Thursday, July 26, 2007
Quotes of Thomas Merton
It is in the ordinary duties and labors of life that the Christian can and should develop his spiritual union with God.
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Just remaining quietly in the presence of God, listening to Him, being attentive to Him, requires a lot of courage and know-how.
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Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone-we find it with another.
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Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience.
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Pride makes us artificial and humility makes us real.
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The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.
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The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another, and all involved in one another.
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We are not at peace with others because we are not at peace with ourselves, and we are not at peace with ourselves because we are not at peace with God.
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We are so obsessed with doing that we have no time and no imagination left for being. As a result, men are valued not for what they are but for what they do or what they have - for their usefulness.
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We have what we seek, it is there all the time, and if we give it time, it will make itself known to us.
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We must make the choices that enable us to fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves. When ambition ends, happiness begins.
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Yet it is in this loneliness that the deepest activities begin. It is here that you discover act without motion, labor that is profound repose, vision in obscurity, and, beyond all desire, a fulfillment whose limits extend to infinity.
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Have you seen this before? I love it.
ReplyDeleteChildren's Prayers by Ina J. Hughs
We pray for the children who put chocolate fingers on everything, who love to be tickled, who stomp in puddles and ruin new pants, who eat sweets before supper and who can never find their shoes in the morning.
And we also pray for those who stare at photographers from behind barbed wire, who have never bound down the street in a new pair of shoes, who never played "one potato, two potatoes," and who are born in places that we would not be caught dead in and they will be.
We pray for the children who give us sticky kisses and fistfuls of dandelions, who sleep with their dog and who bury their goldfish, who hug us so tightly and who forget their dinner money, who squeeze toothpaste all over the sink, who watch their fathers shave, and who slurp their soup.
And we pray for those who will never get dessert, who have no favourite blanket to drag around behind them, who watch their fathers suffer, who cannot find any bread to steal, who do not have any rooms to clean up, whose pictures are on milk cartons instead of on dressers, and whose monsters are real.
We pray for the children who spend all their spends by Tuesday, who pick at their food, who love ghost stories, who shove their dirty clothes under the bed and never rinse the bathtub, who love visits from the Tooth Fairy, even after they find out who it really is, who do not like to be kissed in front of the school bus and who squirm during services.
And we also pray for those children whose nightmares occur in the daytime, who will eat anything, who have never seen a dentist, who are not spoiled by anyone, who go to bed hungry and wake up hungry, who live and move and have no address.
We pray for those children who like to be carried and for those children who have to be carried. We pray for those who give up and for those who never give up, for those who will grab the hand of anyone kind enough to offer it and for those who find no hand to grab.
For all these children, we pray today, for they are all so precious.
That is a beautiful prayer. I think you ought to create your own blog ;)
ReplyDeleteThankyou so much for taking the time to post this.
Suzyx