Thomas Merton hermitage by Bryan Sherwood
My Lord, I have no hope but in Your Cross.
You, by Your humility, sufferings and death,
have delivered me from all vain hope.
You have killed the vanity of the present life in Yourself
and have given me all that is eternal in rising from the dead.
My hope is in what the eye has never seen.
Therefore let me not trust in visible rewards.
My hope is not in what the human can feel.
Therefore let me not trust in the feelings of my heart.
My hope is in what the hand has never touched.
Do not let me trust what I can grasp between my fingers,
because Death will loosen my grasp and my vain hope will be gone.
Let me trust in your mercy,
not in myself.
Let my hope be in Your love,
not in health or strength or ability or human resources.
If I trust You, everything else will become for me strength, health and support.
Everything will bring me to heaven.
If I do not trust You,
everything will be my destruction.
Thomas Merton, 1915 – 1968, American Catholic writer and Trappist monk
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We do, however, speak a message of wisdom among the mature, but not the wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing. No, we declare God’s wisdom, a mystery that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time began. None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. However, as it is written:
“What no eye has seen,
what no ear has heard,
and what no human mind has conceived”—
the things God has prepared for those who love him—
these are the things God has revealed to us by his Spirit.
The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God.
prayer & verse 
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