Ascetic Wisdom

The
contemplative life
must not be construed
as an escape
from social responsibility
and from the life of sense,
but rather,
as a confrontation
with poverty and the void,
a renunciation of the empirical self,
in the presence of death,
and nothingness,
in order to overcome
the ignorance and error
that spring from the
fear
of being nothing.

Thomas Merton
(1915-1968)