Photo by Issam Hammoudi on Unsplash
Why should I want to be rich when you were poor?
Why should I desire the be famous and powerful?
Why should I cherish in my heart a hope that devours me
– the hope for perfect happiness in this life –
when such hope, doomed to frustration,
is nothing but despair?
My hope is in what the eye has never seen.
Therefore, let me not trust in visible rewards.
My hope is in what the heart cannot 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.
Death will loosen my grasp and my vain hope will be gone.
Thomas Merton,1915 – 1968, American Catholic writer and Trappist monk
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But, as it is written,
“What no eye has seen, nor ear heard,
nor the heart of man imagined,
what God has prepared for those who love him”—
these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit.
For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God.