Quote from Merton & Sufism: The Untold Story

Merton and Sufism: The Untold Story -- a complete compendium

Edited by Rob Baker and Gray Henry

Fons Vitae, Louisville, Kentucky    © 1999   343 pp. 

"On the heart of Poverty three renouncements are inscribed: Quit this world, quit the next world, and quit quitting."    -- Unattributed Quote from Merton's reading notebooks


"Each thing hath two faces, a face of its own, and a face of its Lord; in respect of its own face it is nothingness, and in respect of the Face of God it is Being. Thus there is nothing in existence save only God and His face, for everything perisheth but His Face, always and forever."  --Al Ghazali (d. 1111)  -- passage underlined by Thomas Merton


"If you have seen a lover of God you have seen a very wonderful thing--of one grief not settling in the earth but like a wild bird whose delight in solitude has kept him from rest, while he yearns in remembrance of the Beloved, and his food is love in hunger and his drink is love in thirst and his sleep is the thought of union and his waking hours mean no neglect. . . . At last through love (shawq) and long service he attains to the degree of all-absorbing love, then his tranquility returns and his fire dies down and its sparks are quenched and his grief decreases and he becomes one with the object of his longing."  -- Bayda bint al-Mufaddal  (a woman saint of Damascus (c. twelfth century)  -- From Thomas Merton's reading notebooks    p. 141

--submitted by Jennifer Knight

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