Thomas Merton Quotes

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These are quotes from Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain. I enjoyed the book immensely. Merton writes with a candor and self-deprecation that is winsome and inviting. I disagree with a great deal of what he says, particularly about the saints and Mary and the cloistered life. But his life story is worth reading and it took me in as soon as I read about his artist parents. I wish I could have been one of his literature students.

The quotes here are just a smattering of his wise words, but which spoke to me especially now. You know how that is? When a book just meets you and speaks your language? This is one of those.

When the Spirit of God finds a soul in which He can work, He uses that soul for any number of purposes: opens out before its eyes a hundred new directions, multiplying its works and its opportunities for the apostolate almost beyond belief and certainly far beyond the ordinary strength of a human being.

Sometimes I would be preoccupied with problems that seemed to be difficult and seemed to be great, and yet when it was all over the answers that I worked out did not seem to matter much anyway, because all the while, beyond my range of vision and comprehension, God had silently and imperceptibly worked the whole thing out for me and had presented me with the solution. To say it better, He had worked the solution into the very tissue of my own life and substance and existence by the wise incomprehensible weaving of His providence.

Being Aware

Posted in life, Poland by

1. First-world problems I’ve had lately:

–I hate when my ear buds get dreadfully tangled even though I try to store them in an orderly way.

–I can’t decide what colors to wear together because I have so many clothes to choose from. (I still intend to prove to my friends and sisters that pink and turquoise go together, but that’s another subject.)

2. First-world gifts this week:

–I Skyped my mom several times. Computer.

–A friend called to ask if I’m ok. Cell phone.

–I had free care and tests and scans that don’t exist in some countries and would be crazy expensive in others. Hospital and doctors.

–We had a free day from work and we could stay at home and drink coffee and read The Alchemist aloud. Leisure time.

Every day I see people in our town riffling through dumpsters and trash cans. I can watch them from my 5th-story living room window and it makes my heart sick. I don’t know what desperation has pushed them to this, but I’m doubly grateful for food in the fridge and cupboards. And for energy to cook it. And for money to buy it.

And for a toasty-warm flat. And that I love teaching English. And that there are days off.

The list goes on and on.

This sounds like I lead a charmed life. I don’t. There are many things I’m angry about and weep over and put up with and try terribly hard not to worry about. My life is not pinnable, as another blogger put it. But I’m rich to the point of excess. Rich in way, way more than things.

I don’t deserve the luxuries that majority of the world lacks and I’m not big enough to come to any resolutions of the vast inequalities. But today I am aware and thankful.

Tigers’ Shining Eyes

Posted in recommendations, teaching English by

1. I have this group of pre-teens and in the teachers’ room we call them our tiger class. Last Thurs. they completely wore me out with their mischief and naughtiness, and I was quite numb for several hours after the lesson and felt like a colossal failure.

But yesterday they had completely transformed. They focused on their work and came up with amazing things. Their eyes sparkled with energy and intelligence. They acted out and guessed vocabulary with hilarity and creativity. Crazy whirling arms to show a helicopter’s blades, and fierce fangs to show Dracula.   I sat at the side of the room and laughed and laughed with them. Had they transformed, or had I? Maybe both. I only know I fell in love again, with all six of them.  Their shining eyes completely charm me. And they are still tigers because they’re so beautiful and alive.

2. Speaking of shining eyes, I recommend musician and motivational speaker Benjamin Zander’s speech at TED here. I’m not musical enough to follow some of the technical chord progressions he explains. But in general he’s talking about music and passion and I interpret what he says from a teacher’s standpoint. His bounding energy and way of thinking outside the box makes me feel that no problem is insurmountable.

“I have a definition of success. For me, it’s very simple. It’s not about wealth and fame and power. It’s about how many shining eyes I have around me.” –Benjamin Zander

 

Homework and a Psalm

Posted in life, Poland, Sunday School, teaching English by

1. Teachers need weekends to refocus and decompress. Until I started teaching, I never realized how important a weekend is. Especially Saturday. And this Saturday was especially lovely. In the morning, I had two private English lessons that went well. Then Ola called to say she couldn’t come to my place right away, but could she bring food now anyhow?

What sane person is going to refuse food brought to her?

So I ate her pumpkin soup and rested alone until Ola and her son came back. Then while he did his homework at the kitchen table, I helped her with her advanced grammar homework for university. Inversion and the passive voice. Fun, fun. It was a perfectly relaxing afternoon: drink tea, sit beside a friend, do grammar, and eat food she brought, plus brownies. Plus there was an extra hour with the time change. Yay!

2. During the week, reading Psalm 136, it occurred to me that it would fun to write a modern-day psalm like that. So this morning in my youth Sunday school class, we wrote one. First, we read Psalm 136 and talked about how it can sound boring and like a meaningless chant, OR it can be a tool used in poetry to emphasis something wonderful that we don’t want to forget. Probably no other line in the Bible is repeated quite like this, so it must mean that it’s worth remembering.

