BLOGGING TOWARD SUNDAY…

I continue to read Thomas Merton as a part of my daily devotions for Lent.  Merton, who died in 1968, was a Trappist monk, author, and peace activist.  Of him, Scott Peck wrote, “We are all created in the image of God, but Thomas Merton seemed to be just a little bit more so.”  Today’s reading is much like what I wrote a couple of weeks ago in the blog titled “Discovering Our Identity,” but Merton says it so much better.  I quote:

Fear is perhaps the greatest enemy of candor.  How many men fear to follow their conscience because they would rather conform to the opinion of other men than to the truth they know in their hearts!  How can I be sincere if I am constantly changing my mind to conform with the shadow of what I think others expect of me?  Others have no right to demand that I be anything else than what I ought to be in the sight of God.  No greater thing could possibly be asked of a man than this!  This one just expectation, which I am bound to fulfill, is precisely the one they usually do not expect me to fulfill.  They want me to be what I am in their sight: that is, an extension of themselves.  They do not realize that if I am fully myself, my life will become the completion and the  fulfillment of their own, but that if I merely live as their shadow, I will serve only to remind them of their own unfulfillment.  If I allow myself to degenerate into the being I am imagined to be by other men, God will have to say to me, “I know you not.”  (A Thomas Merton Reader, edited by Thomas McDonnell.  Image Books, 1974.  p.124)

Filed under: Blogging Toward Sunday