Friday, March 06, 2009

Concrete demands?

The real purpose of Christian asceticism is then not to liberate the soul from the desires and needs of the body, but to bring the whole person into complete submission to God's will as expressed in the concrete demands of life in all its existential reality.

Thomas Merton, Seasons of Celebration, p. 138

This would do very well to explicate the strange place I find myself in at the moment... And it really is "life in all its existential reality" that is doing all the work, and not any of my own feeble attempts at any form of discipline!

1 comment:

St Edwards Blog said...

I just read this today in the book I am using for Lenten prayer!

And how true it is indeed.