Inspiring Christian Lives

Thomas Merton, 1915-68

Thomas Merton is a fascinating and inspiring writer, a restless quester for the truth, and definitely a Christian thinker for teenagers today. Merton travelled all the way from atheism to monasticism, then to peace activism and beyond. He had lived a wild and debauched youth, fathered a child, flirted with communism until he found his way to an austere Trappist monastery in Kentucky.

Read about his life in his own words in Seven Storey Mountain – poetic inspiration for the riches of the Christian life. In the meantime, ponder his wise words on some issues of twentieth and twenty first century life:
"Businesses, are, in reality, quasi-religious sects. When you go to work in one, you embrace A New Faith. And if they are really big businesses, you progress from faith to a kind of mystique. Belief in the product, preaching the product, in the end the product becomes the focus of a transcendental experience. Through 'the product' one communes with the vast forces of life, nature, and history that are expressed in business."
"Advertising treats all products with the reverence and the seriousness due to sacraments."
"Technology is not in itself opposed to spirituality and to religion. But it presents a great temptation."
"A superficial freedom to wander aimlessly here or there, to taste this or that, to make a choice of distractions (in Pascal's sense) is simply a sham. It claims to be a freedom of 'choice' when it has evaded the basic task of discovering who it is that chooses."
"The danger of education, I have found, is that it so easily confuses means with ends. Worse than that, it quite easily forgets both and devotes itself merely to the mass production of uneducated graduates--people literally unfit for anything except to take part in an elaborate and completely artificial charade which they and their contemporaries have conspired to call 'life'."
"The least of the work of learning is done in classrooms."
"Anyone who regards love as a deal made on the basis of 'needs' is in danger of falling into a purely quantative ethic. If love is a deal, then who is to say that you should not make as many deals as possible?"
"[A publisher asked me to write something on 'The Secret of Success,' and I refused.] If I had a message to my contemporaries, I said, it was surely this: Be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success. ... If you have learned only how to be a success, your life has probably been wasted. If a university concentrates on producing successful people, it is lamentably failing in its obligation to society and to the students themselves."
"War represents a vice that mankind would like to get rid of but which it cannot do without. Man is like an alcoholic who knows that drink will destroy him but who always has a reason for drinking. So with war."