Week Two: Transformation in Solitude

Can you make yourself more loving, holy, or virtuous?

I suspect that you could try, but Thomas Merton suggests that you’ll fail and feel quite bad about it. His alternative is far from flashy: solitude.

In solitude we can rest fully in the love of God and trust the rest to God’s presence within us. Merton writes:

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“If man is to live, he must be all alive, body, soul, mind, heart, spirit. Everything must be elevated and transformed by the action of God, in love and faith.”

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“There is no hope for the man who struggles to obtain a virtue in the abstract—a quality of which he has no experience. He will never efficaciously prefer the virtue to the opposite vice, no matter how much he may seem to despise the latter.”

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“What is the use of praying if at the very moment of prayer, we have so little confidence in God that we are busy planning our own kind of answer to our prayer?”

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Learn more about Thoughts in Solitude…

For Reflection