Redeeming How We Talk by Ken Wytsma

Author:Ken Wytsma
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Moody Publishers
Published: 2018-06-14T04:00:00+00:00

Solitude and Godly Conversation

The Trappist monk Thomas Merton once wrote, “We cannot be at peace with others because we are not at peace with ourselves, and we cannot be at peace with ourselves because we are not at peace with God.”1 What Merton helps us understand is that our relationships are, by and large, reflections of our relationship with God. They flow from one heart. If we are not at peace with God in our hearts and minds, then it will be incredibly challenging to be at peace with people in our lives.

For example, we’ve all walked away from a party and felt as though, somehow, despite our best intentions, our interactions that evening were more marked by our insecurities and loneliness than by our sense of security and desire to have encouraged or shaped those in attendance.

Why does this happen to us?

We are in exile. Ronald Rolheiser describes this well:

All of us live our lives in exile. We live in our separate riddles, partially separated from God, each other, and even from ourselves. We experience some love, some community, some peace, but never these in their fullness. Our senses, egocentricity, and human nature place a veil between us and full love, full community, and full peace. We live, truly, as in a riddle: The God who is omnipresent cannot be sensed; others, who are as real as ourselves, are always partially distanced and unreal; and we are, in the end, fundamentally a mystery even to ourselves.2

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