I came with the notion of perhaps saying something for monks and to monks of all religions because I am supposed to be a monk. ... My dear brothers, WE ARE ALREADY ONE. BUT WE IMAGINE THAT WE ARE NOT. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are
Interpretation
The quote expresses the idea that despite our perceived differences, we are fundamentally united as human beings.
Thomas Merton's quote emphasizes the importance of recognizing our inherent unity as individuals, regardless of our religious or personal identities. He suggests that we often create barriers between ourselves, leading to a false sense of separation, and that what we truly need is to reconnect with our original state of oneness. This message encourages introspection and a shift towards recognizing shared humanity.
In practice
This quote can be shared during a meditation retreat to inspire participants to reflect on their shared humanity.
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 only use for an atomic bomb is to keep somebody else from using one. It can give us no protection - only the doubtful satisfaction of retaliation...
The highest glory of the American Revolution was this: it connected in one indissoluble bond the principles of civil government with the principles of Christianity.
Indeed it may be only by risking the incoherence of identity that connection is possible.
Lord of Lords, grant us the good whether we pray for it or not, but evil keep from us, even though we pray for it.
I maintain that two and two would continue to make four, in spite of the whine of the amateur for three, or the cry of the critic for five.
This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love.
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