Thoughts from Thomas Merton

Thomas Merton was a Trappist Monk who heavily influenced the spiritual life of many Christians (Protestant and Catholics) in the 20th century and into the 21st century. I have a couple of his books that I have picked up through the years but they have sat idle on the shelf in our home...always beckoning me, but their voices overshadowed by others. At the beginning of the summer I began working my way through No Man is an Island by Merton. It is a deeply engaging book, one that is best read in bits and pieces because of the magnitude of his wisdom and knowledge of the devotional life.

Here are a couple of thoughts that resonated with me over the last few days...

"God who is infinitely rich became man in order to experience the poverty and misery of fallen man, not because He needed this experience but because we needed His example. Now that we have seen His love, let us love one another as He has loved us. Thus His love will work in our hearts and transform us into Himself" (291).

Don't misunderstand him to say that the only reason Christ came as a man was for a moral example for us. We know from scripture that he came to rescue us from the power of sin and death and that God sought to triumph over those things through the power of the cross. Lest we forget that the death of Christ doesn't just free us from sin but it frees us to live fully in Christ. Part of this means becoming instruments of God's grace and love in the world around us because we have been fortunate enough through God's free mercy to experience his love and grace!

"Every man becomes the image of the God he adores. He whose worship is directed to a dead thing becomes a dead thing. He who loves corruption rots. He who loves a shadow becomes, himself a shadow. He who loves things that must perish lives in dread of their perishing" (322).

And perhaps among my favorite recent quotes, "The teaching and miracles of Christ were not meant simply to draw the attention of men to a doctrine and a set of practices. They were meant to focus our attention upon God Himself revealed in the Person of Jesus Christ. Once again, theology is essentially concrete. Far from being a synthesis of abstract truths, our theology is centered in the Person of Jesus Himself, the Word of God, the Way, the Truth, and the Life" (249).