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Thomas Merton SocGBI @thomasmertongbi.bsky.social · 05/01/2026

To live “in Christ” is to live in a mystery equal to that of the Incarnation and similar to it. For as Christ unites in His one Person the two natures of God and of man, so too in making us His friends He dwells in us, uniting us intimately to Himself. Life in Christ

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Thomas Merton SocGBI @thomasmertongbi.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

If, at the moment of our death, death comes to us as an unwelcome stranger, it will be because Christ also has always been to us an unwelcome stranger. For when death comes, Christ comes also, bringing us the everlasting life which He has bought for us by His own death. No man is an island

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Thomas Merton SocGBI @thomasmertongbi.bsky.social · 01/11/2025

from Merton's journal entry for Nov 3, 1950

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Thomas Merton SocGBI @thomasmertongbi.bsky.social · 01/11/2025

O God, who bestowed on the Priest Saint John Henry Newman the grace to follow your kindly light and find peace in your Church; graciously grant that, through his intercession and example, we may be led out of shadows and images into the fulness of your truth.

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Thomas Merton SocGBI @thomasmertongbi.bsky.social · 25/10/2025

Man’s greatest dignity, his most essential and peculiar power, the most intimate secret of his humanity is his capacity to love. This power in the depths of man’s soul stamps him in the image and likeness of God. The Power and Meaning of Love

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Thomas Merton SocGBI @thomasmertongbi.bsky.social · 23/10/2025

It is always hard to talk about prayer because everybody prays in private, and everybody is different, and we have to learn to respect our differences and to understand that each one of us is going to have an individual approach. The Alaskan Journal

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Thomas Merton SocGBI @thomasmertongbi.bsky.social · 21/10/2025

Man is truly alive when he is aware of himself as the master of his own destiny to life or to death, aware of the fact that his ultimate fulfilment or destruction depend on his own free choice and aware of his ability to decide for himself. This is the beginning of true life. The New Man

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Thomas Merton SocGBI @thomasmertongbi.bsky.social · 20/10/2025

I am convinced that communication in depth, across the lines that have hitherto divided religious and monastic traditions, is now not only possible and desirable, but most important for the destinies of Twentieth-Century Man. Monastic Experience and East-West Dialogue

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Thomas Merton SocGBI @thomasmertongbi.bsky.social · 24/09/2025

Ten years ago today Pope Francis addressed the US Congress. In his speech he cited Lincoln, MLK, Dorothy Day & Thomas Merton as Americans who represent the finest of us. m.youtube.com/watch?v=oBM7...

m.youtube.com

Pope Francis addresses Joint Session of Congress – FULL SPEECH (C-SPAN)

YouTube video by C-SPAN

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Thomas Merton SocGBI @thomasmertongbi.bsky.social · 23/09/2025

In the morning, after Mass, realization how true it is that prayer really "has power" over the heart of God, really reaches the sanctuary of His heart – starting from the sanctuary of my own: and they are one sanctuary. Journal 20 Oct 1961

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Thomas Merton SocGBI @thomasmertongbi.bsky.social · 22/09/2025

We are reaching a moment of greatest crisis, through blindness and stupidity of our leaders and all who believe in them and in the society we have set up for ourselves and which is falling apart. Letter to Etta Gullick - Oct 1961

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Thomas Merton SocGBI @thomasmertongbi.bsky.social · 19/09/2025

The grip the present has on me. That is the one thing that has grown most noticeable in the spiritual life - nothing much else has. The rest dims as it should. I am getting older. The reality of now - the unreality of all the rest. Journal 25/8/58

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Thomas Merton SocGBI @thomasmertongbi.bsky.social · 15/09/2025

The surest sign that we have received a spiritual understanding of God's love for us is the appreciation of our own poverty in the light of His infinite mercy. Thoughts in Solitude

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Thomas Merton SocGBI @thomasmertongbi.bsky.social · 13/09/2025

You realize that prayer takes us beyond the law. When you are praying you are, in a certain sense, an outlaw. There is no law between the heart and God. The law is outside our intimate relationship with God and if you bring the law into the intimate relationships of your heart with God,

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Thomas Merton SocGBI @thomasmertongbi.bsky.social · 12/09/2025

THE biggest paradox about the Church is that she is at the same time essentially traditional and essentially revolutionary. But that is not as much of a paradox as it seems, because Christian tradition, unlike all others, is a living and perpetual revolution. New Seeds of Contemplation

