“Putting the Power of Film at the Service of the Poor”
“Contradictions have always existed in the soul of [individuals]. But it is only when we prefer analysis to silence that they become a constant and insoluble problem. We are not meant to resolve all contradictions but to live with them and rise above them and see them in the light of exterior and objective values which make them trivial by comparison.”
-Thomas Merton
Thoughts in Solitude
(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1956): 80-81.
“Awaken to the mystery of being here, and enter the quiet immensity of your own presence. May all that is unforgiven in you be released. May all that is unlived in you blossom into a future graced with love.”
-John O’Donahue
“By identifying himself with the poor and the weak, Jesus reminds us that he identifies with all that is poor and weak in each of us. We are called to become more open, trusting, child-like and filled with wonder. Each person is sacred, no matter what his or her culture, religion, handicap, or fragility. Each person is created in God’s image; each one has a heart, a capacity to love and be loved.”
-Jean Vanier
The Heart of L’Arche, A Spirituality for Every Day
[Crossroad Publishing Company, 1995]
“In this fallen world the unity of human beings has been broken, everything is a ‘rat race,’ and I try to free myself from the anguish that torments me by projecting it on another, the scapegoat of my tragic finiteness. The other person is always my enemy and I need him to be so. In Christ, however, death has been defeated, my inner hell transformed in the Church, I no longer need to have enemies, no one is separated from anyone. The criterion of the depth of one’s spiritual growth is therefore love for one’s enemies, in accordance with the paradoxical commandment of the Gospel that takes its meaning solely from the Cross – Christ’s Cross and ours – and from the Resurrection – again Christ’s and our own…
The true miracle, the most difficult achievement, is therefore the example and practice of love in the spiritual sense of that word (and here the Gospel speaks of agape, the Latin caritas). To enter into God is to let oneself be caught up in the immense movement of the love of the Trinity which reveals the other person to us a ‘neighbor’ or (and this is better) which enables each one of us to become a neighbor of others. And to become a neighbor is to side with Christ, since he identifies himself with every human being who is suffering, or rejected, or imprisoned, or ignored.”
-Olivier Clement
The Roots of Christian Mysticism
[New City Press, 1995]
“What is the use of praying if at the very moment of prayer, we have so little confidence in God that we are busy planning our own kind of answer to our prayer.”
-Thomas Merton
Thoughts in Solitude
[page 24]
“To be without compassion is to fail to know the self. When we recognize and accept our own frailties, we have no trouble dealing tenderly with the needs and the lapses of others.”
-Joan Chittister, OSB
Seeing with Our Souls
“Compassion is not sympathy. Compassion is mercy. It is a commitment to take responsibility for the suffering of others.”
-Joan Chittister, OSB
Seeing with Our Souls
“Poverty, by stripping us of all facades that we use to buttress an insecure sense of self, enables us to be simply who we are and to receive God’s gratuitous love as unearned gift.’
-Wilkie Au, S.J.
By Way of the Heart
page 186
“I have learned that an age in which politicians talk about peace is an age in which everybody expects war: the great men of the earth would not talk of peace so much if they did not secretly believe it possible, with one more war, to annihilate their enemies forever. Always, ‘after just one more war’ it will dawn, the new era of love: but first everybody who is hated must be eliminated. For hate, you see, is the mother of their kind of love.
Unfortunately the love that is to be born out of hate will never be born. Hatred is sterile; it breeds nothing but the image of its own empty fury, its own nothingness. Love cannot come of emptiness. It is full of reality. Hatred destroys the real being of man in fighting the fiction which it calls ‘the enemy.’ For man is concrete and alive, but ‘the enemy’ is a subjective abstraction. A society that kills real men in order to deliver itself from the phantasm of a paranoid delusion is already possessed by the demon of destructiveness because it has made itself incapable of love. It refuses, a priori, to love. It is dedicated not to concrete relations of man with man, but only to abstractions about politics, economics, psychology, and even, sometimes, religion.”
-Thomas Merton
from Seeds
Selected and edited by Robert Inchausti
[Boston: Shambhala Publications, Inc, 2002 - page 50]
Originally published in The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton
[New York: New Directions, 1977, pages 374-75]
“We should love our enemies because their injurious conduct gives us an occasion to gain eternal life by returning love for hatred.”
-St. Francis of Assisi
“Where there is mercy and discernment, there is neither excess nor hardness of heart.” -St. Francis of Assisi
“A man’s knowledge can be judged only by his works and the sermons of a religious are only as effective as his actions.” -St. Francis of Assisi
“It is no use walking anywhere to preach unless our walking is our preaching.” -St. Francis of Assisi
“Where there is inner peace and meditation, there is neither preoccupation nor dissipation.”
-St. Francis of Assisi
