Today I received another quote from my Thomas Merton from my friend Jim Forest in Holland. Jim, an author of a book on Merton, Living with Wisdom has sent me lots of quotes form Thomas Merton but this one was different. It was found on the Harper’s Magazine web site accompanied by a painting from Winslow Homer. Also it was written by Thomas Merton in a letter to Jim Forest in 1966. But probably most important of all it was words that I needed to hear today.
The picture is on the side and here are the words under the title: “The Value of Essential Works.”
“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.”
–Thomas Merton, in a letter to Jim Forest dated February 21, 1966, reproduced in The Hidden Ground of Love: Letters by Thomas Merton (W. Shannon ed. 1993).
Why this quote was so timely is that events in my life have left me struggling to strike a balance between trusting and having faith and working hard for results. Some say to me that it is fine to have the right intentions and there are just things you cannot change. On the hand some say that only results count. Hard work without results is failure.
The quote helps me understand that we need to focus on the “value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself.” Otherwise said the means, the work, is just as important, if not more so, than the results or goal.
For example, it helps me understand why I felt so frustrated at a meeting tonight of a group of good people that has worked hard on peace and justice issues for many years. I felt really frustrated after the 2 ˝ hour meeting not because of the results or no results that were achieved, but by the fact that in all the time and words spent at the meeting there was no serious talk about issues or actions of peace and justice which the group is dedicated to. I realized I do not need results so much from groups as this as much as the group focusing on the “value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself.”
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