Posted on by Kurt Bodling

A Quiet Fool for Christ

“The true contemplative is a lover of sobriety and obscurity. He prefers all that is quiet, humble, unassuming. He has no taste for spiritual excitements. They easily weary him. His inclination is to that which seems to be nothing, which tells him little or nothing, which promises him nothing. Only one who can remain at peace in emptiness, without projects or vanities, without speeches to justify his own apparent uselessness, can be safe from the fatal appeal of those spiritual impulses that move him to assert himself and ‘be something’ in the eyes of other men. But the contemplative is, of all religious men, the one most likely to realize that he is not a saint and least anxious to appear as one in the eyes of others. He is, in fact, delivered from subjection to appearances and cares very little about them. At the same time, since he has neither the inclination nor the need to be a rebel, he does not have to advertise his contempt for appearances. He simply neglects them. They no longer interest him. He is quite content to be considered an idiot, if necessary, and in this he has a long tradition behind him. Long ago St. Paul said he was glad to be a ‘fool for the sake of Christ.’ The oriental Church has its holy madmen, the yurodivi, imitated on occasion in the West by men like St. Francis of Assisi and many others. The contemplative does not need to be systematic about anything, even about apparent madness. He is content with the wisdom of God, which is folly to men not because it is contrary to the wisdom of man, but because it entirely transcends it.”

Merton, Thomas. The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation. Edited and with an Introduction by William H. Shannon. NY: HarperOne, 2003 (pp. 108-109)

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signs of the times, the end times

“We live in the time of no room, which is the time of the end. The time when everyone is obsessed with lack of time, lack of space, with saving time, conquering space, projecting into time and space the anguish produced within them by the technological furies of size, volume, quantity, speed, number, price, power, and acceleration. ….

“As the end approaches, there is no room for nature. The cities crowd it off the face of the earth.

“As the end approaches, there is no room for quiet. There is no room for solitude. There is no room for thought. There is no room for attention, for the awareness of our state.

“In the time of the end, there is no room for man.” (pp. 280-281)

Merton, Thomas. “The Time of the End Is the Time of No Room.” (1965) in Selected Essays. Edited with an introduction by Patrick F. O’Connell. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2013), pages 280-281.

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rigid thoughts

“It is the refusal of alternatives–a compulsive state of mind which one might call the ‘ultimatum complex’–which makes wars in order to force the unconditional acceptance of one oversimplified interpretation of reality. The mission of Christian humility in social life is not merely to edify, but to keep minds open to many alternatives. The rigidity of a certain type of Christian thought has seriously impaired this capacity, which nonviolence may recover.”

Merton, Thomas. “Blessed Are the Meek.” (1966) in Selected Essays. Edited with an introduction by Patrick F. O’Connell. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2013), page 292.

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requirements for clear thinking

“Where there is no critical perspective, no detached observation, no time to ask the pertinent questions, how can one avoid being deluded and confused? Someone has to try to keep his head clear of static and preserve the interior solitude and silence that are essential for independent thought.”

Merton, Thomas. “Events and Pseudo-Events Letter to a Southern Churchman.” (1966) in Selected Essays. Edited with an introduction by Patrick F. O’Connell. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2013), page 300.

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comparing apples to tricycles

“When we set Christianity and Buddhism side by side, we must try to find the points where a genuinely common ground between the two exists. At the present moment, this is no easy task. In fact it is practically impossible. ….

“The immense variety of forms taken by thought, experience, worship, moral practice, in both Buddhism and Christianity make all comparisons haphazard….”

Merton, Thomas. “A Christian Looks at Zen.” (1967) in Selected Essays. Edited with an introduction by Patrick F. O’Connell. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2013), page 349.

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linked in a unity

“Those with a passionate sense of the divine milieu cannot bear to find things about them obscure, tepid, and empty, things which should be full and vibrant with God. They are paralyzed by the thought of the innumerable spirits which are linked to theirs in the unity of the same world, but are not yet fully kindled by the flame of the divine presence.”

Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. The Divine Milieu. Translated by Siôn Cowell. (Portland, OR: Sussex Academic Press, 2012), page 107.

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a writer’s audience

“In my literary career I have escaped trying to write for the public or for editors; I have written for myself. I have not asked, ‘What does the public want?’ I have only asked, ‘What do I want to say? What is there in my heart craving for expression? What have I lived or felt or thought that is my own, and has its root in my inmost being?’ ”

Burroughs, John. The Writings of John Burroughs. 15 vols. The Riverby Edition. (Boston and NY: Houghton Mifflin Co., The Riverside Press Cambridge, 1904-1913), Vol. 15, page 5.

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footnotes for the faithful

“The literary compositions of studious premodern Christians place much less emphasis upon authorship than do those of curious moderns. …. The literary works of the doctores ecclesiae are very often saturated with allusions to and echoes of Scripture and the works of their predecessors, many of them not marked in any way, but instead woven invisibly and indivisibly into the fabric of their own words. This lack of marking of alien words is often because the echoes and allusions are thought sufficiently obvious not to need marking….”

Griffiths, Paul J. Intellectual Appetite : a Theological Grammar. (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2009), page 182.

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working from and into solitude

“But I know what I have discovered: that the kind of work I once feared most because I thought it would interfere with ‘solitude’ is, in fact, the only true path to solitude. One must be in some sense a hermit before the care of souls can serve to lead one further into the desert. But once God has called you to solitude, everything you touch leads you further into solitude. Everything that affects you builds you into a hermit, as long as you do not insist on doing the work yourself and building your own kind of hermitage.”

Merton, Thomas. The Sign of Jonas. (San Diego: Harcourt, Inc., 1981), pages 333-334. Entry written 29 November 1951.

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personal prayer or churchly prayer?

“The use of formal prayers can, under certain circumstances, be a help even for a small family group. But often a ritual becomes only an evasion of real prayer. the wealth of churchly forms and thought may easily lead us away from our own prayer; the prayers then become beautiful and profound, but not genuine. Helpful as the Church’s tradition of prayer is for learning to pray, it nevertheless cannot take the place of prayer that I owe to God this day. Here the poorest mumbling utterance can be better than the best-formulated prayer.”

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Life Together. (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1954), page 65.