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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.

With a life in Jesus as our foundation, God’s call to us and our ultimate purpose in life tend to look very different. Thinking less about the decisions themselves and more about the life those decisions effect, we realize that what matters most to God is ultimately not what we choose but the amount of love that those decisions create in our lives; where we go to school, what we do for a living, and our familial life matters to God only to the extent that what we choose enables us to live as Christ-like as we can.

According to the Christian tradition, angels and humans are capable of knowing and loving God. Angels do this more excellently than humans, but both do it. In the Christian tradition, angels are present not only at miraculous times, they are all around us impacting many aspects of our lives. Saint Bonaventure, a Franciscan friar from the Middle Ages, took it for granted that angels are “circling around us like flies.” Angels, to be certain, give us this lasting comfort: We are never alone.

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.

Against the values of the world, Jesus gave up his power in heaven to live as a poor outcast on earth. Loving his people as a shepherd loves his sheep, he led with mercy over judgment, justice over greed, reconciliation over exclusion, and humble service over heavy demands. He associated with the weak and the lowly while criticizing the rich and haughty, announcing a kingdom turned upside down in which the last shall be first and the first shall be last. In his final act of humility, he laid down his life so that others might live, telling his disciples to do the same.

It is tempting to think of peacefulness as merely the refusal to be violent—especially when we live in a culture that emphasizes the duty to leave others alone. But if it is truly Christian peacefulness, it must involve loving action or charity. Christian charity requires that we imitate Jesus’ active loving-kindness for all. This fulfills Jesus’ central command to love our neighbor as ourselves. Especially if that neighbor is in need, Christianity requires that we come to his or her aid and actively seek justice.

It may sound simplistic, but it is one of the most important things that has ever happened to my prayer life: Just show up. Even if prayer is nothing more than a box to be checked off in our day, checking that box off is better than not doing it.

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

Jesus calls us to follow him on his own path of humiliation. When at certain moments in life we fail to find any way out of our difficulties, when we sink in the thickest darkness, it is the moment of our total humiliation, the hour in which we experience that we are frail and are sinners. It is precisely then, at that moment, that we must not deny our failure but rather open ourselves trustingly to hope in God, as Jesus did.