Thomas Merton - New Seeds of Contemplation (1949)

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Everyone of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self..We are not very good at recognizing illusions, least of all the ones we cherish about ourselves.

Thomas Merton
For every gain in deep certitude there is a corresponding growth of superficial "doubt." This doubt is by no means opposed to genuine faith, but it mercilessly examines and questions the spurious "faith" of everyday life, the human faith which is nothing but the passive acceptance of conventional opinion.

Thomas Merton
Each particular being, in its individuality, its concrete nature and entity, with all its own characteristics and its private qualities and its own inviolable identity, gives glory to God by being precisely what He wants it to be here and now, in the circumstances ordained for it by His Love and His infinite Art.

Thomas Merton
To become attached to the experience of peace is to threaten the true and essential and vital union of our soul with God above sense and experience in the darkness of a pure and perfect love.

Thomas Merton
For pride, which is the inordinate attribution of goods and values and glories to one's own contingent self, cannot exist where there is no contingent self to which anything can be attributed.

Thomas Merton
There should be at least a room or some corner where no one will find you and disturb you or notice you.

Thomas Merton
You will never be able to have perfect interior peace and recollection unless you are detached even from the desire of peace and recollection. You will never be able to pray perfectly until you are detached from the pleasures of prayer.

Thomas Merton
To find love I must enter into the sanctuary where it is hidden, which is the mystery of God.

Thomas Merton
In our creation, God asked a question and in our truly living; God answers the question.

Thomas Merton
Each individual Christian and each new age of the Church has to make this rediscovery, this return to the source of Christian life.

Thomas Merton
Our vocation is not simply to be, but to work together with God in the creation of our own life, our own identity, our own destiny....To work out our identity in God.

Thomas Merton
Despair is the absolute extreme of self-love. It is reached when a person deliberately turns his back on all help from anyone else in order to taste the rotten luxury of knowing himself to be lost

Thomas Merton
To those who have no personal experience of this revolutionary aspect of Christian truth, but who see only the outer crust of dead, human conservatism that tends to form around the Church the way barnacles gather on the hull of a ship, all this talk about dynamism sounds foolish.

Thomas Merton
To worship our false selves is to worship nothing. And the worship of nothing is hell.

Thomas Merton
A tree gives glory to God by being a tree. For in being what God means it to be it is obeying God. It consents, so to speak, to God's creative love. It is expressing an idea which is in God and which is not distinct from the essence of God, and therefore a tree imitates God by being a tree.

Thomas Merton
To enter into the realm of contemplation, one must in a certain sense die: but this death is in fact the entrance into a higher life. It is a death for the sake of life, which leaves behind all that we can know or treasure as life, as thought, as experience as joy, as being. [Every form of intuition and experience] die to be born again on a higher level of life.

Thomas Merton
The only influence that can really upset the injustice and iniquity of men is the power that breathes in the Christian tradition, renewing our participation in the Life that is the Light of men.

Thomas Merton
Our idea of God tells us more about ourselves than about Him.

Thomas Merton
God Himself begins to live in me not only as my Creator but as my other and true self.

Thomas Merton