Quote of the Day

Life consists in learning to live on one's own, spontaneous, freewheeling: to do this one must recognize what is one's own – be familiar and at home with oneself. This means basically learning who one is, and learning what one has to offer to the contemporary world, and then learning how to make that offering valid.

. . . The world is made up of people fully alive in it: that is, of people who can be themselves in it and can enter into a living and fruitful relationship with each other in it. The world is, therefore, more real in proportion as the people in it are able to be more fully and more humanly alive: that is to say, better able to make a lucid and conscious use of their freedom. Basically, this freedom must consist first of all in the capacity to choose their own lives, to find themselves on the deepest possible level.

– Thomas Merton (1915-1968)
Excerpted from "Learning to Live"
in Love and Living (1979)

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Daniel Helminiak on the Lesson of Jesus: "We Will Be True to God by Being True to Our Deepest and Best Selves"
• The Challenge to Become Ourselves
• David Whyte: "To Be Courageous is to Stay Close to the Way We Are Made"
• LGBT Catholics Celebrate Being "Wonderfully Made"
• The Gifts of Homosexuality
• The Many Forms of Courage
• The Many Manifestations of God's Loving Embrace

Image: Eric Saulitis.