Letter to a Young Activist

This was written by Thomas Merton. I received it from a friend and it has inspired me for future work, even if I am not doing much of anything right now here in Italy =) Steve, especially thought of you for this one. Looking forward to seeing you all soon.

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 the 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 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, nauseate by ideals 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, no one is left in it. And then the temptation is, with no trace of meaning left, 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 hand 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 and 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 and identify in your work, out of you 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 on this more, and gradually you will be free form the needs 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 our out your life in the service of a myth; and we can 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 someway we cannot see. If we can do God’s will, we will be helping in the process. But we will not necessarily know all about it beforehand… enough of this… at least it is a gesture… I will keep you in my prayers. All the best. In Christ, Tom