I’ve never heard of Thomas Merton, but I’m gonna learn more.

Thomas Merton is considered by many to have been the most significant spiritual writer of the 20th Century… (h)e wrote prolifically while in the Monastery, a great deal at the direction of his superiors who recognized his gift. As he grew, he became a rather controversial figure in the Catholic Church of his day, dabbling in Zen Bhuddism as well as the Peace movement of the Sixties.

One afternoon after having finished a lecture on Marxism and Monasticism, he retired to his room, took a shower, and was reportedly electrocuted to death by a lamp with faulty wiring – on December 10th – 1968, at the age of 53.

“Is Christian ethics merely a specific set of Christian answers to the question of good and evil, right and wrong? To make it no more than this is to forget that man’s fall was a fall into the knowledge of good and evil, reinforced by the inexorable knowledge of a condemning law, and that man’s restoration in Christ is a restoration to freedom and grace, to a love that needs no law since it knows and does only what is in accord with love and with God. To imprison ethics in the realm of division, of good and evil, right and wrong, is to condemn it to sterility, and rob it of its real reason for existing, which is love. Love cannot be reduced to one virtue among many others prescribed by ethical imperatives. When love is only ‘a virtue’ among many, man forgets that ‘God is love’ and becomes incapable of that all-embracing love by which we secretly begin to know God as our Creator and Redeemer – who has saved us from the limitations of a purely restrictive and aimless existence ‘under a law’.”