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READINGS
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The teachings of 4th century Christian Fathers who sought solitude and contemplation in the deserts of the Near East. "In many respects, these Desert Fathers had much in common with Indian Yogis and with Zen Buddhist monks of China and Japan. If we were to seek their like in 20th century America, we would have to look in strange, out of the way places. Such beings are tragically rare. In any case these Fathers distilled for themselves a very practical and unassuming wisdom that is at once primitive and timeless, and which enables us to reopen the sources that have been polluted or blocked up altogether by the accumulated mental and spiritual refuse of our technological barbarism."
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A text on incorporating spirituality into everyday life from the Trappist Monk Thomas Merton. "The spiritual life is a kind of dialectic between ideals and reality. I say a dialectic, not a compromise. Ideals, which are generally based on universal ascetic norms "for everybody" - or at least for all those who are "seeking perfection" - cannot be realized in the same way in each individual. Each one becomes perfect, not by realizing one uniform standard of universal perfection in his own life, but by responding to the call and the love of God, addressed to him within the limitations and circumstances of his own peculiar vocation."
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This is a spiritual autobiography of a man who withdrew from the world only after he had immersed himself in it. Nevertheless, having chosen a life of contemplation and prayer, Thomas Merton communicated with the most well-known activists, artists, politicians and theologians of the day. In writing about Trappist monks before he joined the order, he wrote: "They were poor, they had nothing, and therefore they were free and possessed everything, and everything they touched struck off something of the fire of divinity."
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