“We believe that success, as the world determines it, is not the criterion by which a movement should be judged. We must be prepared and ready to face seeming failure. The most important thing is that we adhere to these values which transcend time and for which we will be asked a personal accounting, not as to whether they succeeded (though we should hope that they do) but as to whether we remained true to them even though the whole world go otherwise.”

I received this quote today, about discouragement, from a friend who, at first, attributed it to Dorothy Day in “Catholic Worker Positions” by Dorothy Day, The Catholic Worker, May 1972. full text

However, he after wards wrote that he found this quote attributed to Dorothy Day, in an article published in the current issue of Tikkun: that quoted a “Catholic Worker Positions” article. Then he found out that it was not Dorothy who wrote Dorothy “Catholic Worker Positions,” though of course she agreed with them and approved their publication. The author might have been Bob Ludlow.

No matter who is the author it is truly the position that Dorothy took in life and a message I needed to hear today.

In the correction article my friend Jim Forest then when on to give similar advice he was given by Thomas Merton in a time of discouragement. I pass this advice on to you, if you face discouragement, like I do.

Advice to a Young Activist: a letter from Thomas Merton

“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 will do will come not from you but from the fact that you have allowed yourself, in the obedience of faith, to be used by 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 … .

The real hope, then, 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 …

Enough of this … it is at least a gesture … I will keep you in my prayers.

All the best, in Christ,

Tom”

[extract from a letter to Jim Forest dated February 21, 1966; the full text is published in The Hidden Ground of Love]

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