“It is a tremendous grace, then, and a great privilege when a person living in the world we have to live in suddenly loses his interest in the things that absorb that world, and discovers in his own soul an appetite for poverty and solitude. And the most precious of all the gifts of nature or grace is the desire to be hidden and to vanish from the sight of men and be accounted as nothing by the world and to disappear from one’s own self-conscious consideration and vanish into nothingness in the immense poverty that is the adoration of God. This absolute emptiness, this poverty, this obscurity holds within it the secret of all joy because it is full of God.”
~ Thomas Merton
Bellshill: Central Parish Church of Scotland 