We are reaching a moment of greatest crisis, through blindness and stupidity of our leaders and all who believe in them and in the society we have set up for ourselves and which is falling apart. Letter to Etta Gullick - Oct 1961

The grip the present has on me. That is the one thing that has grown most noticeable in the spiritual life - nothing much else has. The rest dims as it should. I am getting older. The reality of now - the unreality of all the rest. Journal 25/8/58

The surest sign that we have received a spiritual understanding of God's love for us is the appreciation of our own poverty in the light of His infinite mercy. Thoughts in Solitude

You realize that prayer takes us beyond the law. When you are praying you are, in a certain sense, an outlaw. There is no law between the heart and God. The law is outside our intimate relationship with God and if you bring the law into the intimate relationships of your heart with God,

THE biggest paradox about the Church is that she is at the same time essentially traditional and essentially revolutionary. But that is not as much of a paradox as it seems, because Christian tradition, unlike all others, is a living and perpetual revolution. New Seeds of Contemplation

It is always hard to talk about prayer because everybody prays in private, and everybody is different, and we have to learn to respect our differences and to understand that each one of us is going to have an individual approach.

Our God is a consuming fire. And if we, by love, become transformed into Him and burn as He burns, His fire will be our everlasting joy. New seeds of contemplation

OUR minds are like crows. They pick up everything that glitters, no matter how uncomfortable our nests get with all that metal in them. New Seeds of Contemplation

Hope is a gift. Like life, it is a gift from God, total, unexpected, incomprehensible, undeserved. It springs out of nothingness, completely free. But to meet it, we have to descend into nothingness. The New Man

The contemplative and spiritual self, the dormant, mysterious, and hidden self that is always effaced by the activity of our exterior self does not seek fulfillment. It is content to be, and in its being it is fulfilled, because its being is rooted in God. The Inner Experience

When you are praying you are, in a certain sense, an outlaw. There is no law between the heart and God. The law is outside our intimate relationship with God and if you bring a law into the intimate relationships of your heart with God, you mess things up. Between the soul and God there are no laws.

If Christ became Man, it is because He wanted to be any man and every man. If we believe in the Incarnation of the Son of God, there should be no one on earth in whom we are not prepared to see, in mystery, the presence of Christ. The General Dance - New Seeds of Contemplation

To live “in Christ” is to live in a mystery equal to that of the Incarnation and similar to it. For as Christ unites in His one Person the two natures of God and of man, so too in making us His friends He dwells in us, uniting us intimately to Himself. New Seeds of Contemplation

To live “in Christ” is to live in a mystery equal to that of the Incarnation and similar to it. For as Christ unites in His one Person the two natures of God and of man, so too in making us His friends He dwells in us, uniting us intimately to Himself. New Seeds of Contemplation

I think that if there is one truth that people need to learn, in the world, especially today, it is this: the intellect is only theoretically independent of desire and appetite in ordinary, actual practice. The Seven Storey Mountain

Contemplation is more than a consideration of abstract truths about God, more even than affective meditation on the things we believe. It is awakening, enlightenment and the amazing intuitive grasp by which love gains certitude of God's creative and dynamic intervention in our daily life.

Christ in the world today is not white, nor black either: but He is certainly present and suffering in the black people and coloured people of the earth. The white world is purely and simply under judgement. And they don't know it. Letter to Robert Lawrence Williams 5 Sept 1967

Man’s greatest dignity, his most essential and peculiar power, the most intimate secret of his humanity is his capacity to love. This power in the depths of man’s soul stamps him in the image and likeness of God. The Power and Meaning of Love

Love is not just a sentiment. Love is being itself. It's like a spring coming up out of the ground of our own depths. “I am gift.” All that I am is something that's given, and given freely. Being doesn't cost anything. There's no price tag, no strings attached. It's simply given.

Man’s unhappiness seems to have grown in proportion to his power over the exterior world. And anyone who claims to have a glib explanation of this fact had better take care that he too is not the victim of a delusion. For after all, this should not necessarily be so. The Power and Meaning of Love

The life of solitude must be a continual communion and thanksgiving in which we behold by faith all that goes on in the depths of God, and lose our taste for any other life or any other spiritual food. Thoughts in Solitude

Hope is a gift. Like life, it is a gift from God, total, unexpected, incomprehensible, undeserved. It springs out of nothingness, completely free. But to meet it, we have to descend into nothingness.

Congratulations to Gary Hall, committee member of the TMSGBI and past editor of The Merton Journal, who has just been awarded The International "Louie" Award at the ITMS conference in Denver, Colorado, for 40 years of researching and publishing on Merton.

