Ethan

“The work of the spiritual father consists not so much in teaching us a secret and infallible method for attaining to esoteric experiences, but in showing us how to recognize God’s grace and his will, how to be humble and patient, how to develop insight into our own difficulties, and how to remove the main obstacles keeping us from becoming men of prayer.”
― Thomas Merton, Contemplative Prayer

“Our desire and our prayer should be summed up in St. Augustine’s words: Noverim te, noverim me.38 We wish to gain a true evaluation of ourselves and of the world so as to understand the meaning of our life as children of God redeemed from sin and death. We wish to gain a true loving knowledge of God, our Father and Redeemer. We wish to lose ourselves in his love and rest in him. We wish to hear his word and respond to it with our whole being. We wish to know his merciful will and submit to it in its totality. These are the aims and goals of meditatio and oratio. This preparation for prayer can be prolonged by the slow, “sapiential” and loving recitation of a favorite psalm, dwelling on the deep sense of the words for us here and now.”
― Thomas Merton, Contemplative Prayer

“Christianity is a religion for men who are aware that there is a deep wound, a fissure of sin that strikes down to the very heart of man’s being.”
― Thomas Merton, Contemplative Prayer

“In the first place, Benedictine spirituality implies, the presence of God demands total response. If I really believe God is present in my life, here and now, then I have no choice but to deal with that. Life, in fact, will not be resolved for me until I do. No manner of other agendas will ever completely smother the insistency of the God one. No amount of noise will ever successfully drown out the need to discover what is most important among all the important things of life. No degree of success will ever feel like success until I am succeeding at the center point of life.”
― Joan D. Chittister, Wisdom Distilled from the Daily: Living the Rule of St. Benedict Today