[Kätzchen]

Thomas Merton (b. 1915 - d. 1968), born in France, a trappist monk of the Abbey of Gesthamani in Kentucky, was an American Catholic writer, poet, social activist and student of comparative religion. In 1949, he was ordained into the priesthood and given the name Father Louis. (Link for further info)

Not only am I a huge fan of Czeslaw Milosz, but I'm a huge fan of Thomas Merton... I wanted to leave a few of his quotes here this morning and a poem, too.

Quotes:

The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little.

Peace demands themost herioc labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience.

If you want to study the social and political history of modern nations, study hell.

In the last analysis, the individual person is responsible for living his own life and for "finding himself." If he persists in shifting his responsibility to someonebody else, he fails to find out the meaning of his own existence.

Just remaining quietly in the presence of God, listening to Him, being attentive to Him, requires a lot of courage and know-how.

Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone - we find it with another.

Thomas Merton's Marian Poetry:

Evening: Zer0 Weather (1947)

Now the lone world is streaky as a wall of marble
With viens of clear and frozen snow.
There is no bird song there, no hare's track
No badger working in the russet grass:
All the bare fields are silent as eternity.

And the whole herd is home in the long barn.
The brothers come, with hoods about their faces,
Following their plumes of breath
Lugging the gleaming buckets one by one.

This was a day when shovels would have struck
Full flakes of fire ut of the land like rock:
And ground cries like iron beneath our boots.

When all monks come in with eyes as clean as the cold sky
And axes under their arms,
Still paying out Ave Maria's
With rosaries between their bleeding fingers.

We shake the chips out of our robes outside the door
And go hide in cowls as deep as the clouds,
Bowing our shoulders in the church's shadow, lean and whipped,
To wait upon your vespers, MOther of God!

And we have eyes no more for the dark pillars or the freezing windows,
Ears for the rumorous cloister or the chimes of time above our heads:
For we are sunken in the summer of our adoration,
And plunge, down, down into the fathoms of our secret joy
That swims with indefinable fire.

And we will never see the copper sunset
Linger a moment, like an echo, on the frozen hill
Then suddenly we die an hour before the Angelus.

For we have found our Christ, our August
Here in the zer0 days before Lent -
We are already binding up our sheaves of harvest
Beating the lazy liturgy, going up with exultation
Even on the eve of our Ash Wednesday,
And entering our blazing heaven by the doors of the Assumption!