Forget The Rest

A person who is killed by one enemy is just as dead as a person who is killed by an entire army.

- Thomas Merton

There are many brilliant people in the world who are able to discuss the greatest social subtleties, but who do not have even the faintest appreciation of what they are discussing because they have no love for the manner in which these things impact the daily lives of others. Theirs is an abstract interest with life as a concept...a social construct. They are unable to make themselves understand care and compassion except as principles.

In fact, it is most often those who rise to leadership in an organization who through psychological rigidity and unbending formalism are emotionally castrated, and so are unable to detach themselves from their concepts, and which of course is the first and indeed, the only real step required to both serve others and directly experience God, which are one and the same.

The delicacy of conscience and the abandonment of self that is required to receive the gift of the direct experience of God is something that no amount of formal religious rigour - physical or mental - can secure. So many give up ambition outside the church only to acquire for themselves other ambitions that are more subtle and spiritual in character within the church which they selfishly deem to be of an exclusive and higher order.

Not even the practise of contemplation is immune from those who see it as something to be acquired, like any other object of people's desire. This inordinate attachment to spiritual things can be just as much an attachment to the desire for anything else. This becomes all the more insidious because within religious circles it is a hidden and subtle fantasy.

And so even those who may have overcome the grossest errors of the most brilliant social magicians of the day, these neither enter into close friendship with God, nor experience what can only be understood as the beginning of abiding eternal joy, because they cannot conceive of life without clinging to the miserable little tidbits of consolation that are given to neophytes as they enter the contemplative way.

Abandonment means abandonment. Detachment means detachment. All you have to do is to turn to God. Forget the rest. You will never conquer life on your own terms. It's not difficult; it's the most difficult thing in the world.

I wonder if there are twenty people alive in the world now who see things as they really are. That would mean that there are twenty people who were free, who were not dominated or even influenced by any attachment to any created thing or to their own selves or to any gift of God, even to the highest...of God's graces. I don't believe that there are twenty such people alive in the world. But there must be one or two. They are the ones who are holding everything together and keeping the universe from falling apart.

- Thomas Merton