Monk Thomas Merton Quotes

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Hurry ruins saints as well as artists.
Thomas Merton (Seeds of Contemplation)
Thomas Merton, the American monk, pointed out that we may spend our whole life climbing the ladder of success, only to find when we get to the top that our ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.
Richard Rohr (Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life)
Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves. They never get around to being the particular poet or the particular monk they are intended to be by God. They never become the man or the artist who is called for by all the circumstances of their individual lives. They waste their years in vain efforts to be some other poet, some other saint...They wear out their minds and bodies in a hopeless endeavor to have somebody else's experiences or write somebody else's poems.
Thomas Merton
Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, wrote that nothing can be expressed about solitude "that has not already been said better by the wind in the pine trees.
Michael Finkel (The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit)
Syrian monk, Isaac of Niniveh: Many are avidly seeking but they alone find who remain in continual silence. … Every man who delights in a multitude of words, even though he says admirable things, is empty within. If you love truth, be a lover of silence. Silence like the sunlight will illuminate you in God and will deliver you from the phantoms of ignorance. Silence will unite you to God himself. … More than all things love silence: it brings you a fruit that tongue cannot describe. In the beginning we have to force ourselves to be silent. But then there is born something that draws us to silence. May God give you an experience of this “something” that is born of silence. If only you practice this, untold light will dawn on you in consequence … after a while a certain sweetness is born in the heart of this exercise and the body is drawn almost by force to remain in silence.
Thomas Merton (Contemplative Prayer)
How free you can become if you stop worrying about things that don’t concern you!
Thomas Merton (Entering the Silence: Becoming a Monk and a Writer (The Journals of Thomas Merton Book 2))
I don’t even need to know precisely what I am doing, except that I am acting for the love of God.
Thomas Merton (Entering the Silence: Becoming a Monk and a Writer (The Journals of Thomas Merton Book 2))
As the Trappist monk Thomas Merton says: ‘God is far too real to be met anywhere other than in reality.
Pete Greig (How to Pray: A Simple Guide for Normal People)
In reality the monk abandons the world only in order to listen more intently to the deepest and most neglected voices that proceed from its inner depth.
Thomas Merton (Contemplative Prayer)
Nevertheless, every day love corners me somewhere and surrounds me with peace without my having to look very far or very hard or do anything special. God
Thomas Merton (Entering the Silence: Becoming a Monk and a Writer (The Journals of Thomas Merton Book 2))
Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, wrote that nothing can be expressed about solitude “that has not already been said better by the wind in the pine trees.
Michael Finkel (The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit)
All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone,” concluded the seventeenth-century philosopher Blaise Pascal. The nineteenth-century Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard prescribed quiet to remedy “all the ills of the world.” The twentieth-century monk Thomas Merton embraced monastic silence as a way of coming closer to God.
Stephen Kurczy (The Quiet Zone: Unraveling the Mystery of a Town Suspended in Silence)
I have my own way to walk and for some reason or other Zen is right in the middle of it wherever I go. So there it is, with all its beautiful purposelessness, and it has become very familiar to me though I do not know "what it is." Or even if it is an "it." Not to be foolish and multiply words, I'll say simply that it seems to me that Zen is the very atmosphere of the Gospels, and the Gospels are bursting with it. It is the proper climate for any monk, no matter what kind of monk he may be. If I could not breathe Zen I would probably die of spiritual asphyxiation.
Thomas Merton
Thomas Merton, of course, constitutes a special threat to Christians, because he presents himself as a contemplative Christian monk, and his work has already affected the vitals of Roman Catholicism, its monasticism. Shortly before his death, Father Merton wrote an appreciative introduction to a new translation of the Bhagavad Gita, which is the spiritual manual or “Bible” of all Hindus, and one of the foundation blocks of monism or Advaita Vedanta. The Gita, it must be remembered, opposes almost every important teaching of Christianity. His book on the Zen Masters, published posthumously, is also noteworthy, because the entire work is based on a treacherous mistake: the assumption that all the so-called “mystical experiences” in every religion are true. He should have known better.
Seraphim Rose (Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future)
The solitary is necessarily a man who does what he wants to do,” wrote Thomas Merton, an American Trappist monk who died in 1968. “In fact, he has nothing else to do. That is why his vocation is both dangerous and despised.
