New Seeds of Contemplation | 
You would think this was written today.. I guess some things never change.
You would think this was written today.. I guess some things never change.
pickThomas Merton strikes right through you, he shatters and breaks apart the self deception of our ego. Time after time during reading this I felt as if my ego had no where to hide and it had to stand trial. But Thomas Merton refused to be the judge and would hold no court.Thomas Merton shows that this experience is not to be judged but observed and understood for what it is.It seems to me that “Thinking” gets in the way of “Living” .
This book ! Thomas Merton is just laying waste to all my preconceived notions. He is laying an axe to the root of a dead tree!
“On the other hand, when you use the expression to "desire God" you implicitly reduce God to the status of an "object" or of a "thing," as if He were "something" that could be grasped and possessed the way we possess riches, or knowledge, or some other created entity. “……”In so doing, we tend inevitably to distort and even to dese crate His holy and infinite truth. “
The chief contradiction of sin…. “we have to do violence to our selves to keep from laboring uselessly for what is bitter and without joy, and we have to compel ourselves to take what is easy and full of happiness as though it were against our interests, because for us the line of least resistance leads in the way of greatest hardship and sometimes for us to do what is, in itself, most easy, can be the hardest thing in the world”
This cuts really deep in the soul. Thomas Merton seems to
know bullshit when he sees it.
“The mind that is the prisoner of conventional ideas, and the will that is the captive of its own desire cannot accept the seeds of an unfamiliar truth and a super natural desire. For how can I receive the seeds of freedom if I am in love with slavery and how can I cherish the desire of God if I am filled with another and an opposite desire? “
“When a proud man thinks he is humble his case is hopeless”… .”IN order to become myself I must cease to be what I always thought I wanted to be, and in order to find myself I must go out of myself, and in order to live I have to die.”
I found some great books while I was at the Salvation Army yesterday 😍
“Instead of hating the people you think are war-makers, hate the appetites and disorder in your own soul, which are the causes of war. If you love peace, then hate injustice, hate tyranny, hate greed - but hate these things in yourself, not in another.”
