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In the
last analysis what I am looking for in solitude is not happiness or
fulfillment but salvation. Not "my own salvation" but the salvation of
everybody. Here is where the game gets serious. I have used the word
revolt in connection with solitude. Revolt against what? Against a
notion of salvation that is entirely legal and extrinsic and can be
achieved no matter how false, no matter how shriveled and fruitless
one's inner life really is. This is the worst ambiguity: the impression
that one can be grossly unfaithful to life, to experience, to love, to
other people, to one's own deepest self, and yet be "saved" by an act
of stubborn conformity, by the will to be correct. In the end this
seems to me to be fatally like the act by which one is lost: the
determination to be "right" at all costs, by dint of hardening one's
core around an arbitrary choice of a fixed position. To close in on
one's central wrongness with the refusal to admit that it might be
wrong. ..I am here [in solitude and in the hermitage] for one thing: to
be open, to be not "closed in" on any one choice to the exclusion of
all others: to be open to God's will and freedom to His love, which
comes to save me from all in myself that resists Him and says no to
Him. This I must do not to justify myself, not to be right, not to be
good, but because the whole world of lost people needs this opening by
which salvation can get into it through me.
Thomas Merton. Learning to Love. Christine M. Bochen,
editor.
San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997: 345.
From
Robert Toth
The Merton Institute for Contemplative
Living
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