“At the centre of our being,” wrote Thomas Merton in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, “is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will.”

In the Catholic tradition, we have many words, beautiful sacraments, transformative music, transcendent spaces. We have a lot of things we do. But I’m struck by how much the religion of my birth and of my current practice is struggling to teach me the basics, the most fundamental dimensions, of who we are!

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