Our knowledge of God is perfected by gratiitude: we are thankful and rejoice in the experience of the truth that He is love.
Interpretation
Gratitude enhances our understanding of God as it connects us to His essence, which is love.
This quote by Thomas Merton emphasizes that our comprehension of God matures through the practice of gratitude. By acknowledging our thankfulness, we open ourselves to recognizing the divine nature of God as love, which enriches our spiritual experience and understanding of truth.
In practice
In a sermon about thankfulness, one might say, 'As Merton reminds us, our knowledge of God is perfected by gratitude.'
The devil is no fool. He can get people feeling about heaven the way they ought to feel about hell. He can make them fear the means of grace the way they do not fear sin. And he does so, not by light but by obscurity, not by realities but by shadows; not by clarity and substance, but by dreams and the creatures of psychosis. And men are so poor in intellect that a few cold chills down their spine will be enough to keep them from ever finding out the truth about anything.
Our vocation is not simply to be, but to work together with God in the creation of our own life, our own identity, our own destiny....To work out our identity in God.
Conscience is the light by which we interpret the will of God in our own lives.
You are made in the image of what you desire.
But if you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I think I am living for.
I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.
I looked upon a clock to find the truth. The hours were passing like ivory chess figures, striking piano notes, and the minutes raced on wires mounted like tin soldiers. Hours like tall ebony women with gongs between their legs, tolling continuously so that I could not count them. I heard the rolling of my heart-beats; I heard the footsteps of my dreams, and the beat of time was lost among them like the face of truth.
As America has grown less economically equal, a citizen's ability to move upward has fallen behind that of citizens in other Western democracies. We are no longer the country where anyone can become anything.
It's crazy; in the States, people think the black power movement drew inspiration from Africa. All these Americans come over here looking for awareness. They don't realize they're the ones who've got it over there.
What agent is there other than the Creator of the heavens and earth who can know whatever occurs in our heart, down to its most subtle and secret thoughts, and illuminate the future for us by establishing the Hereafter, saving us from the countless suffocating waves of the world?
Can I confess something? I tell you this as an artist, I think you'll understand. Sometimes when I'm driving on the road at night I see two headlights coming toward me. Fast. I have this sudden impulse to turn the wheel quickly, head-on into the oncoming car. I can anticipate the explosion. The sound of shattering glass. The flames rising out of the flowing gasoline.
Good nature will always supply the absence of beauty; but beauty cannot supply the absence of good nature.
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