#109 - Love and the Search for God: Thomas Merton on Rilke, Monastic versus Lay Living, and Finding God

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Indeed, the truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers the most: and his suffering comes to him from things so little and so trivial that one can say that it is no longer objective at all. It is his own existence, his own being, that is at once the subject and the source of his pain, and his very existence and consciousness is his greatest torture. This is another of the great perversions by which the devil uses our philosophies to turn our whole nature inside out, and eviscerate all our capacities for good, turning them against ourselves.

-Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain, 1948

The Rainer Maria Rilke text that Merton references is Letter Seven from "Letters to a Young Poet"

https://genius.com/Rainer-maria-rilke-letter-seven-annotated

Later Merton cites Rilke's "Book of Hours"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Hours

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Original Reference (Titled “Rilke and his search for God”) - https://merton.bellarmine.edu/s/Merton/page/AVnovices

Publication Date - February 2nd, 1966

Thomas Merton - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Merton