Thoughts in Solitude (Paperback)

The desert, supremely valuable to God because it has no value to men, is the logical dwelling place for the solitary with nothing between himself and his Creator. But as man has moved into the desert for testing nuclear weapons or building casinos, the desert moves elsewhere. The new desert is despair.

All temperaments can serve as material for ruin or for salvation; if we make our temperament serve us we can do better than another who serves his temperament. The things we love tell what we are. A man who sins but does not love his sin is not a sinner in the full sense of the word. Even if we are temperamentally inclined to anger, we are still free not to be angry. We are free to desire either good or evil. Too many ascetics fail to become saints because their rules and ascetic practices have merely deadened humanity instead of setting it free to develop richly, in all its capacities.

Jesus had a clear vision of God but experienced our human emotions of affection, pity, sorrow, happiness, pleasure, grief, indignation, wonder, weariness, anxiety, fear, consolation and peace. If we are without human feelings we cannot love God as we are meant to love Him - as men.

Our five senses are chilled by inordinate pleasure. Penance cleans the senses and gives them back their vitality. Lack of self-denial and self discipline is the cause of mediocrity of much devotional art, much pious writing, many sentimental prayers and many religious lives. "Some men turn away from all this cheap emotion with a kind of heroic despair, and seek God in a desert where the emotions can find nothing to sustain them. But this too can be an error. For if our emotions really die in the desert, our humanity dies with them. We must return from the desert like Jesus or St. John with our capacity for feeling expanded and deepened, strengthened against appeals of falsity, warned against temptation, great, noble, pure."

No amount of technological progress will cure the hatred that eats away the vitals of materialistic society like a spiritual cancer. The only cure is spiritual.

A purely mental life may be destructive if it leads us to substitute thoughts for life, ideas for action. Our destiny is to live out what we think. It is only by making our knowledge part of ourselves, through action, that we enter into reality.

Real self-conquest is the conquest of ourselves by the Holy Spirit. Self-conquest is really self-surrender.

Laziness and cowardice are two of the greatest enemies of the spiritual life and they are most dangerous when masked as discretion. The problem is that discretion is one of the most important virtues.

"Why should I want to be rich, when you were poor? Why should I desire to be famous and powerful in the eyes of men, when the sons of those who exalted the false prophets and stoned the True rejected You and nailed You to the Cross? Why should I cherish in my heart a hope that devours me - the hope for perfect happiness in this life - when such hope, doomed to frustration, is nothing but despair?"

Thomas Merton has great wisdom to pass on to us if we are ready to receive it.