It never ceases to amaze me, when I just pick up a Merton book for a few minutes just for a peek, how intensely prophetic and spiritually insightful the man was. He could just lay out the truth of something in a paragraph like I've never seen. So it went today as I was just looking through a compilation, Love and Living. I came across this piece I'd noticed before. I'm not sure if I've shared it on the blog before, but even if I have, it's certainly worth a repeat. Soak this in, will you please?
The Christian loves because God is love, and because God is manifested in actual love, not only in pious ideas and practices. Indeed, God does wish to come down and "pitch his tent" among men in order to manifest himself in man. Furthermore, he wills to do this only with the free cooperation of man himself. One of the most fundamental ideas of Christianity is that the free decision of men to love one another in Christ enables them to cooperate positively and creatively in the definitive manifestation of God on earth (John 17:3-23).
This is precisely the "new commandment" which is at the heart of the "new covenant" or "New Testament," that is to say, the new relationship between man and God, the very essence of the teaching of Christianity. The teaching of the Gospel is that men are no longer servants of God, no longer bound merely to complex ritual observances and obscure legal systems known only to experts. Men are free from the domination of abstract religious systems that can only be understood by specialists. They are sons of God and brothers of one another, united in a community of freedom and love in which their law is love and in which they are guided by the Spirit of God dwelling in the Church and in each of its members - the Spirit of sonship, of freedom, and of love.
Now, this would be one of my repetitive topics, one of the things I keep saying over and over again. What Merton was talking about there was and is the very core and center of what Christianity is all about. Not just "Christianity," thought of as a "religion" but the new real Life we've been given in Christ. This gives rise to some difficulty for some of us, about certain systems that have arisen in Christianity which may, indeed, even hinder the core of that Life being manifested as he described. I think of the whole concept of "canon law." It strikes me as ultimately unnecessary and, well, problematic. We should think about things like this. Are we willing to do that? I often wonder.
"Then, if we cannot as yet think alike in all things, at least we may love alike. Herein we cannot possibly do amiss." John Wesley
"Keep your eyes on the crucifix, for Jesus without the cross
is a man without a mission, and the cross without Jesus
is a burden without a reliever." Fulton J. Sheen
"...I am deeply convinced that the Christian leader of the future is called to be
completely irrelevant and to stand in this world with nothing to offer but his or her own vulnerable self." Henri Nouwen
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