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The Seasoning of Dark Times
“The shadow embodies all the life which has not been allowed expression. It embodies all lost sensitivity, which denied, breaks through in sentimentality. It represents our creativity, which abandoned, locks us into ennui and enervation.”
~ James Hollis
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I speak as a Catholic priest. We still see the whole thing as a sort of abstract exercise in ethics, when we see it at all. We don’t see we are killing our own hope and the hope of the world.
The impression I always get in talking to Africans is that they have about ten times as much reality as we have. … I have found myself in my African and Asian and Indonesian brother because he has the part of humanity I lack. …
At the heart of the matter then is man’s contempt for truth, and the substitution of his “self” for reality. His image is his truth..
. What I will say is that I am glad I am not a Negro because I probably would never be able to take it: but that I recognize in conscience that I have a duty to try to make my fellow whites stop doing the things they do and see the problem in a different light.”
— Thomas Merton to James Baldwin, 1963.
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For them mankind — which they loved as much as we did — was a fully formed entity that had to be…
