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25.01.2022 For most of the 1990s I found a niche as a layman serving as a Resident Minister in a student dormitory and (rather surprising) as an occasional teacher and adjunct faculty member in the College of Professional Studies at the Jesuit led University of San Francisco, as well as the Episcopal Chaplain at San Francisco State University. I also taught creative writing for several summer sessions at Sacred Heart/Cathedral Preparatory School and facilitated a monthly group spiritual direction gatherings for the Episcopal School for Deacons; which offered a Bachelors of Divinity degree in a part-time format for non-transitional deacons. [ 2,351 more words ] http://themertoncentre.org//remembering-why-i-loved-terti/

22.01.2022 Saw this and thought it was beautifully done.

20.01.2022 Since Brexit and Trump in 2016 I have been addicted to the news, but like all addictions it is fundamentally damaging. Trying to understand this a bit more I tu...rned, as ever, to Thomas Merton. In ‘Faith and Violence’ (page 150-1), he writes about ‘the ambiguity of the babel of tongues that we call mass-society’, and the difficulty of separating the truth from the half-truth, the event from the pseudo-event, reality from the manufactured image’. He writes that someone has to preserve independent thought which comes from interior solitude and silence. Whilst important to know about events: ‘I refrain from trying to know them in their fresh condition as news. When they reach me they have become slightly stale. I eat the same tragedies as others, but in the form of tasteless crusts no longer as a stimulant. Living without news is like living without cigarettes The need for this habitual indulgence quickly disappears. So, when you hear news without the need to hear it, it treats you differently. And you treat it differently too My own experience has been that renunciation of this self-hypnosis, of this participation in the unquiet universal trance, is no sacrifice of reality at all. To fall behind in this sense is to get out of the big cloud of dust that everybody is kicking up, to breathe and to see a little more clearly.’’ See more

20.01.2022 #merton #spirituality #connectedness #insight #humanity

18.01.2022 "The image of Merton cranking up 'Bringing It All Back Home' on vinyl in his hermitage with visitors, who included the 83-year-old French philosopher Jacques Ma...ritain, is amusing to say the least! Yet, what Merton recognized in Dylan's earlier records can be equally applied to what Dylan unknowingly recognizes now in Merton's writings." See more

18.01.2022 What a resource!

14.01.2022 From the Asian Journal of Thomas Merton. I’m not sure I understand this, but I like it.

13.01.2022 https://www.thelivingwater.com.au//a-new-era-dawns-as-myst

13.01.2022 Continuing through "Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander." Merton critiques the myths of American culture, the myth of technological progress, and then has us look... inward. Merton, as stranger, as outsider, is able to see how deeply we are enslaved to the idols of our economy, and can help us begin to imagine what it might be like to break those chains: "If we are fools enough to remain at the mercy of the people who want to sell us happiness, it will be imposible for us ever to be content with anything. How would they profit if we became content? We would no longer need their new product. "The last thing the salesman wants is for the buyer to become content. You are of no use in our affluent society unless you are always just about to grasp what you never have. "The Greeks are not as smart as we are. In their primitive way they put Tantalus in hell. Madison Avenue, on the contrary, would convince us that Tantalus is in heaven. "God gives us freedom to make our own lives within the situation which is the gift of His love to us, and by means of the power His love grants to us. But we feel guilty bout it. We are quite capable of being happy in the life He has provided for us, in which we can contentedly make our own way, helped by His grace. We are ashamed to do so. For we need one thing more than happiness: we need approval. And the need for approval destroys our capacity for happiness. 'How can you believe, who seek glory one from another?' "For in the United States, approval has to be bought - not once, not ten times, but a thousand times over every day...So we have to get money and keep spending it in order to be known, recognized as human. Otherwise we are excommunicated." (p. 84, 85 hardcover edition)

12.01.2022 Our great dignity is tested by death - I mean our freedom. There is no ordinary death. But there is all the difference in the world between flying from it inte...riorly and facing it with a man’s freedom - with a man’s acceptance. When the parting of the ways comes - then to set one’s foot gladly on the way that leads out of this world. This is a great gift of ourselves, not to death but to life. For he who knows how to die not only lives longer in this life(as if it matters) but lives eternally because of his freedom....We are always holding death at arms length, unconsciously trying to think ourselves out of its presence - an this generates an intolerable tension that makes us all the more quickly its victims. It is he who does not fear death who is more ready to escape it and when the time comes, he faces it well. from Thomas Merton’s Journals(November, 1958)-

11.01.2022 Oh, God, we are one with You. You have made us one with You. You have taught us that if we are open to one another, You dwell in us. Help us to preserve this op...enness and to fight for it with all our hearts. Help us to realize that there can be no understanding where there is mutual rejection. Oh God, in accepting one another wholeheartedly, fully, completely, we accept You, and we thank You, and we adore You, and we love You with our whole being, because our being is in Your being, our spirit is rooted in Your spirit. Fill us then with love, and let us be bound together with love as we go our diverse ways, united in this one spirit which makes You present in the world, and which makes You witness to the ultimate reality that is love. Love has overcome. Love is victorious. Amen. (Asian Journal of Thomas Merton pg 318-319 See more

11.01.2022 Beautiful poem by Merton on the beauty of being without being acknowledged! Singing, praising, and loving for the greater glory of God.

09.01.2022 Merton conveys in his writings on social action the power of the society in which hate-filled ideas flow freely, the political systems that purvey them and all the circumstances that make them acceptable. Merton reflects, for example, on the disturbing fact that during the trial of Adolf Eichmann (A devout meditation in memory of Adolf Eichmann in Raids on the Unspeakable) Eichmann was judged to be sane, suffering apparently from no guilt and no anxiety about the actions he h...ad committed during the Holocaust. In Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander Merton notes the universality of Eichmann’s state of mind.

03.01.2022 I have often read the quote, "From now on, Brother, everybody stands on his own feet." Today, I actually read it in its context in Merton's insightful final add...ress, "Marxism and Monastic Perspectives." There is, I believe, a message in this speech worth pondering, if we substitute "Christian" for "monastic." Especially in the context of our political climate and the impact of the pandemic. It suggests to me that what is at the core of faith is beyond our institutional and political structures, and that living into that is at the heart of both resistance and transformation. "From now on, Brother, everybody stands on his own feet...This, I think, is what Buddhism is about, what Christianity is about, what monasticism is about. It is... a statement to the effect that we can no longer rely on being supported by structures that may be destroyed at any moment by a political power or a political force. You cannot rely on structures. The time for relying on structures has disappeared. They are good and they should help us, and we should do the best we can with them. But they may be taken away, and if everything is taken away, what do you do next? "...it is obvious we have to plan the future. Let us look forward to the worst. Supposing we are totally destroyed as an institution. Can we continue? "...What is essential in monastic life is not embedded in buildings, is not embedded in clothing, is not necessarily embedded even in a rule. It is concerned with this business of total inner transformation. All other things serve that end. "...The monk belongs to the world, but the world belongs to him insofar as he has dedicated himself totally to liberation from it in order to liberate it. "...if you once penetrate by detachment and purity of heart to the inner secret of the ground of your ordinary experience, you obtain to a liberty that no one can touch, that nobody can affect, that no political change of circumstances can do anything to." (The Asian Journal, excerpts from pp.338-342)

02.01.2022 Thomas Merton is so good with his emphasis on the inner world, like in this extract: