“One of our great problems is to see clearly what we have to resist. I would say that at the moment we have to understand better than we do the cold-war mentality. If we do not understand it, we will run the risk of contributing to its confusions and thereby helping the enemies of man and of peace. The great danger is that under the pressures of anxiety and fear, the alternation of crisis and relaxation and new crisis, the people of the world will come to accept gradually the idea of war, the idea of submission to total power, and the abdication of reason, spirit and individual conscience. The great peril of the cold war is the progressive deadening of conscience.”
– Thomas Merton, The Hidden Ground of Love. (p. 325-6)
Perhaps these words of ring as true today as they did in 1962. May we guard against the deadening of our conscience by daily returning to the Divine Source of all Wisdom in the silence of contemplation.