Continuing in accordance with biblical tradition, whenever the Trappist monk Thomas Merton uses ‘love’ in a spiritual way that the meaning is ‘agape,’ the word was changed to ‘agape’ in the following quotes from The Pocket Thomas Merton.
“To serve the God of agape one must be free, one must face the terrible responsibility of the decision to share agape in spite of all unworthiness whether in oneself or in one’s neighbor.
“Only agape can attain and preserve the good of all.
“My true identity lies hidden in God’s call to my freedom and my response to God. This means I must use my freedom in order to share agape, with full responsibility and authenticity, not merely receiving a form imposed on me by external forces, or forming my own life according to an approved social pattern but directing my agape to the personal reality of my brother, and embracing God’s will in its naked, often impenetrable mystery.
“If you live for others you will have an intimate personal knowledge of the agape that rises up in you out of a ground that lies beyond your own freedom and your own inclination.
“Agape alone can give us the power and the delicacy to love others without defiling their loneliness which is their need and their salvation.
“A theology of agape cannot afford to be sentimental. It cannot afford to preach edifying generalities about charity, while identifying ‘peace’ with mere established power and legalized violence against the oppressed. A theology of agape cannot be allowed merely to serve the interests of the rich and powerful, justifying their wars, their violence, and their bombs, while exhorting the poor and underprivileged to practice patience, weakness, long-suffering, and to solve their problems, if at all, nonviolently.
“The theology of agape must seek to deal realistically with the evil and injustice in the world and not merely to compromise with them.
“A theology of agape is a theology of resistance, a refusal of the evil that reduces a brother to homicidal desperation.
“We have more power at our disposal today than we have ever had, and yet we are more alienated and estranged from the inner ground of meaning and of agape than we have ever been.
“There can be no question that unless war is abolished the world will remain constantly in a state of madness and desperation in which, because of the immense destructive power of modern weapons, the danger of catastrophe will be imminent and probably at every moment everywhere. Unless we set ourselves immediately to this task, both as individuals and in our political and religious groups, we tend by our passivity and fatalism to cooperate with the destructive forces that are heading inexorably to war.
“Christians must become active in every possible way, mobilizing all their resources for the fight against war. Peace is to be preached, nonviolence is to be explained as a practical method, and not left to be mocked as an outlet for crackpots. Everything else is secondary, for the survival of the human race itself depends upon it.
“Christian nonviolence is not built on a presupposed division, but on the basic unity of humanity. It is not for the conversion of the wicked to the ideas of the good, but for the healing and reconciliation of all of us to ourselves, each the person, and all the human family.
FALSE SELF — “If we take our vulnerable shell to be our true identity, if we think our mask is our true face, we will protect it with fabrications even at the cost of violating our own truth. This seems to be the collective endeavor of society: the more busily men dedicate themselves to it, the more certainly it becomes a collective illusion, until in the end we have the enormous, obsessive, uncontrollable dynamic of fabrications designed to protect mere fictitious identities — ‘selves’ that is to say, regarded as objects; ‘selves’ that can stand back and see themselves having fun (an illusion which reassures them that they are real).
“The shallow ‘I’ of individualism can be possessed, developed, cultivated, and pandered to in order to feel satisfied: it is the center of all our strivings for gains and for satisfaction, whether material or spiritual. But the deep ‘I’ of the spirit, of solitude and of agape, cannot be ‘had,’ possessed, developed, or perfected. It can only be. This inner ‘I,’ who is always alone, is always universal: for in this most inmost ‘I’ my own solitude meets the solitude of every other human and the solitude of God.
“The only true joy on earth is to escape from the prison of our own false self, and enter by agape into union with the Life Who dwells and sings within the essence of every creature and in the core of our own souls. In God’s agape we possess all things and enjoy fruition of them, finding God in them all.
“There is one thing in life that has no limit to its value, one virtue that can be practiced without any need for moderation. And that is agape; the agape of God and the agape of others in God and for God’s sake. There is no point at which it becomes reasonable to abate your interior agape for God and for others, because it is an end in itself: it is the thing for which we were created and the only reason why we exist.”
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