Then we collaborated and made our own and it was fun and true and beautiful. Here it is:

1. We saw a beautiful sunrise, for His mercy endures forever.

2. We played football and won, for His mercy endures forever.

3. We walked in the forest and saw beautiful colors, for His mercy endures forever.

4. We have hands to work and be creative with, for His mercy endures forever.

5. We studied hard and learned alot, for His mercy endures forever.

6. We had good times with friends and family, for His mercy endures forever.

7. We enjoyed wonderful warm sunshine, for His mercy endures forever.

8. We read good books and watched good films, for His mercy endures forever.

9. We ate delicious food, pizza, oatmeal, cakes, for His mercy endures forever.

10. We ran in the field, for His mercy endures forever.

11.We could sleep one hour longer, for His mercy endures forever.

Two Good Stories

Posted in books, Poland, recommendations by

1. This is a book recommendation for the next time you’re at the library: The Soloist, by Steve Lopez, a journalist for the LA Times. It’s about the redemption and power in friendship and music. It’s a true story, and happened in LA.  You can watch the movie, and it’s good, but the book is really worth your time and thought. It was born out of Mr. Lopez’s search for a story for his column, and how he bumped into Nathaniel Ayers, a homeless musical genius. There’s more than one unlikely hero in the story, and maybe that’s part of why I like it.

2. I live in a flat that has 4,000 English books on its walls. This is in a town where the average adult doesn’t speak English, so this flat is exceptionally exceptional. About once a year our landlord hires a lady to dust all the books. This morning she came, a pleasant, patient lady.  We chatted a little bit now and then. My Polish is slow and childish, but functional. She said this is a happy place, and I agreed and said I feel like a princess in it.

At one point in her work, she peered into the room to ask me what the date is today. I glanced at the calendar to make sure and said it’s the 95th. The cleaning lady, God bless her, never flinched or smirked. Then I heard what I’d said, and quickly cancelled it and stumbled out the correct number and explained that numbers are so hard for me. (Never mind that I learned them in the first week of Polish classes three years ago; I still stutter out most numbers higher than 11.) The most amazing part of this story is how graceful the woman was, and how she listened calmly and patiently til I finished what I wanted to say. I guess if you have the patience to carefully dust 4,000 books, you can also wait for the foreign girl to sputter out and self-correct her Polish mistakes.

Bits of Grace

Posted in life by

I follow Rachel Devenish Ford’s blog, called Journey Mama,  Her words and life and children with beautiful hippy names inspire me.  She started recently to post about five things every day:

These things can be bits of grace, they can be funny things, they can be frustrating things.  These are the things you pull out of your pocket, at the end of the day, and arrange on your night table. These are the thoughts and memories you gather throughout the day. These are the things you paste in your journal. There are no rules, really, I just want to write about five things, to jog my brain and memory and not forget– it’s the not forgetting that’s the most important— these years are an avalanche of challenges and gifts and I want to remember it all.

I loved Rachel’s last story about going out to get donuts for her family’s breakfast and waiting for the singing man to make them while she sat with a woman who was stroking a rooster under her arm to calm it. The incredible thing about life is that while it’s daily and relentless, it has these bizarre, stranger-than-fiction moments that deserve to be shared and savored. It made me think it would be fun to try something like Rachel’s five points a day, only to make it more do-able, I’ll start with two things. Maybe not every day, but maybe more frequently than has been my tendency.

1. Yesterday our friend gave us a bag of coffee her friends from Jordan gave her. Well, we think it’s coffee. We can’t read the language on the package. It smells like a mixture of coffee and tea, and has leaves like tea in it and a lot of cardamom. We made some this evening, with milk and sugar in it. I sipped it while I read Anne’s House of Dreams to Jewel. It had the consistency of tea, maybe because I made it too weak, but it was a comforting drink with a lovely strangeness. My motto is that I’ll try to taste anything at least once, and like most new flavors turn out to be, it was a pleasure.

2. This week’s project-on-the-go is making a pumpkin out of a discarded book. Great fun for my inner child who loves cutting and pasting and messing around with paint. Today I sat in an open doorway, letting sun and (unseasonably) warm breezes in while I painted the rounded edges of the pages. Later in class while I was being a semi-dignified, semi-knowledgeable ESL teacher of dignified adults, I happened to glance down and see that my right palm still had a carrot-orange tinge on it. Like the self-tan spray that some girls use. This girl, however, gets her tans honestly, and the orange sheen felt so foreign. But it amused me and I didn’t regret having painted in the sunshine.

 

I Am From

Posted in Family, life, words by

I am from woven rag rugs by the sink and stacks of table boards. I am from orderly and punctual, the taste of raisins and garlic and whole wheat bread. I am from plants in macrame hangers in the living room and the swing in the tree whose long-gone limbs I remember as if they were my own.

I’m from morning devotions and shelves of books and baskets of magazines, from reading in silence as a form of socializing and from holding hands for prayer before meals.

I’m from singing for the tape to start playing, God walking with me in the dark, and “It’s always right to do right.”

