The Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine University

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Author QuotedWilliam Faukner
Title QuotedGo Down Moses
Date (Year/Month/Day)1966/12/06
Imprint[S.l.] : [s.n.]. 1942I
QuotationGreat appetite for Faulkner now. The Bear can be read as a perfect tract on the monastic vocation, i.e. especially poverty. Though it is not "monastic." Merely Christian!! Merely. The Bear is a key to everything in America too. I am talking about it in the Sunday conference. How important to see our monastic vocation in this light. As against all the secular city naivete that is floating around. A genuine and serious eschatology! There comes a point where compromise is simply impossible. Either the curse exists or it doesn't. To embrace the "system" and plunge into it is to say there is no curse and never was and man can by his own ingenuity fix everything just by acting as if there were nothing wrong; and the indifference to humanity which is built into the society he lives in, is accepted as "love." Things just become what you call them. Murder goes on? You have to learn not to see it, I guess!! Solidarity? with what? Murder! Just call it love, that makes everything OK in the secular city and next week there will be a better word for it, "lov" not being quite acceptable.
Quotation SourceLearning to love: exploring solitude and freedom. The Journals of Thomas Merton, Volume 6, 1966-1967.; Edited by Christine M. Bochen. / [San Francisco] : HarperCollins. 1997, p. 166
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