classical Saturday

Thomas Merton (1915-1968) was born in France but lived his adult life, after his conversion in his mid-twenties, as a Trappist monk in an abbey in Kentucky. Today's post is from a little book he wrote called Contemplative Prayer.

"Many people who have a few natural gifts and a little ingenuity tend to imagine that they can quite easily learn, by their own cleverness, to master the methods-one might say the 'tricks'- of the spiritual life.

The only trouble is that in the spiritual life there are no tricks and no shortcuts....One cannot begin to face the real difficulties of the life of prayer and meditation unless one is first perfectly content to be a beginner and really experience himself as one who knows little or nothing and has a desperate need to learn the bare rudiments."