7/15/08

I Think I have just read the most touching, beautiful and personal paragraphs. No other writing has spoken to me and about what I'm feeling. It is an excerpt from "The Seven Story Mountain" written by Thomas Merton. It is a meditation of God speaking directly to Thomas and in so doing, speaking to me in a round about way also. Here it is:


"When you have been praised a little and loved a little I will take away all your gifts and all your love and all your praise and you will be utterly forgotten and abandoned and you will be nothing, a dead thing, a rejection. And in that day you shall begin to possess the solitude you have so long desired. And your solitude will bear immense fruit in the souls of men you will never see on earth.


Do not ask when it will be or where it will be or how it will be: On a mountain or in a prison, in a desert or in a concentration camp or in a hospital or at Gethsemane. It does not matter. So do not ask me, because I am not going to tell you. You will not know until you are in it.


But you shall taste the true solitude of my anguish and my poverty and I shall lead you into the high places of My joy and you shall die in Me and find all things in My mercy which has created you for the end..."


Well, that's it. Painfully perfect, accurate, personal and beautiful.