Watts, Merton, Nakho, Wisdom On Love

The desert mystics’ primary quest was for God, for Love;
 everything else was secondary. 

Thomas Merton (1915–1968) helped modern Christianity recover an
 awareness of contemplative practice,
in part inspired by his reading of the Desert Fathers and Mothers. 

Merton wrote: 

“All through the Verba Seniorum [Latin for Words of the Elders] we find a repeated insistence on the primacy of love over everything else in the spiritual life: over knowledge, gnosis, asceticism, contemplation, solitude, prayer. Love in fact is the spiritual life, and without it all the other exercises of the spirit, however lofty, are emptied of content and become mere illusions. The more lofty they are, the more dangerous the illusion.” [1]

The Desert Fathers and Mothers focused on these
primary practices in their search for God:

1) leaving, to some extent, the systems of the world;

2) a degree of solitude to break from the maddening crowd; 

3) times of silence to break from the maddening mind; and 

4) “technologies” for controlling the compulsivity of mind and the emotions. 

All of this was for the sake of 
growing a person capable
 of love and community. 

Contemplation became a solid foundation for building 

a civilisation and human community

not just in the wilderness centuries ago but in the world today. 

Contemplative consciousness labels things less easily and 

does not attach itself to one solitary definitive meaning. 

In contemplation, one experiences all things as somehow created 

in the image of God 

and therefore of equal dignity and deserving of respect.

Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.

Love is our true destiny. 

We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone - 

we find it with another.

Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance, 

order, rhythm and harmony.

Pride makes us artificial and humility makes us real.

Every moment and every event of every man's life on earth 

plants something in his soul.

The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little.

Perhaps I am stronger than I think.

When ambition ends, happiness begins.

We are not at peace with others because we are not at peace with ourselves, 

and we are not at peace with ourselves because we are not at peace with God.

We are already one. 

But we imagine that we are not. 

And what we have to recover is our original unity. 

What we have to be is what we are.