Thomas Merton

[Snoopy]

We have to be able to relax the psychic and spiritual cramp which knots us in the painful, vulnerable, helpless “I” that is all we know as ourselves.

[Snoopy]

Originally Posted by Tariki

Yes, it seems fairly quiet................

yes, it's nice isn't it?

[Tariki]

If you want to find satisfactory formulas you had better deal with things that can be fitted into a formula. The vocation to seek God is not one of them. Nor is existence. Nor is the spirit of man.

...or wo/man (I wish the guy had been PC!!)

[Tariki]

From a letter to the "Zen Man" Daisetz T Suzuki.................

I want to speak for this Western world.................which has in past centuries broken in upon you and brought you our own confusion, our own alienation, our own decrepitude, our lack of culture, our lack of faith...........If I wept until the end of the world, I could not signify enough of what this tragedy means. If only we had thought of coming to you to learn something..............If only we had thought of coming to you and loving you for what you are in yourselves, instead of trying to make you over into our own image and likeness. For me it is clearly evident that you and I have in common and share most intimately precisely that which, in the eyes of conventional Westerners, would seem to separate us. The fact that you are a Zen Buddhist and I am a Christian monk, far from separating us, makes us most like one another. How many centuries is it going to take for people to discover this fact?......

[InLove]

Thanks for that quote, Tariki--

It reminds me of some of Kakuzo Okakura's writings in The Book of Tea.

InPeace,
InLove

[Tariki]

Originally Posted by InLove

Thanks for that quote, Tariki--

It reminds me of some of Kakuzo Okakura's writings in The Book of Tea.

InPeace,
InLove

InLove,

I had never heard of Kakuzo Okakura and his "Book of Tea". Thanks! I looked it up on Amazon and saw that it was a "search inside" book, so took a quick peep. Yes, he seems to be concerned about the stereotyping that goes on between "east" and "west" - both ways! His book seems a gentle one and well worth a full read..............

[InLove]

Merton seems to be making the rounds, does he not? I know which book is at the top of my reading list now, once I get that gift card or make it to the library.

I am going to pass this link on here in the same fashion in which I received it, that is, hidden in plain sight. The Book of Tea by Kakuzo Okakura Got a printer? Thanks to our very own "nomadic fish slapper" here in CR. Thanks again, SG.


InPeace,
InLove

[InLove]

I thought I should add that the link I provided above is not the whole package. This book is also high up on my list of purchases to make, as the complete hard copy would also be a treasure. I just find the material I passed on here to be inspired and educational.

(Hope that covers any possible infringement. )

Anyway...back to Merton, anyone?

InPeace,
InLove

[Tariki]

Originally Posted by InLove

Anyway...back to Merton, anyone?

InPeace,
InLove

True communication on the deepest level is more than a simple sharing of ideas, conceptual knowledge, or formulated truth...............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 and sisters, 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.

[Tariki]

Once more I am reading through "The Hidden Ground of Love", the first volume of Thomas Merton's collected letters. This collection has really been a grace and I bless the day that I saw it, priced at a mere £4 in a secondhand bookstore.

Just a couple of quotes drawn from the first 30 odd pages or so........

But it certainly is a wonderful thing to wake up suddenly in the solitude of the woods and look up at the sky and see the utter nonsense of everything, including all the solemn stuff given out by professional asses about the spiritual life: and simply to burst out laughing, and laugh and laugh, with the sky and the trees because God is not in words, and not in systems, and not in liturgical movements, and not in "contemplation" with a big C, or in asceticism or in anything like that, not even in the apostolate. Certainly not in books. I can go on writing them, for all that, but one might as well make paper airplanes out of the whole lot.

The second comes from a letter written to E.D.Andrews, an expert on the life and beliefs of the Shakers (or the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing). Andrews had sent Merton a copy of his book, Shaker Furniture, and Merton was responding to the gift. Sadly, though written in 1961, the words "in our day" remain appropriate........

This wordless simplicity, in which the works of quiet and holy people speak humbly for themselves. How important that is in our day, when we are flooded with a tidal wave of meaningless words: and worse still when in the void of those words the sinister power of hatred and destruction is at work. The Shakers remain as witnesses to the fact that only humility keeps man in communion with truth, and first of all with his own inner truth. This one must know without knowing it, as they did. For as soon as a man becomes aware of "his truth" he lets go of it and embraces an illusion.

[Ciel]

Beautiful paradox Tariki.

- c -

[Snoopy]

Originally Posted by Tariki

For as soon as a man becomes aware of "his truth" he lets go of it and embraces an illusion.

You must not allow yourself to be represented as someone in whom a few of the favourite daydreams of the public have come true. You must be willing, if necessary, to become a disturbing and therefore an undesired person, one who is not wanted because he upsets the general dream.

Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander.

We make ourselves real by telling the truth.

No Man is an Island.

[Snoopy]

We do not think we can be happy with a happiness that has no price tag on it.

Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander.

[wil]

I am against war, against violence, against violent revolution, for peaceful settlement of differences, for nonviolent but nevertheless radical changes. Change is needed, and violence will not really change anything: at most it will only transfer power from one set of bull-headed authorities to another.
Thomas Merton (1915 - 1968)

[Tariki]

As promised (or was it "threatened" ) on another thread...........here are Merton's views concerning "proselytizing/evangelising"

I hate proselytizing. This awful buisness of making others just like oneself so that one is thereby "justified" and under no obligation to change himself. What a terrible thing this can be. The source of how many sicknesses in the world. The true Christian apostolate is nothing of this sort, a fact that Christians themselves have largely forgotten. I think it was......Tauler (or maybe Eckhart) who said in a sermon that even if the church were empty he would preach the sermon to the four walls because he had to. That is the true apostolic spirit, based not on the desire to make others conform, but in the desire to proclaim and announce the good tidings of God's infinite love. In this context the preacher is not a "converter" but merely a herald, a voice, and the Spirit of the Lord is left free to act as He pleases. But this has degenerated into a doctrine and fashion of "convert-makers" in which man exerts pressure and techniques (this awful business of "modern techniques of propaganda") upon his fellow man in order to make him, force him, bring him under a kind of charm that compels him to abandon his own integrity and his own freedom and yield to another man or another institution. Little do men realize that in such a situation the Holy Spirit is silent and inactive, or perhaps active against the insolence of man. Hence the multitude of honest and sincere men who "cannot accept" a message that is preached without respect for the Spirit of God or for the spirit of man.