"In the Chapter Room [of the monastery] they are finishing [my book] 'Seeds of Contemplation,' reading a couple of pages each evening before Compline. I am glad the book has been written and read. Surely I have said enough about the business of darkness and about the 'experimental [experiential] contact with God in obscurity' to be able to shut up about it and go on to something else for a change. Otherwise it will just get to be mechanical - grinding out the same old song over and over again. But if it had not been read aloud at me, I might have forgotten how often I had said those things, and gone on saying them again, as if they were discoveries . . . When you reread your journal you find out that your newest discovery is something you found out five years ago. Still, it is true that one penetrates deeper and deeper into the same ideas, the same experiences. As usual, after one of my books has been read at me, I am left with the wish that I were simpler."
Thomas Merton
Photo: Spires of Lumpy Ridge rise up through mist and falling snow; Rocky Mountain National Park, CO; December 7, 2012
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