Quotes about Unity
The more perfectly we are ourselves the more we are able to contribute to the good of the whole Church of God.
— Thomas Merton
The ultimate perfection of the contemplative life is not a heaven of separate individuals, each one viewing his own private intuition of God; it is a sea of Love which flows through the One Body of all the elect, all the angels and saints, and their contemplation would be incomplete if it were not shared, or if it were shared with fewer souls, or with spirits capable of less vision and less joy.
— Thomas Merton
I will have more joy in heaven and in the contemplation of God, if you are also there to share it with me; and the more of us there will be to share it the greater will be the joy of all.
— Thomas Merton
kind of prayer we here speak of as properly "monastic" (though it may also fit into the life of any lay person who is attracted to it) is a prayer of silence, simplicity, contemplative and meditative unity, a deep personal integration in an attentive, watchful listening of "the heart.
— Thomas Merton
When the Love of God is in me, God is able to love you through me and you are able to love God through me. If my soul were closed to that love, God's love for you and your love for God and God's love for Himself in you and in me, would be denied the particular expression which it finds through me and through no other.
— Thomas Merton
Because God's love is in me, it can come to you from a different and special direction that would be closed if He did not live in me, and because His love is in you, it can come to me from a quarter from which it would not otherwise come. And because it is in both of us, God has greater glory.
— Thomas Merton
we are human, like everyone else, that we all have weaknesses and deficiencies, and that these limitations of ours play a most important part in all our lives. It is because of them that we need others and others need us. We are not all weak in the same spots, and so we supplement and complete one another, each one making up in himself for the lack in another.
— Thomas Merton
If the deepest ground of my being is love, then in that very love and nowhere else will I find myself, the world, and my brother and sister in Christ. It is not a question of either-or but of all-in-one. It is not a matter of exclusivity and "purity" but of wholeness, wholeheartedness, unity, and of Meister Eckhart's gleichheit (equality) which finds the same ground of love
— Thomas Merton
Above all things have charity, which is the bond of perfection and may the peace of Christ exult in your hearts in which you are called unto one Body. And be grateful.? It seems to me that all mystical theology is contained in those two lines.
— Thomas Merton
Love is our true destiny. We do not find the mining of life by ourselfs alone- we find it with another
— Thomas Merton
Self-will…is not identical to the will of the new creation—to the will which one finds in renouncing oneself, in the unity of the Body of Christ, wherein the canons of the Church make us recognize a common and individual will. Not the properties of an individual nature, but the unique relationship of each being with God—a relationship by the Holy Spirit and realized in grace—is what constitutes the uniqueness of a human person."8
— Thomas Merton
It is a law of man's nature, written into his very essence, and just as much a part of him as the desire to build houses and cultivate the land and marry and have children and read books and sing songs, that he should want to stand together with other men in order to acknowledge their common dependence on God, their Father and Creator. In fact, this desire is much more fundamental than any purely physical necessity.
— Thomas Merton