The Living Centrifuge

Barbara:

"FEAR! FEAR! WHAT ARE YOU AFRAID OF!? SUCCESS! THAT'S WHAT YOU'RE AFRAID OF!"

"If you were completely balanced it would just be boring. There's vulnerability in imbalance"

Merton:

"Christianity is fundamentally humanistic, in the sense that its chief task is to enable man to achieve his destiny, to find himself, to be himself: to be the person he is made to become. Man is supposed to be God's helper in the work of creating himself. Dei adjutores sumus. Salvation is no passive thing. Nor is it an absorption of man into a kind of nonentity before the face of God. It is the elevation and divinization of man's freedom. And the Christian life demands that man be fully conscious of his freedom and of the responsibility it implies."

"Any person who pretends to love God in this day, and who has lost his sense of the value of humanity, has also lost his sense of God without knowing it. I believe that we are facing the consequences of several centuries of more and more abstract thinking, more and more unrality in our grasp of values. We have reached such a condition that now we are unable to appreciate the meaning of being alive, of being able to think, to mae decisions, to love. We have been trying for so long to turn ourselves into machines that we have finally succeeded. The logical consequence is to destroy everything."

"I certainly agree with you that we ought to scrap the notion that mental health is merely a matter of adjustment to the existing society - to be adjusted to a society that is insane is not to be healthy. The trouble is that those who are not adjusted to it, even for the right reasons, have a rather hard time too...As a priest and a man dedicated to God in a monastery, I am bound to say that I am deeply worried by the falsity, thee superficiality nd the fundamental irreverence of what is so often hailed, nowadays, as a 'return to God.' People have resurrected a lot of 'words about' God and a lot of concepts of religious things, but it sometimes seems to me that they -- we -- are not too anxious to find the Living God."

"All our 'humanism' really flows from the right understanding of the mytery of the Incarnation and of the recapitulation of all in Christ."

"I am steeped in that experience of bafflement, compunction and wonder which is the experience of those who have been rescued from tyranny, only to renounce freedom and in confusion and subjection to worse tyrants, through infidelity to the Lord. For only in his service is there true freedom, as the Prophets would tell us."

"It is the duty of man to try to focus on the truth whatever it may be, and not to deceive himself by trying to make the 'truth' conform to what keeps him happy. Of course the first truth of all is that we cannot do this perfectly, and that if we think we can we are not going to take the first step."

There's more to come. I'm just taking a rest.