Grasping

Today's Daily Dig from Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain was spot on:

If what most people take for granted were really true—if all you needed to be happy was to grab everything and see everything and investigate every experience and then talk about it, I should have been a very happy person, a spiritual millionaire, from the cradle even until now…What a strange thing! In filling myself, I had emptied myself. In grasping things, I had lost everything. In devouring pleasures and joys, I had found distress and anguish and fear.

And from Eugene Peterson's new book, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology,

Only when we do the Jesus truth in the Jesus way do we get the Jesus life. (p. 334)

P.S. I was prompted to buy (from my local bookshop) Christ Plays... after reading this review by a book seller recommended on a site I read to make sure I get an occasional dose of (neo)Calvinism, Gideon Strauss.