Take Whatever Helps: Be free
To the truly humble (person) the ordinary ways and customs and habits of (people) are not a matter for conflict… To make conformity or nonconformity with others in these accidents a matter of life and death is to fill your interior life with confusion and noise. Ignoring all this as indifferent, the humble (person) takes whatever there is in the world that helps them to find God and leaves the rest aside. Thomas Merton
What keeps me from being free?
Clever mind sticky gods maker
master of nature conspicuous creator
of concepts forged in caustic steel
fabricates customs pretends they’re real
But I refuse to cut and cube
creation into confused groups
succumb to separating spiels
shouting Shangri-la ideals
I much prefer indifference
from bondage taste deliverance
rather than hobbled to blue-sky
I choose to die before I die
Poem by Debra Asis If you appreciate this please stay on the site for 30+ seconds and clap! Thank you.
Thomas Merton’s above quote is found in today’s selection in An Ignatian Book of Days by James Martin, SJ, a series of daily reflections from the Spiritual Wisdom of St. Ignatius of Loyola. Throughout the book we hear the voices of St. Ignatius as well as many great thinkers and writers, long gone and present day, each uniquely revealing the way of finding God in all things.And that is my intention; to find God/Divine Presence/Ultimate Reality in whatever presents itself to me each day in 2024.
Each day I read, reflect and write on the selection, hoping to articulate the ways in which I come to know God/Divine Presence/Ultimate Reality via personal experience, impelled by the leading of my inner life.
INVITATION
Would you like to join me? The book is accessible on Amazon. Let me know in the comments to this post and sign up to get an email whenever I post. I would love to read your reflections too, public or private messages welcome!
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Learn more about me at
https://www.debraasis.org
All words are generated by grace and the grit of a real human being,
Debra Asis