Michael Finkel (The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit)
I believe with Diadochos, that if at the hour of death my confidence in God’s mercy is perfect, I will pass the frontier without trouble and pass the dreadful array of my sins with compunction and confidence and leave them all behind forever.
Thomas Merton (A Search for Solitude: Pursuing the Monk's True Life, The Journals of Thomas Merton, Volume 3: 1952-1960)
I simply have no business being in love and playing around with a girl, however innocently.... After all I am supposed to be a monk with a vow of chastity and though I have kept my vow—I wonder if I can keep it indefinitely and still play this gorgeous game!
Thomas Merton (Learning to Love: The Journals of Thomas Merton [Volume Six 1966-1967])
Things seemed to be falling apart, and the Church was changing the rituals and practices that the boy waiting to board the bus thought were immutable. In fact, when I first stepped onto the Greyhound bus bound for Cincinnati, via Amarillo, St. Louis, and Indianapolis, I believed my own life and the life of the world was experiencing a spiritual rebirth signaled by the popularity of national figures like TV personality Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, and social activists like Catholic Worker founder, Dorothy Day.
Murray Bodo (The Road to Mount Subasio)
What has happened to our ability to dwell in unknowing, to live inside a question and coexist with the tensions of uncertainty? Where is our willingness to incubate pain and let it birth something new? What has happened to patient unfolding, to endurance? These things are what form the ground of waiting. And if you look carefully, you’ll see that they’re also the seedbed of creativity and growth—what allows us to do the daring and to break through to newness. As Thomas Merton observed, “The imagination should be allowed a certain amount of time to browse around.”1 Creativity flourishes not in certainty but in questions. Growth germinates not in tent dwelling but in upheaval. Yet the seduction is always security rather than venturing, instant knowing rather than deliberate waiting.
Sue Monk Kidd (When the Heart Waits: Spiritual Direction for Life's Sacred Questions (Plus))
In a talk he gave two hours before his death in 1968, the renowned Trappist monk Thomas Merton said, “The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another and all involved with one another.
Karen Speerstra (The Divine Art of Dying: How to Live Well While Dying)
They knew a good building would praise God better than a bad one, even if the bad one were covered all over with official symbols of praise.
Thomas Merton (Entering the Silence: Becoming a Monk and a Writer (The Journals of Thomas Merton Book 2))
In this matter of monastic tradition, we must carefully distinguish between tradition and convention. In many monasteries there is very little living tradition, and yet the monks think themselves to be traditional. Why? Because they cling to an elaborate set of conventions. Convention and tradition may seem on the surface to be much the same thing. But this superficial resemblance only makes conventionalism all the more harmful. In actual fact, conventions are the death of real tradition as they are of all real life. They are parasites which attach themselves to the living organism of tradition and devour all its reality, turning it into a hollow formality. Tradition is living and active, but convention is passive and dead. Tradition does not form us automatically: we have to work to understand it. Convention is accepted passively, as a matter of routine. Therefore convention easily becomes an evasion of reality. It offers us only pretended ways of solving the problems of living— a system of gestures and formalities. Tradition really teaches us to live and shows us how to take full responsibility for our own lives. Thus tradition is often flatly opposed to what is ordinary, to what is mere routine. But convention, which is a mere repetition of familiar routines, follows the line of least resistance. One goes through an act, without trying to understand the meaning of it all, merely because everyone else does the same. Tradition, which is always old, is at the same time ever new because it is always reviving - born again in each new generation, to be lived and applied in a new and particular way. Convention is simply the ossification of social customs. The activities of conventional people are merely excuses for not acting in a more integrally human way. Tradition nourishes the life of the spirit: convention merely disguises its interior decay. Finally, tradition is creative. Always original, it always opens out new horizons for an old journey. Convention, on the other hand, is completely unoriginal. It is slavish imitation. It is closed in upon itself and leads to complete sterility. Tradition teaches us how to love, because it develops and expands our powers, and shows us how to give ourselves to the world in which we live, in return for all that we have received from it. Convention breeds nothing but anxiety and fear. It cuts us off from the sources of all inspiration. It ruins our productivity. It locks us up within a prison of frustrated effort. It is, in the end, only the mask for futility and for despair. Nothing could be better than for a monk to live and grow up in his monastic tradition, and nothing could be more fatal than for him to spend his life tangled in a web of monastic conventions.
