contemplation

Owen Merton, Watercolor, 1919 - "Snow Scene, Long Island"

Contemplation cannot construct a new world by itself. 

Contemplation does not feed the hungry; it does not clothe the naked… 

and it does not return the sinner to peace, truth, and union with God. 

But without contemplation we cannot see what we do… 

Without contemplation we cannot understand 

the significance of the world in which we must act. 

Without contemplation we remain small, limited, divided, partial; 

we adhere to the insufficient, 

permanently united to our narrow group and its interests, 

losing sight of justice and charity, 

seized by the passions of the moments… 

Without contemplation, 

without the intimate, silent, 

secret pursuit of truth through love, 

our action loses itself in the world and becomes dangerous.

~ Thomas Merton

---

Evolutionary thinking is actually contemplative thinking because it leaves the full field of the future in God’s hands and agrees to humbly hold the present with what it only tentatively knows for sure. Evolutionary thinking must agree to both knowing and not knowing, at the same time. This is hard for the egoically bound self. It wants to fully know—now—which is never true anyway. - Richard Rohr