Follow Up Merton Quotes

Everything I couldn't include in his Ikon Post...

One of the most important—and most neglected—elements in the beginnings of the interior life is the ability to respond to reality, to see the value and the beauty in ordinary things, to come alive to the splendor that is all around us in the creatures of God. NMI, 33

If you were looking for more quotes from Thomas Merton, here’s it is. This is the first final list I initially assembled for the post but couldn’t work in…and this is still only half of all that I recorded. The man could write.

I’m going to keep some of the original quotes from the first post in, but you’ll find plenty of new ones to comb through.

I cannot discover God in myself and myself in Him unless I have the courage to face myself exactly as I am, with all my limitations, and to accept others as they are, with all their limitations. The religious answer is not religious if it is not fully real. Evasion is the answer of superstition. NMI, xvi

Here is a poem he wrote when he learned his brother was killed-in-action during World Word II

FOR MY BROTHER:
REPORTED MISSING IN ACTION, 1943

Sweet brother, if I do not sleep
My eyes are flowers for your tomb; 
And if I cannot eat my bread, 
My fasts shall live like willows where you died. 
If in the heat I find no water for my thirst, 
My thirst shall turn to springs for you, poor traveller.

Where, in what desolate and smokey country, 
Lies your poor body, lost and dead? 
And in what landscape of disaster
Has your unhappy spirit lost its road?

Come, in my labor find a resting place
And in my sorrows lay your head, 
Or rather take my life and blood
And buy yourself a better bed—
Or take my breath and take my death
And buy yourself a better rest. 

When al the men of war are shot
And flags have fallen into dust, 
Your cross and mine shall tell men still
Christ died on each, for us both. 

For in the wreckage of your April Christ lies slain, 
And Christ weeps in the ruins of my spring: 
The money of Whose tears shall fall
Into your weak and friendless hand, 
And buy you back to your own land:

The silence of Whose tears shall fall
Like bells upon your alien tomb. 
Hear them and come: they call you home.