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.
The world is full of ways and means to waste time.
In our society, as people pass out of young adulthood, they tend to relate to themselves more in terms of what they are no longer than what they are now, and that's psychologically low-grade devastating.
The white man discovered the Cross by way of the Bible, but the black man discovered the Bible by way of the Cross.
Preacher to me: 'A dollar for the Lord, brother?' Me to preacher: 'That's all right, I'm headed his way. I'll give it to him when I see him.'
Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.
I've tried to believe, but I don't, I can't, and there's no use pretending.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.