We live on the brink of disaster because we do not know how to let life alone. We do not respect the living and fruitful contradictions and paradoxes of which true life is full.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes our struggle to accept life's complexities and contradictions, leading to turmoil.
Thomas Merton's quote suggests that our continual battle with life's inherent uncertainties creates a state of perpetual crisis. By failing to respect and embrace the contradictions and paradoxes that life presents, we push ourselves to the edge of disaster, denying ourselves the peace that comes from acceptance and understanding of life's complexities.
In practice
In a discussion about mental health, one might use this quote to highlight the importance of accepting life's complexities.
The devil is no fool. He can get people feeling about heaven the way they ought to feel about hell. He can make them fear the means of grace the way they do not fear sin. And he does so, not by light but by obscurity, not by realities but by shadows; not by clarity and substance, but by dreams and the creatures of psychosis. And men are so poor in intellect that a few cold chills down their spine will be enough to keep them from ever finding out the truth about anything.
Our vocation is not simply to be, but to work together with God in the creation of our own life, our own identity, our own destiny....To work out our identity in God.
Conscience is the light by which we interpret the will of God in our own lives.
You are made in the image of what you desire.
But if you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I think I am living for.
I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.
We must want for others, not ourselves alone.
How many things there are concerning which we might well deliberate whether we had better know them.
What had been (at the beginning) no bigger than a full stop had expanded into a comma, a word, a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter; now it was bursting into more complex developments, becoming, one might say, a book - perhaps an encylopaedia - even a whole language.
Temptation said that we all dream of committing crimes, but that only the unbalanced make that macabre idea a reality.
At physical death man loses his consciousness of the flesh and becomes conscious of his astral body in the astral world. Thus physical death is astral birth. Later, he passes from the consciousness of luminous astral birth to the consciousness of dark astral death and awakens in a new physical body. Thus astral death is physical birth. These recurrent cycles of physical and astral encasements are the ineluctable destiny of all unenlightened men.
It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such.
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