence that we are at last completely free to serve God in perfection for His own sake alone. ~ Thomas Merton

The world as pure object is something that is not there. It is not a reality outside us for which we exist ... It is a living and self-creating mystery of which I am myself a part, to which I am myself, my own unique door. ~ Thomas Merton

Hence monastic prayer, especially meditation and contemplative prayer, is not so much a way to find God as a way of resting in him whom we have found, who loves us, who is near to us, who comes to us to draw us to himself. ~ Thomas Merton

The real purpose of meditation is this: to teach a man how to work himself free of created things and temporal concerns, in which he finds only confusion and sorrow, and enter into a conscious and loving contact with God in which he is disposed to receive from God the help he knows he needs so badly, and to pay to God the praise and honor and thanksgiving and love which it has now become his joy to give. ~ Thomas Merton

We should not, however, judge the value of our meditation by "how we feel." A hard and apparently fruitless meditation may in fact be much more valuable than one that is easy, happy, enlightened and apparently a big success. ~ Thomas Merton

Solitude means withdrawal from an artificial and fictional level of being which men, divided by original sin, have fabricated in order to keep peace with concupiscence and death. But by that very fact the solitary finds himself on the level of a more perfect spiritual society - the city of those who have become real enough to confess and glorify God (that is, life) in the teeth of death. ~ Thomas Merton

The camera does not know what it takes; it captures materials with which you reconstruct, not so much what you saw as what you thought you saw. Hence the best photography is aware, mindful, of illusion and uses illusion, permitting and encouraging it - especially unconscious and powerful illusions that are not usually admitted on the scene. ~ Thomas Merton

If it is awakened, it communicates a new life to the intelligence in which it lives, so that it becomes a living awareness of itself: and this awareness is not so much something that we ourselves have, as something that we are. It is a new and indefinable quality of our living being. ~ Thomas Merton

Fishes are born in water Man is born in Tao. If fishes, born in water, Seek the deep shadow Of pond and pool, All their needs Are satisfied. If man, born in Tao, Sinks into the deep shadow Of non-action To forget aggression and concern, He lacks nothing His life is secure. Moral: All the fish needs Is to get lost in water. All man needs is to get lost In Tao. ~ Thomas Merton

I stand among you as one who offers a small message of hope ... there are always people who dare to seek on the margin of society, who are not dependent on social acceptance, not dependent on social routine, and prefer a kind of free-floating existence under a state of risk. ~ Thomas Merton

For me to be a saint means to be myself. Therefore the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and of discovering my true self. ~ Thomas Merton

But there is nothing to prevent a layman from taking just one Psalm a day, for instance in his night prayers, and reciting it thoughtfully, pausing to meditate on the lines which have the deepest meaning for him. ~ Thomas Merton

Life is not accomplishing some special work but attaining to a degree of consciousness and inner freedom which is beyond all works and attainments. ~ Thomas Merton

Love is the epiphany of God in our poverty. ~ Thomas Merton

I feel like, for me, reading Thomas Merton is like that. When you're a ways into it, you're five pages in, 20 pages in, 30 pages in, it seems like one of the more oxymoronic undertakings you could attempt. ~ Will Oldham

Love not only prefers the good of another to my own, but it does not even compare the two. ~ Thomas Merton

He's not a safe safe or a tame God, securely lodged behind the bars of a distant Heaven; He has the most annoying manner of showing up when we least want Him; of confronting us in the strangest ways. ~ Thomas Merton

I cannot make the universe obey me. I cannot make other people conform to my own whims and fancies. I cannot make even my own body obey me. ~ Thomas Merton

Even the darkest moments of the liturgy are filled with joy, and Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the lenten fast, is a day of happiness, a Christian feast. ~ Thomas Merton

