Spiritual leader Thomas Merton says it best: What matters is love

While doing a daily office prayer from Thomas Merton's "A Book of Hours," I read a very sensitive, realistic spiritual account of the American society he saw in the mid-twentieth century.  It is relevant just as much to today's America, and to much of the world.  It comes from deep in his heart, it is under his sub-heading of "Lesson;" the daily office's "Collect" is next.  God bless America and the world.

Lesson:

It is true that the materialistic society, the so-called culture that has evolved under the tender mercies of capitalism, has produced what seems to be the ultimate limit of this worldliness.  And nowhere, except perhaps in the analogous society of pagan Rome, has there ever been such a flowering of cheap and petty and disgusting lusts and vanities as in the world of capitalism, where there is no evil that is not fostered and encouraged for the sake of making money.  We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible, in order to cater to them with the products of our factories and printing presses and movie studios and all the rest.

No matter what happens, I feel myself more and more closely united with those who, everywhere, devote themselves to the glory of God's truth, to the search for divine values hidden among the poor and the outcast, to the love of that cultural heritage without which man cannot be healthy.  The air of the world is foul with lies, hypocrisy, falsity, and life is short, death approaches.  We must devote ourselves with generosity and integrity to the real values:  there is no time for falsity and compromise.  But on the other hand we do not have to be greatly successful or even well known.  It is enough for our integrity to be known to God.  What we do that is pure in His sight will avail for the liberty, the enlightenment, and the salvation of His children everywhere.

Collect:

Let go of all that seems to suggest getting somewhere, being someone, having a name and a voice, following a policy and directing people in "my" ways.  What matters is love.

Merton, Thomas. A book of hours. Notre Dame, Indiana: Sorin Press, 2007.

Thoughts on ethical and political reform

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