Merton on Self-understanding

Today I was pondering this quote from Merton with some pastor colleagues. It’s a very pointed comment about our need to grow in self-awareness and for ongoing spiritual formation. I don’t have the source for the quote, but came to it through Ruth Haley Barton’s eReflections.

If you attempt to act and do for others or for the world without deepening your own self-understanding, freedom, integrity and capacity to love, you will not have anything to give others. You will communicate to them nothing but the contagion of your own obsessions, your aggressivity, your ambitions, your delusions and ends and means… -Thomas Merton