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Quotes About Redemption

There had always been people who had willingly entered into illness and madness in order to win knowledge for mankind--and knowledge, having been wrested from madness, became health and, once obtained by heroic sacrifice. its possession and use were no longer conditioned by illness and madness. That was the true death on the cross.
~ Thomas Mann
Very well can love come out of evil, and out of disorder something ordered for the best.
~ Thomas Mann
If I can contradict you at all, if I can defend your own profession a little against you, it is not by saying anything new, but simply by reminding you of some things you very well know yourself: of the purifying and healing influence of letters, the subduing of the passions by knowledge and eloquence; literature as the guide to understanding, forgiveness, and love, the redeeming power of the word, literary art as the noblest manifestation of the human mind...
~ Thomas Mann
God help our darkened and desecrated country and teach it to make its peace with the world and with itself!
~ Thomas Mann
The Lord did not create suffering. Pain and death came into the world with the fall of man. But after man had chosen suffering in preference to the joys of union with God, the Lord turned suffering itself into a way by which man could come to the perfect knowledge of God.
~ Thomas Merton
it is of the very essence of Christianity to face suffering and death not because they are good, not because they have meaning, but because the resurrection of Jesus has robbed them of their meaning.
~ Thomas Merton
This is the crucifixion of Christ: in which He dies again and again in the individuals who were made to share the joy and freedom of His grace, and who deny Him.
~ Thomas Merton
God has left sin in the world in order that there may be forgiveness: not only the secret forgiveness by which He Himself cleanses our souls, but the manifest forgiveness by which we have mercy on one another and so give expression to the fact that He is living, by His mercy, in our own hearts.
~ Thomas Merton
To know the Cross is not merely to know our own sufferings. For the Cross is the sign of salvation, and no man is saved by his own sufferings. To know the Cross is to know that we are saved by the sufferings of Christ; more, it is to know the love of Christ Who underwent suffering and death in order to save us. It is, then, to know Christ.
~ Thomas Merton
Show us your Christ, Lady, after this our exile, yes: but show Him to us also now, show Him to us here, while we are still wanderers.
~ Thomas Merton
And yet with every wound You robbed me of a crime, And as each blow was paid with Blood, You paid me also each great sin with greater graces. For even as I killed You, You made Yourself a greater thief than any in Your company, Stealing my sins into Your dying life, Robbing me even of my death.
~ Thomas Merton
When sin becomes bitter, then Christ becomes sweet.
~ Thomas Merton
Hope deprives us of everything that is not God, in order that all things may serve their true purpose as means to bring us to God.
~ Thomas Merton
Why did Christ become Man if not to save men by uniting them mystically with God through His own Sacred Humanity?
~ Thomas Merton
The Mass is a memorial of Christ's sacrifice, not in the sense of an exterior commemoration, but as a living and supremely efficacious re-presentation of that sacrifice, pouring out into our hearts the redemptive power of the Cross and the grace of the resurrection, which enables us to live in God.
~ Thomas Merton
The beasts and the trees will one day share with us a new creation and we will see them as God sees them and know that they are very good. Meanwhile, if we embrace them for themselves, we discover both them and ourselves as evil. This is the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil—disgust with the things we have misused and hatred of ourselves for misusing them.
~ Thomas Merton
Good Shepherd, You have a wild and crazy sheep in love with thorns and brambles. But please don't get tired of looking for me! I know You won't. For You have found me. All I have to do is stay found.
~ Thomas Merton
Everything that happens to the poor, the meek, the desolate, the mourners, the despised, happens to Christ.
~ Thomas Merton
Is the basic teaching of Buddhism—on ignorance, deliverance and enlightenment—really life-denying, or is it rather the same kind of life-affirming liberation that we find in the Good News of Redemption, the Gift of the Spirit, and the New Creation?
~ Thomas Merton
Father, I love You Whom I do not know, and I embrace You Whom I do not see, and I abandon myself to You Whom I have offended because You love in me Your only begotten Son. You see Him in me, You embrace Him in me, because He has willed to identify Himself completely with me by that love which brought Him to death, for me, on the Cross.
~ Thomas Merton
But I think St. Peter and the twelve Apostles would have been rather surprised at the concept that Christ had been scourged and beaten by soldiers, cursed and crowned with thorns and subjected to unutterable contempt and finally nailed to the Cross and left to bleed to death in order that we might all become gentlemen.
~ Thomas Merton
I will give them a heart to understand that I am Yahweh, and they shall be my people and I will be their God when they return to me with all their heart. —JEREMIAH 24:7
~ Thomas Merton
It is only when we have lost all love of our selves for our own sakes that our past sins cease to give us any cause for suffering or for the anguish of shame. For the saints, when they remember their sins, do not remember the sins but the mercy of God, and therefore even past evil is turned by them into a present cause of joy and serves to glorify God.
~ Thomas Merton
Once you have grace, I said to him, you are free. Without it, you cannot help doing the things you know you should not do, and that you know you don't really want to do.
~ Thomas Merton