Blog From A Hermit Dot Com

I will generally shy away from the consecrated Catholic hermits in this blog.  My exposure to and understanding of Catholicism is so limited that it hardly seems fair to mention even one.  But Catholic mystic Thomas Merton [1915-1968] wrote so eloquently about silence and solitude that he belongs on my list.

Merton’s poems, essays and autobiography have a unique appeal to many people of all faiths. The desire, devotion and discipline to join a religious order and dedicate one’s life to God is totally alien to most of us (including me).  But Merton beautifully describes what it means to be “called.”  He makes the resultant choices seem perfectly understandable.

Maybe one of the reasons Merton so effectively communicates his spiritual path (aside from his education in English literature) is he was drawn to Catholicism (and chose his vocation) as an adult after a tumultuous, very secular, sometimes controversial early life. (He was described by Cambridge classmates as a “womanizer.”) I always appreciate a spiritual teacher who has real experience with the pleasures and difficulties of being fully human – some time spent out there flailing around with the rest of us.  No self-righteous, judgmentalism from Thomas Merton.

Merton was a a peace activist during the Vietnam war and he was devoted to inter-faith understanding and commonalities. He drew the consternation of some Catholic higher-ups over both activities.

Merton would not have defined me as a hermit at all, but rather an individualist or recluse. He reserved the term hermit to true eremitics – those whose solitary lifestyle is singularly focused on prayer and an understanding of God. I believe his definition of hermit was inclusive of religious hermits of all faiths, however, not just Catholics.

There are so many sites devoted to Merton and his writings I won’t detail his life further. I’m just going to add a few Merton quotes of which I am particularly fond:

“The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.”

“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.”

“Every moment and every event of every man’s life on earth plants something in his soul.”

“Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance, order, rhythm and harmony.”

“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 somebody else, he fails to find out the meaning of his own existence.”

“Peace demands the most heroic 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.”

“Solitude is not something you must hope for in the future. Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present you will never find it.”

“The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another, and all involved in one another.”