One of the books I bought at the Monastery of Christ in the Desert yesterday is The Pocket Thomas Merton, ed. with introduction by Robert Inchausti (Boston: New Seeds Pocket Classics, 2005). Although I don’t usually buy such little books, I found this one quite attractive, the sort of book I can easily carry around and read in the odd moments of the day. Quite frankly I’m pressed with the quality of selections Inchausti had made and would like to share some of them with you in the days ahead. Here’s a starter:

The deep secrecy of my own being is often hidden from me by my own estimate of what I am. My idea of what I am is falsified by my admiration for what I do. And my illusions about myself are bred by contagion from the illusions of other men. We all seek to imitate one another’s imagined greatness. If I do not know who I am, it is because I think I am the sort of person everyone around me wants to be. Perhaps I have never asked myself whether I really wanted to become what everybody else seems to want to become. Perhaps if only I realized that I do not admire what everyone seems to admire, I would really begin to live after all. I would be liberated from the painful duty of saying what I really do not think and acting in a way that betrays God’s truth and the integrity of my own soul. (No Man in an Island, 125-26)