An author-slash-theologian who has had a significant influence in my life over the last year or so has been Thomas Merton.
I typically spend my weekends mostly offline, leaving my computer under the couch (which also serves as my office most weekdays). On Sunday nights I feel pressured to write something powerful and thought-provoking to begin the new week, and to be honest with you, I’d rather spend that time still in reflection and offline.
Today begins the first of “Merton Mondays,” where I’ll share an insight from Thomas Merton. I think it’s a good way to begin the week, for me, because it allows me to still respect the down time of the weekend – and for you, because I know your RSS reader of choice is full of information people just have to share.
So, enjoy. Soak it in. And may your week begin well.
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“We must expect to be making mistakes all the time. We must be content to fail repeatedly and to begin again to try to deny ourselves for the love of God…
We want to shake off the hateful thing that has humbled us. In our rush to escape the humiliation of our mistakes, we run headfirst into the opposite error, seeking comfort and compensation.
And so we spend our lives running back and forth from one attachment to another.
If that is all our self-denial amounts to,
…our mistakes will never help us.
The thing you do, when you have made a mistake, is not to give up doing what you were doing and start something altogether new, but to start over again with the thing you began badly and try, for the love of God, to do it well.
(Merton, Journals, Oct 7, 1949, II.372)