Merton, my bff.

I’ve been reading a bit recently and two books and one journal: How To Do Nothing; Writing Creativity and Soul; and Presence, all mention Thomas Merton. Now Merton was not my friend, I wish he was, but he died before I was born. His definition of spiritual direction is the best I’ve seen, “The whole purpose of spiritual direction is to penetrate beneath the surface of a person’s life, to get behind the facade of conventional gestures and attitudes which one presents to the world, and to bring out one’s inner spiritual freedom, one’s inmost truth, which is what Christians call the likeness of Christ in one’s soul.”