Sincerity

It is still a lost cause for me finding even just one book by Thomas Merton. My friend Grace suggested that I go to the UST Library but I told her that I want to have a copy of my own. His most famous works like The Seven Storey Mountain, No Man is an Island, Thoughts in Solitude and some of his famous selected poems are still in my Wish list until now.I was arranging some of my old collections of quotations and my college journal when I found this inserted in one of my notebooks, writings of Thomas Merton which I have typed some thirty years ago. I cannot remember now which one of his works I got this from but I want to share it with you.

Thomas Merton is a Trappist monk and is one of the most influential Catholic authors of the 20th century.

SINCERITY (Thomas Merton)

We make ourselves real by telling the truth. We cannot know truth unless we ourselves are conformed to it. We must be true inside, true to ourselves, before we can know that which is outside us. But we make ourselves true inside by manifesting the truth as we see it.

Sincerity in the fullest sense must be more than a temperamental disposition to be frank. It is simplicity of spirit which is preserved by the will to be true. Sincerity in the fullest sense is a divine gift, a clarity of spirit which comes only with grace. the sincere man therefore, is one who has the grace to know that he may be instinctively insincere, and that even his natural sincerity may become a camouflage for irresponsibility and moral cowardice; as if it were enough to recognize the truth, and do nothing about it.

Your idea of me is fabricated with materials you have borrowed from other people and from yourself. What you think of me depends on what you think of yourself. Perhaps you create your idea of me out of material that you would like to eliminate from your own idea of yourself. Perhaps your idea of me is a reflection of what other people think of you. Or perhaps what you think of me is simply what you think I think of you.

It takes more courage than we imagine to be perfectly simple with other men. Our frankness is often spoiled by a hidden barbarity, born of fear.

In the end, the problem of sincerity is a problem of love. A sincere man is not so much one who sees the truth and manifests it as he sees it, but one who loves the truth with a pure love. But truth is more than an abstraction. It lives and is embodied in men and things that are real. And the secret of sincerity is, therefore not to be sought in a philosophical love for abstract truth but in a love for real people and real things – a love for God apprehended in the reality around us.

Advertisement