Settling down in the quiet...

It is useless to try to make peace with ourselves by being pleased with everything we have done. In order to settle down in the quiet of our own being we must learn to be detached from the results of our own activity. We must withdraw ourselves, to some extent, from effects that are beyond our control and be content with the good will and the work that are the quiet expression of our inner life. We must be content to live without watching ourselves live, to work without expecting an immediate reward, to love without an instantaneous satisfaction, and to exist without any special recognition.

Thomas Merton: No Man Is an Island, with thanks to Inward/Outward

I think this has much to do with the sense that I have tried to articulate, albeit clumsily, in the last few posts, that it is only as we give up our relentless desire for self-determination - the "key-code to the soul's chartroom", as I put it yesterday - that we become free to be who we really are. The withdrawal "from effects that are beyond our control" is perhaps a better way of putting what I was trying to say about accepting losses. And "to exist without any special recognition" is surely that hiddenness which lies at the heart of my own call to follow Francis... and in that is peace, "peace which the world cannot give..."