What he called "the reality of life itself" taught him a simple way to be a monk, namely, "One lives and loves." As he explained: "To deliver oneself up, to hand oneself over, entrust oneself completely to the silence of a wide landscape of woods and hills... to sit still while the sun comes up over that land and fills its silence with light. To pray and work in the morning and to labor and rest in the afternoon, and to sit still again in the meditation in the evening when night falls upon that land and when the silence fills itself with darkness and with stars." Thomas Merton, via Monica Weis; Thomas Merton's Gethsemani - Landscapes of Paradise
"One lives and loves" - this is quintessentially IT. It just is. All the things we talk about, trying to explain this - all that we as God's people, over the years and years and years, have done to try and get this across to the world, to ourselves... as wonderful as much of it has been and is, it all still acts only as a pale reflection of the fullness contained in that statement.
And that talk of landscape and woods, work and prayer and rest, giving oneself to the silence there - oooooh my - my heart just aches for that. I can't properly explain it to you. I just close my eyes and breathe. I see the trees and grass.
"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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