Thomas Merton: There Must Be A Time

Sometimes, we need to take a step back.

Sometimes, we need to look at our lives afresh.

To close our eyes.

To start over.

To begin again.

As if for the first time.

But only this time, perhaps, with breathtaking passion and extravagant gratitude.

We may even try to pretend that everything that came before really didn’t matter, really didn’t make any difference.

But even as we do, we cannot help but lug around the accumulated wisdom wrested from difficult days, or endure the hurts inflicted along the way – sometimes even by our own hands.

So let’s, each of us, take the time to measure out – in solitude – the power and the wisdom contained within this new day.

And let’s, each of us, try to understand just where we’ve been, to grasp just where it is that we might be heading.

But we cannot wait for that to happen, as if by magic.

No.

We must demand it.

We must, in reality, seize it.

Thomas Merton, no stranger to such contemplation, wrote these words in No Man is an Island – words which broke through to me.

Perhaps you’ll find something within them that will move you similarly:

There must be a time of day when the man who makes plans forgets his plans, and acts as if he had no plans at all.

There must be a time of day when the man who has to speak falls very silent.

And his mind forms no more propositions, and he asks himself: Did they have a meaning?

There must be a time when the man of prayer goes to pray as if it were the first time in his life he had ever prayed;

When the man of resolutions puts his resolutions aside as if they had all been broken, and he learns a different wisdom:

Distinguishing the sun from the moon, the stars from the darkness, the sea from the dry land, and the night sky from the shoulder of a hill.

Peace

Image Credit: Pixabay.com

Merton Quote Credit Here.