Thomas Merton on The World

One of Thomas Merton’s continual but fruitful struggles was with how to approach, understand, and relate to, “world”. It’s a struggle I know well and have found demanding a constant and delicate attentiveness, and is one of the major reasons Merton has always been such an important voice for me. Here he cuts perfectly to the heart of the matter:

“In the hospital, life is covered over with a kind of organized ugliness for which no one is responsible: it is in large part the ugliness of sickness and suffering which the hospital attempts to alleviate. But under this drab and routine front, there is a great deal of human goodness and beauty, a deep fund of richness and generosity in the nurses, the doctors, the nuns, and all the people who work here. I think the question of ‘turning to the world’ is in fact a question of being patient with the unprepossessing surface of it, in order to break through to the deep goodness that is underneath. But to my way of thinking, 'the world’ is precisely the dehumanized surface. What is under the surface, and often stifled and destroyed, is more than 'the world’: it is the spirit and likeness of God in men. Much of the ambiguity in talk about the world–especially mine–is that everyone tends to be quite selective about the elements he admits into his concept of 'the world.’ My particular concept focuses on the sham, the unreality, the alienation, the forced systematization of life, and not on the human reality that is alienated and suppressed. This has to be made clear." 

—Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander