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Why the Master Will Wait on Us

  • THOMAS MERTON

The Lord would not only love his creation as a Father, but he would enter into his creation, emptying himself, hiding himself, as if he were not God but a creature.


christthomasWhy should he do this?  Because he loved his creatures, and because he could not bear that his creatures should merely adore him as distant, remote, transcendent, and all-powerful.  This was not the glory that he sought, for if he were merely adored as great, his creatures would in their turn make themselves great and lord it over one another.  For where there is a great God, then there are also god-like men, who make themselves kings and masters.  And if God were merely a great artist who took pride in his creation, then men too would build cities and palaces and exploit other men for their own glory....

So God became man.  He took on the weakness and ordinariness of man, and he hid himself, becoming an anonymous and unimportant man in a very unimportant place.  And he refused at any time to lord it over men, or to be a king, or to be a leader, or to be a reformer, or to be in any way superior to his own creatures.  He would be nothing else but their brother, and their counsellor, and their servant, and their friend.

He was in no accepted human sense an important person, though since that time we have made him The Most Important Person.  That is another matter for though it is quite true that he is the King and Lord of all, the conqueror of death, the judge of the living and of the dead, the Pantokrator, yet he is also still the Son of Man, the hidden one, unknown, unremarkable, vulnerable.  He can be killed.  And when the Son of Man was put to death, he rose again from the dead, and was again with us, for he said: "Kill me, it does not matter."

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Acknowledgement

merton Father Thomas Merton "Why the Master Will Wait on Us."  from New Seeds of Contemplation (New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1961).

Copyright 1961 by The Abbey of Gethsemani, Inc. Used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

The Author

merton merton1Thomas Merton (1915-1968) was a Trappist monk of the Abbey of Gethsemani, Kentucky. He is the author of over 70 books including The Seven Storey Mountain, New Seeds of Contemplation, and Wisdom of the Desert.  

Copyright © 1961 The Abbey of Gethsemani, Inc.