Thursday, December 15, 2011

A Year With Thomas Merton - December 15



Love Is the Only Answer

"My responsibility is to be in all reality a peacemaker in the world, an apostle, to bring people to truth, to make my whole life a true and effective witness to God's truth."

Moving words of Albert Einstein (with whom I agree that Gandhi has been in reality the most effective and trustworthy political thinker of our time): "We must revolutionize our thinking, revolutionize our actions, and must have the courage to revolutionize our relations among the nations of the world. Clichés of yesterday will no longer do....To bring this home to men all over the world is the most important and fateful function intellectuals have ever had to shoulder. Will they have enough courage to overcome their own nationalities to the extent that is necessary to induce the peoples of the world to change their deep-rooted national traditions in a most radical fashion?"

Love is the only answer. But medieval talk about love does nothing. What does love mean today? What is its place in the enormous dimensions of the modern world? We have to love in a new way and with a new attitude, and I suppose perhaps the first thing to do is admit that I do not know the meaning of love in any context--ancient or new.

December 27, 1957, III.149-50

1 comment:

  1. "We have to love in a new way and with a new attitude, and I suppose perhaps the first thing to do is admit that I do not know the meaning of love in any context--ancient or new."

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