The Merton Institute for Contemplative Living offers a free weekly thoughts newletter of Thomas Merton, a famous 20th Century American monk. The Sep. 3rd issue strikes to the heart of what All Things Reform is about-- ethics and politics. Here Merton in his later years speaks of it, not as an agenda of a program with a definite beginning and ending, but as a way of life.
The Merton Reflection for the Week of September 3, 2007
"[Reading Chuang Tzu, I wonder seriously if the wisest answer (on the human level, apart from the answer of faith) is not beyond both ethics and politics. It is a hidden answer; it defies analysis and cannot be embodied in a program. Ethics and politics, of course: but only in passing, only as a "night's lodging." There is a time for action, a time for "commitment," but never for total involvement in the intricacies of a movement. There is a time of innocence and kairos, when action makes a great deal of sense. But who can recognize such moments? Not he who is debauched by a series of programs. And when all action has become absurd, shall one continue to act simply because once, a long time ago, it made a great deal of sense? As if one were always getting somewhere? There is a time to listen, in the active life as everything else, and the better part of action is waiting, not knowing what is next, and not having a glib answer."
Thomas Merton. Conjectures of A Guilty Bystander. New York: Doubleday, 1966: 173.
Thought to Remember
"A postulant who has come to the end of his rope and wants to leave, but who has been dissuaded (not by me), stands in the novitiate library leafing through a book called Relax and Live. Sooner or later it comes to that."
Conjectures of A Guilty Bystander: 173
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