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Thomas Merton SocGBI @thomasmertongbi.bsky.social · 31/08/2025

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Thomas Merton SocGBI @thomasmertongbi.bsky.social · 30/08/2025

Our God is a consuming fire. And if we, by love, become transformed into Him and burn as He burns, His fire will be our everlasting joy. New seeds of contemplation

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Thomas Merton SocGBI @thomasmertongbi.bsky.social · 18/08/2025

OUR minds are like crows. They pick up everything that glitters, no matter how uncomfortable our nests get with all that metal in them. New Seeds of Contemplation

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Thomas Merton SocGBI @thomasmertongbi.bsky.social · 12/08/2025

Hope is a gift. Like life, it is a gift from God, total, unexpected, incomprehensible, undeserved. It springs out of nothingness, completely free. But to meet it, we have to descend into nothingness. The New Man

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Thomas Merton SocGBI @thomasmertongbi.bsky.social · 01/08/2025

The contemplative and spiritual self, the dormant, mysterious, and hidden self that is always effaced by the activity of our exterior self does not seek fulfillment. It is content to be, and in its being it is fulfilled, because its being is rooted in God. The Inner Experience

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Thomas Merton SocGBI @thomasmertongbi.bsky.social · 31/07/2025

When you are praying you are, in a certain sense, an outlaw. There is no law between the heart and God. The law is outside our intimate relationship with God and if you bring a law into the intimate relationships of your heart with God, you mess things up. Between the soul and God there are no laws.

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Thomas Merton SocGBI @thomasmertongbi.bsky.social · 24/07/2025

If Christ became Man, it is because He wanted to be any man and every man. If we believe in the Incarnation of the Son of God, there should be no one on earth in whom we are not prepared to see, in mystery, the presence of Christ. The General Dance - New Seeds of Contemplation

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Thomas Merton SocGBI @thomasmertongbi.bsky.social · 20/07/2025

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Thomas Merton SocGBI @thomasmertongbi.bsky.social · 15/07/2025

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Thomas Merton SocGBI @thomasmertongbi.bsky.social · 11/07/2025

I think that if there is one truth that people need to learn, in the world, especially today, it is this: the intellect is only theoretically independent of desire and appetite in ordinary, actual practice. The Seven Storey Mountain

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Thomas Merton SocGBI @thomasmertongbi.bsky.social · 08/07/2025

Contemplation is more than a consideration of abstract truths about God, more even than affective meditation on the things we believe. It is awakening, enlightenment and the amazing intuitive grasp by which love gains certitude of God's creative and dynamic intervention in our daily life.

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Thomas Merton SocGBI @thomasmertongbi.bsky.social · 04/07/2025

Christ in the world today is not white, nor black either: but He is certainly present and suffering in the black people and coloured people of the earth. The white world is purely and simply under judgement. And they don't know it. Letter to Robert Lawrence Williams 5 Sept 1967

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Thomas Merton SocGBI @thomasmertongbi.bsky.social · 03/07/2025

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Thomas Merton SocGBI @thomasmertongbi.bsky.social · 02/07/2025

Love is not just a sentiment. Love is being itself. It's like a spring coming up out of the ground of our own depths. “I am gift.” All that I am is something that's given, and given freely. Being doesn't cost anything. There's no price tag, no strings attached. It's simply given.

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Thomas Merton SocGBI @thomasmertongbi.bsky.social · 28/06/2025

Man’s unhappiness seems to have grown in proportion to his power over the exterior world. And anyone who claims to have a glib explanation of this fact had better take care that he too is not the victim of a delusion. For after all, this should not necessarily be so. The Power and Meaning of Love

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Thomas Merton SocGBI @thomasmertongbi.bsky.social · 27/06/2025

The life of solitude must be a continual communion and thanksgiving in which we behold by faith all that goes on in the depths of God, and lose our taste for any other life or any other spiritual food. Thoughts in Solitude

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Thomas Merton SocGBI @thomasmertongbi.bsky.social · 25/06/2025

Hope is a gift. Like life, it is a gift from God, total, unexpected, incomprehensible, undeserved. It springs out of nothingness, completely free. But to meet it, we have to descend into nothingness.