Hence the aim of meditation, in the context of Christian faith, is not to arrive at an objective and apparently 'scientific' knowledge of God, but to come to know him through the realization that our very being is penetrated with his knowledge and love for us. Our knowledge of God is paradoxically a knowledge not of him as the object of our scrutiny, but of ourselves as utterly dependent on his saving and merciful knowledge of us. It is in proportion as we are known to him that we find our real being and identity in Christ. We know him and through ourselves in so far as his truth is the source of our being and his merciful love is the very heart of our life and existence. We have no other reason for being, except to be loved by him as our Creator and Redeemer, and to love him in return. There is no true knowledge of God that does not imply a profound grasp and an intimate personal acceptance of this profound relationship. ~ Thomas Merton

October is a fine and dangerous season in America. a wonderful time to begin anything at all. You go to college, and every course in the catalogue looks wonderful. ~ Thomas Merton

One of the effects of original sin is an instinctive prejudice in favour of our own selfish desires. We see things as they are not, because we see them centered on ourselves. Fear, anxiety, greed, ambition and our hopeless need for pleasure all distort the image of reality that is reflected in our minds. Grace does not completely correct this distortion all at once: but it gives us a means of recognizing and allowing for it. And it tells us what we must do to correct it. Sincerity must be bought at a price: the humility to recognize our innumerable errors, and fidelity in tirelessly setting them right. ~ Thomas Merton

As a matter of face, Zen is at present most fashionable in America among those who are least concerned with moral discipline. Zen has, indeed, become for us a symbol of moral revolt. It is true, the Zen-man's contempt for conventional and formalistic social custom is a healthy phenomenon, but it is healthy only because it presupposes a spiritual liberty based on freedom from passion, egotism and self-delusion. A pseudo-Zen attitude which seeks to justify a complete moral collapse with a few rationalizations based on the Zen Masters is only another form of bourgeois self-deception. It is not an expression of healthy revolt, but only another aspect of the same lifeless and inert conventionalism against which it appears to be protesting. ~ Thomas Merton

Those of us who attempt to act and do things for others or for the world without deepening our own self-understanding, freedom, integrity, and capacity to love, will not have anything to give others. We will communicate to them nothing but the contagion of our own obsessions, our aggressivity, our ego-centered ambitions, our delusions about ends and means. ~ Thomas Merton

How do you expect to arrive at the end of your journey if you take the road to another man's city?(100) ~ Thomas Merton

Stop asking yourself questions that have no meaning. Or if they have, you'll find out when you need to
find out both the questions and the answers. ~ Thomas Merton

We do not exist for ourselves alone, and it is only when we are fully convinced of this fact that we begin to love ourselves properly and thus also love others. ~ Thomas Merton

Freedom is perfect when no other love can impede our desire to love God ~ Thomas Merton

Do not be one of those who, rather than risk failure, never attempts anything. ~ Thomas Merton

Keng's Disciple

The disciple: "When I don't know people treat me like a fool.
When I do know, the knowledge gets me into trouble.
When I fail to do good. I hurt others.
When I do good, I hurt myself.
If I avoid my duty, I am remiss,
But if I do it, I am ruined.
How can I get out of these contradictions?
This is what I came to ask you."

". . . .You are trying to sound
The middle of the ocean
With a six-foot pole.
You have got lost and are trying
To find your way back
To your own true self.
You find nothing
But illegible signposts
Pointing in all directions.
I pity you."

The disciple asked for admittance,
Took a cell, and there
Meditated,
Trying to cultivate qualities
He thought desirable
And get rid of others
Which he disliked.
Ten days of that!
Despair!

". . . Do not try
To hold on to Tao -
Just hope that Tao
Will keep hold of you!"

". . . You want the first elements?
The infant has them.
Free from care, unaware of self,
He acts without reflection,
Stays where he is put, does not know why,
Does not figure things out,
Just goes along with them,
Is part of the current.
These are the first elements!"

The disciple asked:
Is this perfection?

Lao replied: "Not at all.
It is only the beginning.
Thomas Merton

In the last analysis, the individual person is responsible for living his own life and for 'finding himself.' If he persists in shifting his responsibility to somebody else, he fails to find out the meaning of his own existence. ~ Thomas Merton