I ran across this quote from Merton and wanted to share it. It encapsulates much of my journey, and hope for the future. The photo was taken of Merton and his holiness the Dalai Lama when they met many years ago. Sometime after Merton’s death the Dalai Lama was asked if believed in God. To the interviewers surprise he said yes. Asked how he a Buddhist could believe in God, his holiness replied “I believe in the God of Thomas Merton.”
Friendship, is the beginning of grace as it moves in us and through us.
“Des Hommes comme Saint Seraphim, Saint Francois d’Assise et bien d’autres, ont accompli dans leur vie l’union des Eglises.”
This profound and simple statement of an Orthodox Metropolitan, Eulogius, gives the key to ecumenism for monks, and indeed for everyone.
If I do not have unity in myself, how can I even think, let alone speak, of unity among Christians? Yet, of course, in seeking unity for all Christians, I also attain unity within myself.
The heresy of individualism: thinking oneself a completely self-sufficient unity and asserting this imaginary “unity” against all others. The affirmation of the self as simply “not the other”. But when you seek to affirm your unity by denying that you have anything to do with anyone else, by negating everyone else in the universe until you com down to you: what is there left to affirm? Even if there were something to affirm, you would have no breath left with which to affirm it.
The true way is just the opposite: the more I am able to affirm others, to say “yes” to them in myself, by discovering them in myself and myself in them, the more real I am. I am fully real if my own heart says yes to everyone.
I will be a better Catholic, not if I can refute every shade of Protestantism, but if I can affirm the truth in it and still go further. So, too, with the Muslims, the Hindus, the Buddhists, etc. This does not mean syncretism, indifferentism, the vapid and careless friendliness that accepts everything by thinking of nothing. There is much that one cannot 'affirm' and 'accept,' but first one must say 'yes' where one really can.
If I affirm myself as a Catholic merely by denying all that is Muslim, Jewish, Protestant, Hindu, Buddhist, etc., in the end I will find there is not much left for me to affirm as a Catholic: and certainly no breath of the Spirit with which to affirm it.”
-Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (143-144)