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Thomas Merton SocGBI @thomasmertongbi.bsky.social · 24/06/2025

Congratulations to Gary Hall, committee member of the TMSGBI and past editor of The Merton Journal, who has just been awarded The International "Louie" Award at the ITMS conference in Denver, Colorado, for 40 years of researching and publishing on Merton.

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Thomas Merton SocGBI @thomasmertongbi.bsky.social · 21/06/2025

The saint knows that the world and everything made by God is good, while those who are not saints either think that created things are unholy, or else they don’t bother about the question one way or another because they are only interested in themselves. New Seeds of Contemplation

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Thomas Merton SocGBI @thomasmertongbi.bsky.social · 19/06/2025

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Reposted by Thomas Merton SocGBI

Jon M. Sweeney @jonmsweeney.bsky.social · 19/06/2025

Thomas Merton with Chatral Rinpoche in the Himalayas, 1968. "If I were going to settle down with a Tibetan guru, I think Chatral would be the one." We talked about "Christian doctrine compared with Buddhist...but all leading back to dzogchen, the ultimate emptiness." (The Asian Journal)

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Thomas Merton SocGBI @thomasmertongbi.bsky.social · 16/06/2025

If we want to bring together what is divided, we can not do so by imposing one division upon the other or absorbing one division into the other. But if we do this, the union is not Christian. It is political, and doomed to further conflict.

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Thomas Merton SocGBI @thomasmertongbi.bsky.social · 15/06/2025

The Christian life is a return to the Father, the Source, the Ground of all existence, through the Son, the Splendor and the Image of the Father, in the Holy Spirit, the Love of the Father and the Son.

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Thomas Merton SocGBI @thomasmertongbi.bsky.social · 13/06/2025

Rain in the night, at bedtime. Rain this morning during my early Mass, Mass of Our Lady. At the last Gospel I could see the blue vineyard knob in the grey west with a scapular of mist on it, and then during thanksgiving those other knobs,

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Thomas Merton SocGBI @thomasmertongbi.bsky.social · 09/06/2025

When God reveals Himself to us in contemplation we must accept Him as He comes to us, in His own obscurity, in His own silence, not interrupting Him with arguments or words, conceptions or activities that belong to the level of our own tedious and labored existence. New Seeds of Contemplation

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Thomas Merton SocGBI @thomasmertongbi.bsky.social · 05/06/2025

The monk faces the worst, and discovers in it the hope of the best. From the darkness comes light. From death, life. From the abyss there comes, unaccountably, the mysterious gifts of the Spirit sent by God to make all things new,

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Thomas Merton SocGBI @thomasmertongbi.bsky.social · 04/06/2025

Community will grow if we let it be more natural and spontaneous, because the Kingdom of Heaven is like yeast. The yeast that comes to us most spontaneously is natural friendship. The grace of God is with us and we just need to let it work. The Springs of Contemplation

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Thomas Merton SocGBI @thomasmertongbi.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

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Thomas Merton SocGBI @thomasmertongbi.bsky.social · 31/05/2025

Solitude is not found so much by looking outside the boundary of your dwelling, as by staying within. 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. Jan3, 1950 - The Sign of Jonas

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Thomas Merton SocGBI @thomasmertongbi.bsky.social · 30/05/2025

As long as we experience life and existence as suns that have to rise every morning, we are in agony. We must learn that life is a light that rises when God summons it out of darkness. For this there are no fixed times. 'The war within us', The New Man

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Thomas Merton SocGBI @thomasmertongbi.bsky.social · 29/05/2025

On Ascension Day (May 26) 1949 Merton was ordained priest, saying his first mass the following day.

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Thomas Merton SocGBI @thomasmertongbi.bsky.social · 28/05/2025

THE more I become identified with God, the more will I be identified with all the others who are identified with Him. His Love will live in all of us. His Spirit will be our One Life, the Life of all of us and Life of God.

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Thomas Merton SocGBI @thomasmertongbi.bsky.social · 26/05/2025

It is God’s love that speaks to me in the birds and streams; but also behind the clamor of the city God speaks to me in His judgments, and all these things are seeds sent to me from His will. New Seeds of Contemplation

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Thomas Merton SocGBI @thomasmertongbi.bsky.social · 24/05/2025

We do not go into the desert to escape people but to learn how to find them; we do not leave them in order to have nothing more to do with them, but to find out the way to do them the most good. Learn to be alone - New Seeds of Contemplation

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Thomas Merton SocGBI @thomasmertongbi.bsky.social · 22/05/2025

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