Thomas Merton

I recently read Robert Inchausti’s “The Way of Thomas Merton – a Prayer Journey through Lent.” The book offers fascinating and helpful insights from Thomas Merton. The book, for example, reminds us of our struggles, sometimes, to see God – “The problem is, as Merton takes such great pains to explain, God is too often hidden from us under a fog of worldly cares and abstract conceptions that keep us living in confusion as to who we are and what truly matters.” It also offers some good reflections on success – “Life does not have to be regarded as a game in which scores are kept and somebody wins. If you are too intent on winning, you will never enjoy playing. If you are too obsessed with success, you will forget how to live. If you have learned only how to be a success, your life has probably been wasted. If a university concentrates on producing successful people, it is lamentably failing in its obligation to society and to the students themselves.” “Getting what you want is no guarantee of happiness. And seeing yourself as a ‘success’ turns you into a figment of your own imagination. Those who worship success never truly succeed because they do not fathom how bearing one’s cross could be the very victory they seek. They have yet to get their minds around the basic, paradoxical Christian truism that to find oneself, one must lose oneself (John 12.24).” Merton certainly helps us see what God can do for us and this book helps us discover that. “For Merton, the Bible’s value did not derive primarily from its literary worth, although many sublime passages are contained within its pages. Nor did it derive from any explicit ideas, concepts or theories it contains, though there are plenty of those things too. Its value derives from its capacity to show us the possibility for redemption in our lives and then enact it within us.”