Thursday, January 20, 2011

A few quotes from "A Life in Letters"

As I reviewed Thomas Merton: A Life in Letters: The Essential Collection yesterday, I thought that today I might share a few quotes from Thomas Merton with you.

From a letter to Ecuadorian artist Jaime Andrade:

You are a sculptor: I am a monk and a priest: this means we are both consecrated men, men with a vocation that is more or less prophetic; this means that we should be witnesses to the truth, not only to intellectual truth, but to mystic truth, the integral truth of life, of history, of man - of God.

From a letter to Mother Coakley, a Religious of the Sacred Heart

God is so much greater than all our thoughts and problems and the best thing we can do is forget ourselves entirely in Him and go along where he wishes.

From a letter to Abbot James Fox, O.C.S.O.

I do not aim at the heights. I aim at the depths. Not at what is exalted and spectacular but whst is humble and unenviable and unattractive and blank. I aspire to become a nonentity and to be forgotten.

From a letter to Dom Francis Decroix

God loves us irrespective of our merits and whatever is good in us comes from his love, not from our own doing.



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