I’ve been working on a chapter this week — “Being the Beloved” — which is based on a talk I’ve been giving for years. So I have been rereading favorite sections from my favorite book of Thomas Merton: New Seeds of Contemplation. The excerpt below from NSC is written in prose, but I have taken the liberty here to rearrange it in a poetic form because it slows us down and invites a more meditative reading of this poignant passage on love which is worth prayerfully pondering. 

Love comes out of God and gathers
us to God in order to pour itself
back into God through all of us
and bring us all back to Him*
on the tide of His own mercy.

So we all become doors and windows
through which God shines back
into His own house. When the love
of God is in me God is able to love
you through me and you are able
to love God through me. If my soul
were closed to that love, God’s love
for you and your love for God
and God’s love for Himself in you
and in me, would be denied
the particular expression which it finds
through me and through no other.
Because God’s love is in me, it can
come to you from a different and special
direction that would be closed if He did
not live in me, and because His love
is in you, it can come to me from a quarter
from which it would not otherwise come.
And because it is in both of us, God has
greater glory. His love is expressed in two
more ways in which it would not otherwise
be expressed, that is, in two more joys
that could not exist without Him.
Let us live in this love and this happiness,
you and I and all of us, in the love of Christ
and contemplation, for this is where we find
ourselves and one another as we truly are.
It is only in this love that we at last become real.
For it is here that we most truly share
the life of One God in three Persons.

~ Thomas Merton,
from New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 67-68.

* NB! Thomas Merton lived and wrote when masculine pronouns for God were the only show in town. Never questioned. His work preceded the conversation that has taken place the last three decades among biblical scholars, theologians, liturgists, pastoral ministers, and active congregants regarding inclusive-language with respect to God. We know that Merton was ever the forerunner, yet adverse to fads. We know he was a contemplative who understood not just theologically but experientially that the unnameable one we so cavalierly call God is beyond gender. I believe Merton would not have seen this issue as a fad but a serious issue within the community of faith. A poet himself, I imagine even in the 1950’s and 1960’s Merton would have shuddered at the number of Christians who literalized gender-specific metaphors for God like Father and King. Let’s remember, the word God is itself a metaphor for the one in whom we live and move and have our being. I believe it is more than likely that Merton would have led the way in either alternating the masculine pronouns He/His with the feminine pronouns She/Hers, simply used God throughout, or chosen other images for God when it seemed appropriate. This is a difficult passage to know how he would have expressed himself if he wrote it in 2019. I have posted it using God throughout, alternating masculine and feminine pronouns. Here I have chosen to quote the passage as it appears in New Seeds of Contemplation, but with this disclaimer.