Thomas Merton quote on God

I am re-reading Merton's "New Seeds of Contemplation". This paragraph speaks to me in a time when we are attempting to be "intellectually spiritual" and trying to work through in our minds what we will accept about Jesus and what we will discard as irrelevant or "out dated" about God.

In all the situations of life the "will of God" comes to us not merely as an external dictate of impersonal law but above all as an interior invitation of personal love. Too often the conventional conception of "God's will" as a sphinx-like and arbitrary force bearing down upon us with implacable hostility, leads men to lose faith in a God they cannot find it possible to love. Such a view of the divine will drives human weakness to despair and one wonders if it is not, itself, often the expression of a despair too intolerable to be admitted to conscious consideration. These arbitrary "dictates" of a domineering and insensible Father are more often seeds of hatred than of love. If that is our concept of the will of God, we cannot possibly seek the obscure and intimate mystery of the encounter that takes place in contemplation. We will desire only to fly as far as possible from Him and hide from His Face forever. So much depends on our idea of God! Yet no idea of Him, however pure and perfect, is adequate to express Him as He really is. Our idea of God tell us more about ourselves than about Him.

Thomas Merton

Merton and Nouwen

Thomas Merton and Henri Nouwen are known by many of us as monks who have written much about the spiritually inward and the acting outward life as an apostle of Jesus Christ. They found this balance out of their monastic callings. I keep trying imagine the local church as a monastery that sends out monks into the world. They are not hyper people running about trying to fix the world, but listening, discerning, and praying folks who have a greater impact on the world than any of their individual actions could imply. Another person who has been of the modern era and helped me with both of these actions is Elizabeth O'Connor who was part of Church of the Savior in Washington DC.

How do we do this? How do we slow down each day in a time of sabbath and how do we honor each 7th day as a sabbath to the Lord?