Fuck Yeah Thomas Merton

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. That is not our business, and in fact, it is nobody's business. What we are asked to do is to love, and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbours worthy if anything can.

The truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers the most: and his suffering comes to him from things so little and so trivial that one can say that it is no longer objective at all. It is his own existence, his own being, that is at once the subject and the source of his pain, and his very existence and consciousness is his greatest torture.

The truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers the most: and his suffering comes to him from things so little and so trivial that one can say that it is no longer objective at all. It is his own existence, his own being, that is at once the subject and the source of his pain, and his very existence and consciousness is his greatest torture.

“Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance and order and rhythm and harmony.”

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.

since the old version of this post was flagged for 'adult content'...

“Ash Wednesday is full of joy … The source of all sorrow is the illusion that of ourselves we are anything but dust.”

….Martin Luther King, who is no fanatic but a true Christian, writes a damning letter from Birmingham jail, saying that the churches have utterly failed the Negro. In the end, that is what the Black Muslims are saying too. And there is truth in it. Not that there is not a certain amount of liberal and sincere concern for civil rights among Christians, even among ministers, priests, and bishops. But what is this sincerity worth? What does this “good will” amount to? Is it anything more than a spiritual luxury, to calm the conscience of those who cultivate it? What good does it do the Negro? What good does it do the country? Is it a pure evasion of reality?

Hi all!