Thomas Merton

And the essence of this contemplation is the pure and eternal joy that is in God, because God is God. The serene and interminable exaltation in the truth that they who are perfect is infinitely perfect.

is perfection.

To think that a person could be proud of this joy, once it had discovered them and delivered them, would be like saying, This person is proud because the air is free. This other person is proud because the sea is wet.

And here is one who is proud because the mountains are high and the snow on their summits is clean and the wind blows on the snow and makes the plume of cloud trail away from the high peaks. Music

Here is a person who is dead and buried and gone and their memory has vanished from the world of people and they no longer exist among the living who wander about in time.

And will you call them proud because the sunlight fills the huge arc of sky over the country where they lived and died and was buried back in the days when they existed?

So it is with one who has vanished into God by pure contemplation. God alone is left. They are the I who acts there,

They are the one who loves and knows and rejoices. Can God be proud? Or can God sin?

Suppose such a person were once in their life to vanish into God for the space of a minute.

All the rest of their life has been spent in sins and virtues, in good and evil, in labor and struggle, in sickness and health, in gifts, in sorrows, in achieving and regretting,

in planning and hoping, in love and fear. They have seen things, considered them, known them, made judgments, spoken, acted wisely or not.

They have blundered in and out of the contemplation of beginners. They have found the cloud, the obscure sweetness of God. They have known rest in prayer.

In all these things, their life has been a welter of uncertainties.

In the best of them they may have sinned. In their imperfect contemplation they may have found sin. But in the moment of time, the minute, the little minute in which they were delivered into God, if they truly were so delivered,

There is no question that then their life was pure. That then they gave glory to God. That then they did not sin. That in that moment of pure love they could not sin.

Can such a union with God be the object of inordinate desire? Not if you understand it. Because you cannot inordinately desire God to be God. You cannot inordinately desire that God's will be done for its own sake.

But it is in these two desires perfectly conceived and fulfilled that we are emptied into that and transformed into that joy. And it is in these that we cannot sin.

It is in this ecstasy of pure love that we arrive at a true fulfillment of the first commandment, loving God with our whole heart and our whole mind and all our strength. Therefore it is something that all people

who desire to please God ought to desire, not for a minute, not for half an hour, but forever. It is in these souls that peace is established in the world.

They are the strength of the world because they are the tabernacles of God in the world. They are the ones who keep the universe from being destroyed. They are the little ones. They do not know themselves