Piggybacking
June 29, 2009
I’ve been toting around this idea that we are more human the more we are redeemed. Before we are redeemed, Franz Wright would call us monsters. And today I was reading Thomas Merton and found this:
These missions [knowing God and becoming like Christ] begin at baptism. But they do not take on any practical meaning in the life of our spirit until we become capable of conscious acts of love. From then on, God’s special presence in us corresponds to our own free decisions. From then on, our life becomes a series of choices between the fiction of our false self, whom we feed with the illusions of passion and selfish appetite, and our loving consent to the purely gratuitous mercy of God.
You should read the whole of chapter 6: “Pray for Your Own Discovery.” There is a phenomenal prayer toward the end.