The saint knows that the world and everything made by God is good, while those who are not saints either think that created things are unholy, or else they don’t bother about the question one way or another because they are only interested in themselves. New Seeds of Contemplation

You realize that prayer takes us beyond the law. When you are praying you are, in a certain sense, an outlaw. There is no law between the heart and God. The law is outside our intimate relationship with God,

Thomas Merton with Chatral Rinpoche in the Himalayas, 1968. "If I were going to settle down with a Tibetan guru, I think Chatral would be the one." We talked about "Christian doctrine compared with Buddhist...but all leading back to dzogchen, the ultimate emptiness." (The Asian Journal)

If we want to bring together what is divided, we can not do so by imposing one division upon the other or absorbing one division into the other. But if we do this, the union is not Christian. It is political, and doomed to further conflict.

The Christian life is a return to the Father, the Source, the Ground of all existence, through the Son, the Splendor and the Image of the Father, in the Holy Spirit, the Love of the Father and the Son.

Rain in the night, at bedtime. Rain this morning during my early Mass, Mass of Our Lady. At the last Gospel I could see the blue vineyard knob in the grey west with a scapular of mist on it, and then during thanksgiving those other knobs,

When God reveals Himself to us in contemplation we must accept Him as He comes to us, in His own obscurity, in His own silence, not interrupting Him with arguments or words, conceptions or activities that belong to the level of our own tedious and labored existence. New Seeds of Contemplation

The monk faces the worst, and discovers in it the hope of the best. From the darkness comes light. From death, life. From the abyss there comes, unaccountably, the mysterious gifts of the Spirit sent by God to make all things new,

Community will grow if we let it be more natural and spontaneous, because the Kingdom of Heaven is like yeast. The yeast that comes to us most spontaneously is natural friendship. The grace of God is with us and we just need to let it work. The Springs of Contemplation

Man’s unhappiness seems to have grown in proportion to his power over the exterior world. And anyone who claims to have a glib explanation of this fact had better take care that he too is not the victim of a delusion. The Power and Meaning of Love

Solitude is not found so much by looking outside the boundary of your dwelling, as by staying within. Solitude is not something you must hope for in the future. Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present you will never find it. Jan3, 1950 - The Sign of Jonas

As long as we experience life and existence as suns that have to rise every morning, we are in agony. We must learn that life is a light that rises when God summons it out of darkness. For this there are no fixed times. 'The war within us', The New Man

On Ascension Day (May 26) 1949 Merton was ordained priest, saying his first mass the following day.

THE more I become identified with God, the more will I be identified with all the others who are identified with Him. His Love will live in all of us. His Spirit will be our One Life, the Life of all of us and Life of God.

It is God’s love that speaks to me in the birds and streams; but also behind the clamor of the city God speaks to me in His judgments, and all these things are seeds sent to me from His will. New Seeds of Contemplation

We do not go into the desert to escape people but to learn how to find them; we do not leave them in order to have nothing more to do with them, but to find out the way to do them the most good. Learn to be alone - New Seeds of Contemplation

Community will grow if we let it be more natural and spontaneous, because the Kingdom of Heaven is like yeast. The yeast that comes to us most spontaneously is natural friendship. The grace of God is with us and we just need to let it work. The Springs of Contemplation

It is all much simpler than we think: we always want to make the spiritual life something added on to the rest of life, and so to speak compensating for our normal life. What compensation is needed? Our normal life is life 'in Christ'. Letter to Beatrice Olmstead and family 6 Feb 1960

To live “in Christ” is to live in a mystery equal to that of the Incarnation and similar to it. For as Christ unites in His one Person the two natures of God and of man, so too in making us His friends He dwells in us, uniting us intimately to Himself. New Seeds of Contemplation

Solitude is necessary for spiritual freedom. But once that freedom is acquired, it demands to be put to work in the service of a love in which there is no longer subjection or slavery.

Our minds are like crows. They pick up everything that glitters, no matter how uncomfortable our nests get with all that metal in them. Sentences - New Seeds of Contemplation

Thomas Merton reading group: Our next Zoom meeting is this Thursday 15th May at 7pm GMT when we will be looking Merton's essay Christian Culture needs Oriental Wisdom. Details: www.thomasmertonsociety.org.uk/news/launch-...

The way I feel today — the feeling doesn't matter. I am living a life which belongs to Christ – it's not my life, it's His life. Therefore let's celebrate. This is the key to the idea of celebration. Talk to the community 10 Nov 1965

If man is to recover his sanity and spiritual balance, there must be a renewal of communion between the traditional, contemplative disciplines and those of science, between the poet and the physicist, the priest and the depth-psychologist, the monk and the politician.

In our age everything has to be a “problem.” Ours is a time of anxiety because we have willed it to be so. Our anxiety is not imposed on us by force from outside. We impose it on our world and upon one another from within ourselves. Thoughts in Solitude

O God of mercy and of truth, look down we beg You upon this troubled world, and grant the light of Your grace to all who are kept by ignorance or scandal from coming to the knowledge of Your Truth. . from a prayer by Merton 1964-5

I must look for my identity, somehow, not only in God but in other men. I will never be able to find myself if I isolate myself from the rest of mankind as if I were a different kind of being. New Seeds of Contemplation