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Choosing to Love the World: On Contemplation QUOTES

Choosing to Love the World: On Contemplation QUOTES

1 " My dear brothers and sisters, we are already one. But we imagine that we are not. So what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are. "

― Thomas Merton , Choosing to Love the World: On Contemplation

2 " If the deepest ground of my being is love, then
in that very love and nowhere else will I find
myself, the world, and my brother and sister
in Christ. It is not a question of either-or but
of all-in-one. It is not a matter of exclusivity
and “purity” but of wholeness, wholeheartedness,
unity, and of Meister Eckhart’s gleichheit
(equality) which finds the same ground of love "

― Thomas Merton , Choosing to Love the World: On Contemplation

3 " This “ground,” this “world” where I am mysteriously present at once to my own self and to the freedoms of all other men, is not a visible, objective and determined structure with fixed laws and demands. It is a living and self-creating mystery of which I am myself a part, to which I am myself my own unique door. "

― Thomas Merton , Choosing to Love the World: On Contemplation

4 " And the deepest level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless. It is beyond words, and it is beyond speech, and it is beyond concept. Not that we discover a new unity. We discover an older unity. My dear brothers and sisters, we are already one. But we imagine that we are not. So what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are. "

― Thomas Merton , Choosing to Love the World: On Contemplation

5 " To choose the world is to choose to do the work I am capable of doing, in collaboration with my brother and sister, to make the world better, more free, more just, more livable, more human. And it has now become transparently obvious that mere automatic “rejection of the world” and “contempt for the world” is in fact not a choice but an evasion of choice. The person who pretends that he can turn his back on Auschwitz or Viet Nam and act as if they were not there, is simply bluffing. "

― Thomas Merton , Choosing to Love the World: On Contemplation

6 " For since man has decided to occupy the place of God he has shown himself to be by far the blindest, and cruelest, and pettiest, and most ridiculous of all the false gods. "

― Thomas Merton , Choosing to Love the World: On Contemplation

7 " p.191) "

― Thomas Merton , Choosing to Love the World: On Contemplation