John Moses

In prayer we discover what we already have. You start where you are and you deepen what you already have, and you realize that you are already there. We already have everything, but we don’t know it and we don’t experience it. Everything has been given to us in Christ. All we need is to experience what we already possess.

— from The Art of Thomas Merton: A Divine Passion in Word and Vision

The life of contemplation is a life of great simplicity and inner liberty. One is not seeking anything special or demanding any particular satisfaction. One is content with what is. One is not worried about the results of what is done. One is content to have good motives and not too anxious about making mistakes. In this way one can swim with the living stream of life and remain at every moment in contact with God, in the hiddenness and ordinariness of the present moment with its obvious task.

There is no failure for those who are loved and sought by Christ. He loves you, even though you may feel that your faith does not have its old drive. To feel oneself a great and vital Christian is a luxury that we have to do without today when God is so hidden and so unknown in His world …. Perhaps He wills to be hidden even in our lives. We must be content to be united with Jesus in His passion and in darkness, for it is thus that we cooperate with Him in helping others.

What Thomas Merton sought was an awareness of “the presence of God in this present life.” His abiding witness in his several vocations is that men and women might find their deepest freedom in God; and, holding firm to the central mystery of Christian faith, he acknowledged that “in order to become myself I must cease to be what I always thought I wanted to be….and in order to live I have to die.” In his refusal to conform, to give way, to settle for a quiet life, he continues to encourage those who go beyond the conventions of life and dare to claim for themselves the freedom of the sons