In this
letter to a friend, Thomas Merton addresses a frustration every person has
known, or will one day know: the sinking feeling that one's efforts (in
whatever arena they are) are not succeeding or - even worse - seem wholly
ineffective....
Do not
depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have
taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that
your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if
not perhaps results opposite to what you expect.
As you get
used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results
but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. And there too a
great deal has to be gone through, as gradually you struggle less and less for
an idea and more and more for specific people. The range tends to narrow down,
but it gets much more real. In the end, it is the reality of personal
relationships that saves everything.
You are fed
up with words, and I don't blame you. I am nauseated by them sometimes. I am
also, to tell the truth, nauseated by ideals and with causes. This sounds like
heresy, but I think you will understand what I mean.
It is so
easy to get engrossed with ideas and slogans and myths that in the end one is
left holding the bag, empty, with no trace of meaning left in it. And then the
temptation is to yell louder than ever in order to make the meaning be there
again by magic. Going through this kind of reaction helps you to guard against
this. Your system is complaining of too much verbalizing, and it is right...
The big
results are not in your hands or mine, but they suddenly happen, and we can
share in them; but there is no point in building our lives on this personal
satisfaction, which may be denied us and which after all is not that important.
The next
step in the process is for you to see that your own thinking about what you are
doing is crucially important. You are probably striving to build yourself an
identity in your work, out of your work and your witness. You are using it, so
to speak, to protect yourself against nothingness, annihilation. That is not
the right use of your work.
All the good
that you do will come not from you but from the fact that you have allowed
yourself, in the obedience of faith, to be used for God's love. Think of this
more and gradually you will be free from the need to prove yourself, and you
can be more open to the power that will work through you without your knowing
it.
The great
thing after all is to live, not to pour out your life in the service of a myth:
and we turn the best things into myths. If you can get free from the domination
of causes and just serve Christ's truth, you will be able to do more and will
be less crushed by the inevitable disappointments. Because I see nothing
whatever in sight but much disappointment, frustration, and confusion...
Our real
hope...is not in something we think we can do, but in God who is making
something good out of it in some way we cannot see. If we can do His will, we
will be helping in this process. But we will not necessarily know all about it
beforehand...
From a
letter, February 21, 1966
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