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.
What this generation was bred to at television's knees was not wisdom, but cynicism.
Faith is not a refuge from reality. It is a demand that we face reality ... The true subject matter of religion is not our own little souls, but the Eternal God and His whole mysterious purpose, and our solemn responsibility to Him.
I found him well educated, with unusual powers of mind, but infected with misanthropy, and subject to perverse moods of alternate enthusiasm and melancholy.
The enduring lesson is war is a disaster. Whoever wins, tremendous loss of life, property - a set back for civilisation.
I see with greater and greater clearness that consistent Christianity is the easiest Christianity to defend
If I were going to begin practicing the presence of God for the first time today, it would help to begin by admitting the three most terrible truths of our existence: that we are so ruined, and so loved, and in charge of so little.
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