September 28th - What might I have learned if I was a monk?

The story...

I read a quote from Thomas Merton's book and must have been surprised - it rang true to my previous learnings, knowledge, experiences, and possibly my spirit too.  I suspected these things were true yet I hadn't put the pieces together before.  "No Man Is an Island," was one, if not the most, impactful book on my life journey.  Thomas seems to have put the important pieces of life together.  He wrote the book before I was born.  I'm so thankful that he shared his life walk with God in a way that I could receive, understand, apply to me, and begin to live out more fully too.

I read another book that summarized Merton's life up to the point when he entered the life of a monk in central Indiana.  I hope that we all seek to better understand who we are as we work out our life story.  Seems like part of a good life sharing and growing along with fellow sojourners.  I expect that we will learn that we need each other.

The only church in town will be a place where we can meet others who want to work out their life in the reality of God's revealed Word.  We can share our lives together and become a more complete whole -  a community.

Just for today...

"... when we are strong we are always much greater than the things that happen to us, and the soul of a man who has found himself is like a deep sea in which there may be many fish: but they never come up out of the sea, and not one of them is big enough to trouble its placid surface. His "being" is far greater than anything he feels or does."  

"The deep secrecy of my own being is often hidden from me by my own estimate of what I am. My idea of what I am is falsified by my admiration for what I do . . . We all seek to imitate one another's imagined greatness.  If I do not know who I am, it is because I think I am the sort of person everyone around me wants to be."

Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island (p. 125)