Posts Tagged ‘Quote’
Thomas Merton – No Man Is an Island (page 153)
All vocations are intended by God to manifest His love in the world. For each special calling gives a man some particular place in the Mystery of Christ, gives him something to do for the salvation of all mankind.
Thomas Merton – No Man Is an Island (page 153)
C.S. Lewis – The Four Loves (page 121)
To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping in intact, you must give your heat to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up sage in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket–safe, dark, motionless, airless–it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation.
C.S. Lewis – The Four Loves (page 121)
Thomas Merton – No Man Is an Island (page 127)
For we cannot make the best of what we are, if our hearts are always divided between what we are and what we are not.
Thomas Merton – No Man Is An Island (page 127)
Thomas Merton – No Man Is an Island (page 64)
In order to suffer without hate we must drive out bitterness from our heart by loving Jesus.
Thomas Merton – No Man Is an Island (page 94)
Thomas Merton – No Man Is an Island (page 64)
And since no man is an island, since we all depend on one another, I cannot work out God’s will in my own life unless I also consciously help other men to work out His will in theirs.
Thomas Merton – No Man Is An Island (page 64)
Thomas Merton – No Man Is an Island (page 53)
The will of the Lord is not a static center drawing our souls blindly toward itself. It is a creative power, working everywhere, giving life and being and direction to all things, and above all forming and creating, in the midst of a n old creation, a whole new world which is called the Kingdom of God.
Thomas Merton – No Man Is an Island (page 36)
John Bunyan – The Pilgrim’s Progress (page 150)
… it is easier going out of the Way when we are in it than it is going in when we are out of it.
John Bunyan – The Pilgrim’s Progress (page 150)
Growing Against Entropy And Being Made For More
As I’ve been reading M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled I stumbled across a forgotten, but familiar idea. It’s found in the section on Grace under the chapter The Miracle of Evolution. The idea is that one grows spiritually in the opposite direction of nature. That is to say nature eventually wears out and decays; essentially entropy. However, even though we as humans are a part of nature we grow spiritually. So in a sense we transcend nature.
Our bodies follow the laws of nature and wear out, yet our spirits grow. Peck notes that this growth is for the better or worse, but regardless we still grow. His statement and diagram, on page 266, explain this idea quite thoroughly.
Again and Again I have emphasized that the process of spiritual growth is an effortful and difficult one. This is because it is conducted against a natural resistance…
Not only does Peck state this is a miracle, but he states on page 268:
Among humanity love is the miraculous force that defies the natural law of entropy.
Two questions immediately pop in to my head. The first is why? That is why does love defy the laws of nature? I mean how is it that internally–or spiritually–we defy nature, move forward and grow instead of wind down and decay? Nature winds down and decays and we’re part of it, right? Joseph Addison expands this thought in The Spectator here:
But a man can never have taken in his full measure of Knowledge, has not time to subdue his Passions, establish his Soul in Virtue, and come up to the Perfection of his Nature, before he is hurried off the Stage.
There must be something more than simply growing contrary to nature and then being “hurried of the Stage” by death. That is some sort of reason, place or something which we grow in to. If not, then all this contrary growth would be wasted. The mathematician, Kurt Godel, poses and answers this question far better than myself in a letter to his mother here:
If the world [Welt] is rationally constructed and has meaning, then there must be such a thing [as an afterlife]. For what sense would there be in creating a being (man), which has such a wide realm of possibilities for its own development and for relationships to others, and then not allowing it to realize even a thousandth of those [possibilities]? That would be almost like someone laying, with the greatest effort and expense, the foundations for a house, and then letting it all go to seed again.
Godel assumes our spirits grow contrary to nature, but also are within the confines nature. Then he supposes the world is rational and has meaning, concluding there must be something our spirits are growing in to. That “something” only makes sense if there is growth continuation, that is to say an afterlife. C.S. Lewis expands this thought and question in The Weight Of Glory:
A man’s physical hunger does not prove that man will get any bread; he may die of starvations on a raft in the Atlantic. But surely a man’s hunger does prove that he comes of a race which repairs its body by eating and inhabits a world where eatable substances exist. In the same way, though I do not believe (I wish I did) that my desire for Paradise proves that I shall enjoy it, I think it a pretty good indication that such a thing exists and that some men will.
So we’ve established all this growth leads into something more, an “afterlife,” and it’s not simply wasted upon death. That answers the first question of why. Which leads into the second question: what is love? According to Peck, love is the force or reason behind all of this, but what is it? To answer that question I’ll refer again to Joseph Addison in The Spectator:
There is not, in my Opinion, a more pleasing and triumphant Consideration in Religion than this of the perpetual Progress which the Soul makes towards the Perfection of its Nature, without ever arriving at a Period in it… The Soul considered with its Creator, is like one of those Mathematical Lines that may draw nearer to another for all Eternity without a Possibility of touching it: And can there be a Thought so transporting, as to consider our selves in these perpetual Approaches to him, who is not only the Standard of Perfection but of Happiness!
Concluding that all this growth and headway really only makes sense if we truly are made for something more than this life. And the truth is finally revealed: love is the Creator. I’ll leave arguments about the Creator for another post. That something more or afterlife is a part of the Creator’s design. That is to say growing after death is part of the plan. C.S. Lewis always seems to take the cake when it comes to explaining, so I’ll leave you with his quote from The Weight Of Glory:
When human souls have become as perfect in voluntary obedience as the inanimate creation is in its lifeless obedience, then they will put on its glory of which Nature is only the first sketch. For you must not think that I am putting forward any heathen fancy of being absorbed into Nature. Nature is mortal; we shall outlive her. When all the suns and nebulae have passed away, each one of you will still be alive. Nature is only the image, the symbol; but it is the symbol Scripture invites me to use. We are summoned to pass through Nature, beyond her, into that splendour which she fitfully reflects.
M. Scott Peck – The Road Less Traveled (page 261)
I do not think we can hope to approach a full understanding of the cosmos, of the place of man within the cosmos, and hence the nature of mankind itself, without incorporating the phenomenon of grace into our conceptual framework.
M. Scott Peck – The Road Less Traveled (page 261)
Thomas Merton – No Man Is an Island (page 36)
Music and art and poetry attune the soul to God because they induce a kind of contact with the Creator and Ruler of the Universe. The genius of the artist finds its way by the affinity of creative sympathy, or connaturality, into the living law that rules the universe. This law is nothing by the secret gravitation that draws all things to God as to their center. Since all true art lays bare the action of this same law in the depths of our own nature, it makes us alive to the tremendous mystery of being, in which we ourselves, together with all other living and existing things, come forth fro the depths of God and return again to Him. An art that does not produce something of this is not worthy of its name.
Thomas Merton – No Man Is an Island (page 36)