Franciscan Quote of the Day

The truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering the more you suffer because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you in proportion to your fear of being hurt.

~ Thomas Merton, via OH……….. FRANCESCO.

No one can really embrace the Christian asceticism mapped out in the New Testament unless he [or she] has some idea of the positive, constructive function of self-denial. The Holy Spirit never asks us to renounce anything without offering us something much higher and much more perfect in return … The function of self-denial is to lead to a positive increase of spiritual energy and life. The Christian dies, not merely in order to die but in order to live. And when he [or she] takes up his cross to follow Christ, the Christian realizes, or at least believes, that he is not going to die to anything but death. The Cross is the sign of Christ’s victory over death. The Cross is the sign of life. It is the trellis upon which grows the Mystical Vine whose life is infinite joy and whose branches we are. If we want to share the life of that Vine, we must grow on the same trellis and must suffer the same pruning.

~ Thomas Merton, via Dating God

What is the use of prayer if at the very moment of prayer, we have so little confidence in God that we are busy planning our own kind of answer to our prayer?

~Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude, via The Mercy Blog

The worst error is to imagine that a Christian must try to be “sane” like everybody else, that we belong in our kind of society.

~Thomas Merton, Raids on the Unspeakable (via the post “The Real Christian” on the blog A Capuchin Journey.

A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all. No man can serve two masters. Your life is shaped by the end you live for. You are made in the image of what you desire.

~Thomas Merton

I cannot discover God in myself and myself in Him unless I have the courage to face myself exactly as I am, with all my limitations, and to accept others as they are, with all their limitations.

~ Thomas Merton (Another great quote from what is quickly becoming one of my favorite web stopping places — Little Portion Hermitage)

Abbot Pastor said: “If you have a chest full of clothing, and leave it for a long time, the clothing will rot inside it. It is the same with the thoughts in our heart. If we do not carry them out by physical action, after a long while they will spoil and turn bad.”

Thomas Merton, The Wisdom of the Desert