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July 26, 2006
> 12:29 PM
love and wrong thinking Thinking of Tom Merton, I went skimming through Love and Living again and found this quote I had previously marked and commented in the margins on. It's so central and important, I thought I'd share it with you here. The power of genuine love is so deep and so strong that it cannot be deflected from its true aim even by the silliest of wrong ideas. When love is alive and mature in a person, it does not matter if he has a false idea of himself and of life: love will guide him according to its own inner truth and will correct his ideas in spite of him. That may be dangerous, but the danger is nothing new and the human race has lived with it for a million-odd years. The trouble is, though, that our wrong ideas may prevent love from growing and maturing in our lives. Once we love, our love can change our thinking. But wrong thinking can inhibit love.First, we need to be clear, Merton IS talking about LOVE here, God's Love, God's Life for God is Love. He's talking about the most central thing we are about as Christians: our transformation into the Image of Christ in Love, into Love like Him. He's talking about how powerful that is in us when it grows and becomes mature. This is what happens, the Love of God in us grows - try to think concretely here if you can - in us - it expands and takes over our insides. It changes the ground of our personhood and as it spreads it changes our personalities (that which reflects who and what we are as a person). The old analogy works well here: like light entering a dark room, and it's more like sunlight than lamp light or candle light, because sunlight contains unseen "physical" matter. When we are exposed to sunlight for any length of time, we are physically affected at the cellular level, we are irradiated. Sunlight changes things. Much more the Light of God Himself if allowed to shine brightly on every part of us, changes us deeply. It fills us with Its own essence. HE fills us with His own Self. And so, we become different. And once irradiated sufficiently, our proverbial organs will react differently to what touches them or goes through them. I think this is what Merton was pointing at as he wrote about how Love was so powerful that once it's mature in us, it won't matter so much what other silly things might come in - they'll be changed too, by the powerful presence of God's own Life in us. But -- this Love becoming mature in us, our being fully exposed to that radiation of God's Light, is NOT automatic. Our minds and the thoughts that run through them are the network of our transformation in a way. So yes, what we believe matters. Theology matters. How we think matters. We CAN block out the light. We may be convinced that this radiation is bad for us and so we buy sunglasses that block it out or shut it down to a trickle. Many of us are likely very accustomed to living in the dark. Bright light bothers our eyes. So, we do not do what belongs to being exposed to this Light. We avoid it perhaps without even knowing what or Whom we are avoiding. Wrong thinking can inhibit love. That's what we're talking about. Bad programming can inhibit the full and useful operation of a computer. This should be obvious. Unfortunately its not. We must take the Grace that has been given us through our initial connection to God and will to go forward, to do what belongs to being open to the irradiating power of His Love. And as we are changed, we will be able to access even more Grace and so on. This is growth into maturity, the process of salvation - the fullness of salvation. It's not over yet. We have to keep laying out in the Son. (I know that was a little corny but give me a break, it works). - I think this connects well with what Kyle was talking about today. technorati tags > thomas merton, love, christianity, spirituality, spiritual formation, discipleship Labels: merton, spiritual formation 0 Comments:| permalink | e-mail me | 
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