#MastersofSocialIsolation #12. In 1941 #ThomasMerton entered the strict cloister of the Trappist Abbey of Gethsemani. In the Trappists his heart was captured by the image of men “on this miserably noisy, cruel earth, who tasted the marvelous joy of silence and solitude."
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Henceforth he would serve the world by his prayers. Yet even as he longed for even greater solitude, his attitude toward the world was changing. On an errand in Louisville he had a mystical epiphany in which he saw his deep connection with the mass of human beings.
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“I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation..."
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His sense of his vocation and his solitude changed. God’s grace was not concentrated in the monastery. “I must see and embrace God in the whole world.” He began to write about the moral issues of the day, while networking with a range of likeminded thinkers around the world.
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His solitude was not an escape from the world but a point of solidarity, a watchtower from which he could survey the world with all its illusions and pathologies and join in the struggle “to make the world better, more free, more just, more livable, more human.”
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In the silence and solitude of his hermitage, he felt he was making his own kind of protest against a world in which communication had been replaced by party platforms and advertising slogans; in which time and existence were measured out and weighed for their productive value.
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His vocation to solitude became a form of witness, a call to others to reclaim their true humanity and freedom, to taste the sweetness of silence, to shake off the noise of ideologies and mass culture.
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The contemplative “is not the man who has fiery visions of the cherubim carrying God on their imagined chariot, but simply he who has risked his mind in the desert beyond language and beyond ideas where God is encountered in the nakedness of pure trust….
“God loves you, is present to you, lives in you, dwells in you, calls you, saves you, and offers you an understanding and light which are like nothing you ever found in books or heard in sermons.”
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