COMPARING SHADOWS
One of my favorite authors is Thomas Merton.
He was a monk who died in 1968.
As a young man, Merton was quite the libertine. Got a girl pregnant
and abandoned her, sought stimulation and excitement on two continents,
and really had no time for God.
Until he realized that his pursuit of pleasure was painful, doomed and debilitating.
So he joined one of the most austere monastic orders in America, and entered a place
where monks took a vow of silence, embraced manual labor and ignored the outside world.
But fortunately, Merton (or Brother Louis, as he was known in the Gethsemani monastery),
was allowed to write.
His first book, which was basically his life story up until becoming a monk, was a huge best-seller.
From that time on he wrote about his spiritual life, his observations on the times (the Civil Rights
movement, the Vietnam war—he even wrote about the Beatles and listened to Bob Dylan!) and
what it means to seek God.
I will be quoting from Merton often on this blog.
Few people have so precisely identified the reality of living a spiritual life: a life that is real,
unlike the fake life that all of us so earnestly pursue.
“In order to become myself,” he said, “I must cease to be what I always thought I wanted to be.”
It can be scary to take that step, to abandon the mask and seek your real self.
But it’s really the only solution. Because….
“As long as you have to define the imaginary self that you think is important, you lose your peace of heart.
As soon as you compare that shadow with the shadows of other people, you lose all job, because
you have begun to trade in unrealities, and there is no joy in things that do not exist.”
petermaize 