Thomas Merton (No Man Is an Island)
There should be at least a room or some corner where no one will find you and disturb you or notice you. You should be free to untether yourself from the world and set yourself free, loosing all the fine strings and strands of tension that bind you, by sight, by sound, by thought, to the pressure of other men. Once you have found a place, be content with it, and do not be disturbed if a good reason takes you out of it. Love it, and return to it as soon as you can. — THOMAS MERTON FRENCH-BORN TRAPPIST MONK
Dale Salwak (The Wonders of Solitude)
The great twentieth-century monk Thomas Merton encountered precisely the same spiritual exhaustion partway through his life. The chief source of this exhaustion, he writes, “is the selfish anxiety to get the most out of everything, to be a sparkling
Stephen Cope (The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling)
I need criticism the way a man dying of thirst needs water.
Thomas Merton (Merton and Waugh: A Monk, A Crusty Old Man, and The Seven Storey Mountain)
I understand conservatism. He is one of the genuine conservatives: he wishes to conserve not what might be lost but what is not even threatened because it vanished long ago.
Thomas Merton (Merton and Waugh: A Monk, A Crusty Old Man, and The Seven Storey Mountain)
For the monk searches not only his own heart: he plunges deep into the heart of that world of which he remains a part although he seems to have "left" it. In reality the monk abandons the world only in order to listen more intently to the deepest and most neglected voices that proceed from its inner depth.
Thomas Merton (Contemplative Prayer)
No one can find God without having first been found by Him. A monk is a man who seeks God because he has been found by God.
Thomas Merton (The Silent Life)
Thomas Merton, the American monk, pointed out that we may spend our whole life climbing the ladder of success, only to find when we get to the top that our ladder is leaning against the wrong wall. Most
Richard Rohr (Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life)
My friend’s experience reminded me that the search for a perfect religious community is a futile one. As the Trappist monk Thomas Merton wrote in The Seven Storey Mountain, “The first and most elementary test of one’s call to the religious life—whether as a Jesuit, Franciscan, Cistercian or Carthusian—is the willingness to accept life in a community in which everybody is more or less imperfect.” That holds for any religious organization.
James Martin (The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything: A Spirituality for Real Life)
We [vowed religious; nuns, monks] want to be squares, and we want others to be square, also. That's what religious have been doing. They're part of a square society. And let me be quite clear about the fact that liberalism doesn't get you off this hook, because liberals are part of the square society, too. It's better to be a liberal than a conservative, but they're both equally square.
Thomas Merton (Thomas Merton on Prayer)
else. They lose self-possession and freedom. The prolific letter-writer and Trappist monk Thomas Merton noticed this was happening to him during his college years at Columbia University. Later in life, he wrote: “The true inner self must be drawn up like a jewel from the bottom of the sea, rescued from confusion, from indistinction, from immersion in the common, the nondescript, the trivial, the sordid, the evanescent.”3
Luke Burgis (Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life)
Jesus, I put myself in Your hands. I rest in Your wisdom that has arranged all things for me. I promise to stop jumping out of Your arms to try and walk on my own feet, forgetting that I am no longer on the ground or near it!
Thomas Merton (Entering the Silence: Becoming a Monk and a Writer (The Journals of Thomas Merton))
As the monk Thomas Merton wrote, “People may spend their whole lives climbing the ladder of success only to find, once they reach the top, that the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.
Drew Dyck (Your Future Self Will Thank You: Secrets to Self-Control from the Bible and Brain Science (A Guide for Sinners, Quitters, and Procrastinators))
In contrast to [Thomas] Merton, who hazarded "with diffidence" statements about Buddhism and was acutely aware that, as a Catholic priest and monk, he could not be sure that he had trustworthy insights into the spiritual values of a tradition with which he was not really familiar (Merton 1967, 5), Suzuki was always confident in his own judgment on Christianity. However, his interpretation of Christianity remained superficial and polemical. He argued, for example, that Christian tenets such as the crucifixion are merely symbolical, "while Buddhism is . . . free from the historical symbolism of Christianity" (Suzuki 1949–1953, 1: 152).
