This came today from Bruderhof's Daily Dig. Merton is a favorite and a man whose love of beauty and the sensual expanded my understanding of desire in the context of loning after G-d as a deer pants for water. Merton, however, also extended this willingness to desire to the things of G-d, the beauty of creation, the tenderness of love, friendship, the wonder of things seen and unseen in the everyday-ness of life. And for that I am forever grateful...
Merton's "The Seven Storey Mountain" is his journey to faith. Another great read is his "Dialogues with Silence."
Thomas Merton
If what most people take for granted were really true—if all you needed to be happy was to grab everything and see everything and investigate every experience and then talk about it, I should have been a very happy person, a spiritual millionaire, from the cradle even until now…What a strange thing! In filling myself, I had emptied myself. In grasping things, I had lost everything. In devouring pleasures and joys, I had found distress and anguish and fear.
Source: Thomas Merton, "The Seven Storey Mountain"
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