bernie
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Total Posts
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501
- Joined: 11/22/2007
- Location: TX (transplanted New Yorker; world citizen)
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Status: online
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Conversion...
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1/25/2009 12:14 AM
( #1 )
Conversion...
The man who has attained final integration is no longer limited by the culture in which he has grown up. "He has embraced all of life....He has experienced qualities of every type of life": ordinary human existence, intellectual life, artistic creation, human love, religious life. He passes beyond all these limiting forms, while retaining all that is best and most universal in them, "finally giving birth to a fully comprehensive self." He accepts not only his own community, his own society, his own friends, his own culture, but all mankind. He does not remain bound to one limited set of values in such a way that he opposes them aggressively or defensively to others. He is fully "Catholic" in the best sense of the word. He has a unified vision and experience of the one truth shining out in all its various manifestations, some clearer than others, some more definite and more certain than others. He does not set these partial views up in opposition to each other, but unifies them in a dialectic or an insight of complementarity. With this view of life he is able to bring perspective, liberty, and spontaneity into the lives of others. The finally integrated man is a peacemaker, and that is why there is such a desperate need for our leaders to become such men of insight.
...Man does not have to transcend himself in the sense of pulling himself up by his own bootstraps, He has, rather, to respond to the mysterious grace of a Spirit which is at once infinitely greater than his own and yet which, at the same time, offers itself as the total plenitude of all Gifts, to be in all reality his "own Spirit."
However, the response is not automatic. It demands a great purity of devotion to truth and to life. The delusions of a fat society glutted with the profits begotten by its own death wish hardly dispose us to respond to the Creator Spiritus, the Cantor sapientissimus, without a fundamental re-orientation of our thought and life. All have the duty to contribute whatever they can to this re-orientation. I do not think the word re-orientation is strong enough. What is required is a spiritual upheaval such as we seldom see recorded in history. But such things have happened, and let us hope we have not gone so far that they will not happen again.
(Thomas Merton "Final Integration" - Thomas Merton [1915-1968] was a Trappist monk of Gethsemani, Kentucky. He is the author of many books including Contemplative Prayer and Mystics and Zen Masters.)
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sandra67
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Total Posts
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4371
- Joined: 6/15/2008
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Status: offline
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RE: Conversion...
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1/25/2009 7:15 AM
( #2 )
However, the response is not automatic. It demands a great purity of devotion to truth and to life.
This really made me think ,I guess purity comes in time  if we try hard enough. Sandrax
The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love~and be loved in return♥♥
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