Australian Thomas Merton Society in Boronia, Victoria, Australia | Organisation

Australian Thomas Merton Society

Locality: Boronia, Victoria, Australia

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23.01.2022 A Christmas Card - Written in 1947 When the white stars talk together like sisters And when the winter hills Raise their grand semblance in the freezing night, ... Somewhere one window Bleeds like the brown eye of an open force. Hills, stars, White stars that stand above the eastern stable. Look down and offer Him. The dim adoring light of your belief. Whose small Heart bleeds with infinite fire. Shall not this Child (When we shall hear the bells of His amazing voice) Conquer the winter of our hateful century? And when His Lady Mother leans upon the crib, Lo, with what rapiers Those two loves fence and flame their brillancy! Here in this straw lie planned the fires That will melt all our sufferings: He is our Lamb, our holocaust! And one by one the shepherds, with their snowy feet, Stamp and shake out their hats upon the stable dirt, And one by one kneel down to look upon their Life. Thomas Merton

21.01.2022 Thomas Merton on Ash Wednesday and Lent. 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. Ash Wednesday is for people who know that it means for their soul to be logged with these icy waters: all of us are such people, if only we can realize it.... There is confidence everywhere in Ash Wednesday, yet that does not mean unmixed and untroubled security. The confidence of the Christian is always a confidence in spite of darkness and risk, in the presence of peril, with every evidence of possible disaster Once again, Lent is not just a time for squaring conscious accounts: but for realizing what we had perhaps not seen before. The light of Lent is given us to help us with this realization. Nevertheless, the liturgy of Ash Wednesday is not focussed on the sinfulness of the penitent but on the mercy of God. The question of sinfulness is raised precisely because this is a day of mercy, and the just do not need a savior. This essay may be found in Seasons of Celebration (FSG 1965), 113-124.

16.01.2022 How spiritual is our life?

11.01.2022 Thomas Merton Photo by Sr. Therese Lentfoehr

08.01.2022 Thomas Merton, in a book he considered one of his best, New Seeds of Contemplation, has what I think is an exceptionally beautiful passage: "A tree gives glory to God by being a tree. For in being what God means it to be it is obeying him. It 'consists,' so to speak, to his 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." (p 29) By our creation we, too, express an ide...a that is in God, that always has been and always will be and that is not distinct from his very essence. We indeed imitate God, and in a fuller way than anything else in creation. And because we are the kind of creatures that we are, human persons with knowing minds and choosing hearts, and with free will, we can consent to God's creative love not only in a "so to speak" way but in a very godlike way. Father M. Basil Pennington, OCSO Centering Prayer (pages 69-70) See more

02.01.2022 A Merton Prayer for Today. Justify My Soul "Justify my soul, O God, but also from Your fountains fill my will with fire....Continue reading

02.01.2022 It is my sense, from having meditated with persons from many different {non-Christian} traditions, that in the silence we experience a deep unity. When we go beyond the portals of the rational mind into the experience, there is only one God to be experienced. Father M. Basil Pennington, OCSO Centered Living Page 192