My great obligation is to obey God, and to seek His will carefully with a pure and empty heart. Not to try to impose my own order on my life but let God impose His, to serve his will and his order by ralizing them in my own life. This means certainly a deep consent to all that is actually and manifestly his will for me.
-thomas merton
God's love takes care of everything I do. He guides me in all my work and in my reading, at least until I get greedy and start rushing from page to page. It is really illogical that I should get temptations to run off to another monastery and to another order of monks. God has put me in a place where I can spend hour after hour, each day, in occcupations that are always on the borderline of prayer. There is always a change to step over the line and enter into simple and contemplative union with God.
-thomas merton
Yesterday, when I was reading in the cemetery, I thought how the silence you find in yourself, when you enter in and rest in God, is always the same and always new, even though it is unchanging. For that silence is true life and, even though you body moves around, you soul stays in the same place, resting in its life Who is God, now in winter just as it did before in summer, without any apparent difference, as if nothing had changed at all, and the passage of seasons had only been an illusion
-thomas merton
