Thomas Merton: "You Are Fed Up With Words And I Don't Blame You... (And You Are) Left Holding The Bag, Empty, With No Trace Of Meaning In It"

 

"You are fed up with words and I don’t blame you. I am nauseated by them sometimes.  I am also, to tell the truth, nauseated by ideals and with causes.  This sounds like heresy, but I think you will understand what I mean.  It is so easy to get engrossed with ideas and slogans and myths that in the end one is left holding the bag, empty, with no trace of meaning left in it.  And then the temptation is to yell louder than ever in order to make meaning be there again by magic..."   

Thomas Merton

 

"Do not depend on the hope of results.  When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect.  As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. And there too a great deal has to be gone through, as gradually you struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. The range tends to narrow down, but it gets much more real.  In the end, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything." 

Thomas Merton

Thomas Merton, Trappist Monk-Priest

Wikipedia Entry

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Merton

"The terrible thing about our time is precisely the ease with which theories can be put into practice.  The more perfect, the more idealistic the theories, the more dreadful is their realization.  We are at last beginning to rediscover what perhaps men knew better in very ancient times, in primitive times before utopias were thought of: that liberty is bound up with imperfection, and that limitations, imperfections, errors are not only unavoidable but also salutary. The best is not the ideal.  Where what is theoretically best is imposed on everyone as the norm, then there is no longer any room even to be good.  The best, imposed as a norm, becomes evil.”  

"Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander,” by Trappist monk, Father Thomas Merton

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