Our knowledge of God is perfected by gratiitude: we are thankful and rejoice in the experience of the truth that He is love.
Interpretation
Gratitude enhances our understanding of God as it connects us to His essence, which is love.
This quote by Thomas Merton emphasizes that our comprehension of God matures through the practice of gratitude. By acknowledging our thankfulness, we open ourselves to recognizing the divine nature of God as love, which enriches our spiritual experience and understanding of truth.
In practice
In a sermon about thankfulness, one might say, 'As Merton reminds us, our knowledge of God is perfected by gratitude.'
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.
Almost always when I told someone I was writing a book about "eating animals", they assumed, even without knowing anything about my views, that it was a case for vegetarianism. It's a telling assumption, one that implies not only that a thorough inquiry into animal agriculture would lead one away from eating meat, but that most people already know that to be the case.
Beloved," said the Glorious One, "unless thy desire had been for me thou wouldst not have sought so long and so truly. For all find what they truly seek.
Each of us is a unique strand in the intricate web of life and here to make a contribution.
Every fairy tale had a bloody lining. Every one had teeth and claws.
Feel the delight of walking in the noisy street and being the noise.
But you see, our society is still trapped in this binary, black/white logic and that has had some very positive implications for our generation. It's had some very negative ones as well and one of the negative ones is that it creates enormous identity problems for people who have one black ancestor and all white ancestors for example.
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