I’m from camping on Skyline Drive and walking with a hissing lantern and 12-hour road trips to Grampas and countless airport trips.

I’m from Virginia and Germany and Ireland and molasses cookies and canned peaches.

From younger siblings playing church and showing slides, from a typewriter and fabric scraps in the sewing room, from toy poodles, and a world map on the wall.

 

This is based on the poem “I Am From” by George Ella Lyon. The template for this kind of fun writing is here. Try it!

 

 

Living Gifted

Posted in life by

Most mornings, the easiest thing for me to do would be to curl up and stay out of sight for the day, much like my hamster does in her toilet paper roll hide-out.

I love brainstorming and dreaming big and flinging color into life.  But most of my ideas and ideals get so muddied up in the reality of living that I get tired of even trying again, so I respond by wanting to hide.

I want to hide when I’ve failed again. Snapped at someone. Gossiped. Let circumstances determine my behavior. I won’t say more here because this is not a public confessional, but believe me, it gets ugly. Those living closest to me know.

Sometimes all I can see are my failures, the past with all the blotches and blemishes.

But living with regret and hiding means living without grace.

And if there were no grace, no eraser of mistakes, no forgiveness, I would go out and kill myself.

But there is marvelous, infinite, matchless grace. Free. Poured out. Lavished on all creation. The past is in the past, covered, gone, for every repentant. This is what my friend reminded me of this summer, and she’s right.

“You are so, so gifted,” she said. She meant that I’ve been given so much–everything I have has been given, and mustn’t be denied or clenched tightly.

If I live as though my failures (and others’) are too big to release, it is to say that Jesus death wasn’t enough to satisfy God’s wrath, as if His grace isn’t as big as He said.  Which would be living in unbelief, and God has stern words for that kind of person. And I don’t want Jesus’ death to have been in vain, because I do love Him awfully, awfully much.

So I’m taking baby steps toward living in grace. It feels presumptuous to even say it but it’s true. Grace is charis, a gift given from a source outside ourselves, something to embrace and share, not try to produce it or hide from it.

Taking that gift with open hands is the only way to really live.

The Secret Life of Ministry

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“So, what’s your ministry?”

She asked me this as we got acquainted at a Christian writer’s weekend.

“I work in a store,” I said.

But as soon as I’d said it, I saw it was the wrong answer. I was supposed to have said I’m leading women’s groups, or mentoring teens, or writing music, or teaching mentally handicapped children or something else amazing and important. This country bumpkin just said what her job was.  That’s not ministry.

Or is it?

That vignette often replays itself in my mind , even though it was years ago, and I still feel the tension of the lady’s unasked questions. I often feel the tug of war between doing what’s labelled as ministry and just doing the next thing that needs doing. The labels and expectations of public service for God countered with the hidden, thankless reality of service. The praise that’s poured out on numbers and responses, and the silence that accompanies faithfulness and setbacks.

Jesus saved us, Paul said,  so that we wouldn’t live for ourselves but for Him.  I suggest that, just as submission isn’t submission until we disagree, ministry isn’t ministry until it’s forgetful of self, or until it cuts across the grain of our bent to look out for me, me, me and keep ourselves comfy.

There might be a place for styled hair and sound amplifiers and  whitened teeth and glossy posters and impressive numbers of followers. But it seems to me that Jesus’ kind of ministry has more to do with dusty feet and glasses of water and holding children.  Or saying ‘hello’ and smiling at a bus driver. Or changing the trash cans at church.

Ministry isn’t reserved for the ones who have it all together, the ones who’ve built their platform, the ones who have a dramatic story to tell the world. Ministry is for every person who has walked across the line to the Kingdom of Light and wants to serve the King from sheer gratitude and awe at being rescued from the Dark Side.

Because Jesus the Servant is our hero, and this is the upside-down kingdom where the last becomes first. Where, with God’s mysterious exchange, the cracked ones are the healed ones, and the most light comes from those who are most broken.

I find this both convicting and comforting.

Rates and Over-Rates

Posted in Ireland, life, words by

According to the numbers, I lost more than half of my blog readers when Google Reader finished. Am I supposed to do something about this?  I’m a little sad about it, but not too much because I’m not writing/blogging these days anyhow. This is the season when teachers rest their brains and give themselves permission to be dormant. At least this teacher does.

I think mostly in single words or lines these days.

Over-rated:

first impressions

clothes’ brand-names

color-coordination. So why doesn’t blue and green work?

silk ivy leaves

whitened teeth

chevron stripes

blog stats

bloggers’ opinions

Can’t over-rate:

going barefoot all day every day

babies’ peach-skin cheeks

wild fuchsias in hedgerows

spicy nachos and cold Coke

breakfast in the sun

swimming in a wild sea cove

To mull:

Most people, most of the time, are doing the best they can.

“The cure for everything is saltwater–sweat, tears, or the sea. “–Isak Dinesen

Good relationships come from large helpings of grace and redemption mixed with a little amnesia.