Bernard Faure (Chan Insights and Oversights)
Many of us are like James Joyce’s Mr. Duffy who “lived a short distance from his body.” In fact, we may live some distance from our bodies, and it can take enormous effort to get back in touch with our five senses. In trying, we often go overboard and get destructive with our bodies or what we put into them. …An unexpected pratfall is sometimes the way our “earthiness” is revealed to us. Jung once spoke of this experience as a pilgrimage back down out of the clouds into our bodies. He writes of having to climb back down to the earth to accept that the little clod of earth that he was. This wasn’t self-negation but true humility. The monk Thomas Merton records having a similar experience in a crosswalk in Louisville. He jumped for joy when he realized that he was like everybody else-a human being, a creature in solidarity with all creation. But not everybody jumps for joy at that realization. One reason we may try to ignore the senses or zonk out with excess is that our bodies remind us of our extreme vulnerability. The gift of life can be taken away so suddenly and unexpectedly. Holding this awareness rescues us from the danger of imagining that we are morally self-sufficient or excellent. Celebrating our vulnerability and finitude places our fears and dreads where they belong-not at the center of life but at its edge. We are closer to the mystery at the heart of things, to which the proper response is gratitude.
Alan Jones (Seasons of Grace: The Life-Giving Practice of Gratitude)
Prayer is bringing your helplessness to Jesus. Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, summarized it beautifully: Prayer is an expression of who we are. . . . We are a living incompleteness. We are a gap, an emptiness that calls for fulfillment.
Paul E. Miller (A Praying Life: Connecting With God In A Distracting World)
The truth is, I am far from being the monk or the cleric that I ought to be. My life is a great mess and tangle of half-conscious subterfuges to evade grace and duty. I have done all things badly. I have thrown away great opportunities. My infidelity to Christ, instead of making me sick with despair, drives me to throw myself all the more blindly into the arms of His mercy.
Thomas Merton (The Sign of Jonas)
Trappist monk Thomas Merton wrote in his poem “The Inner Law”: He who is controlled by objects Loses possession of his inner self: If he no longer values himself, How can he value others? If he no longer values others, He is abandoned.101
John Delony (Building a Non-Anxious Life)
Humility is the surest sign of strength. —THOMAS MERTON, AUTHOR AND TRAPPIST MONK
Mark Goulston (Just Listen: Discover the Secret to Getting Through to Absolutely Anyone)
JMJT February 1, 1942. Septuagesima.
Thomas Merton (Entering the Silence: Becoming a Monk and a Writer (The Journals of Thomas Merton Book 2))
Our landlord, Mr. Duggan, ran a nearby saloon. He got in trouble with Father for helping himself to the rhubarb which we were growing in the garden. I remember the grey summer dusk in which this happened. We were at the supper table, when the bended Mr. Duggan was observed, like some whale in the sea of green rhubarb, plucking up the red stalks. Father rose to his feet and hastened out into the garden. I could hear indignant words. We sat at the supper table, silent, not eating, and when Father returned I began to question him, and to endeavour to work out the morality of the situation. And I still remember it as having struck me as a difficult case, with much to be said on both sides. In fact, I had assumed that if the landlord felt like it, he could simply come and harvest all our vegetables, and there was nothing we could do about it. I mention this with the full consciousness that someone will use it against me, and say that the real reason I became a monk in later years was that I had the mentality of a medieval serf when I was barely out of the cradle.
Thomas Merton
To see how seriously men take things and yet how little their seriousness profits them. Their tragedy makes our mediocrity all the more terrible.
Thomas Merton (Entering the Silence: Becoming a Monk and a Writer (The Journals of Thomas Merton Book 2))
On 10 December 1968, at a Red Cross centre near Bangkok, Thomas Merton gave a lecture affirming the place of the monastic as an outsider. ‘The monk is essentially someone who takes up a critical attitude toward the world and its structures,’ he remarked, ‘somebody who says, in one way or another, that the claims of the world are fraudulent.’ Afterward, he went back to his cottage to rest and to shower before a scheduled evening panel discussion. He emerged from his shower, walking with wet feet on a wet floor. It’s surmised that he reached for a fan, which was later shown to have faulty wiring, and suffered a fatal electric shock. Merton’s body was flown back to the US on an Air Force transport to Oakland, then sent on a commercial carrier to Louisville.
Jane Brox (Silence: A Social History of One of the Least Understood Elements of Our Lives)