My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going.

I do not see the road ahead of me.

I cannot know for certain where it will end.

Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean I am actually doing so.

But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.

And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it.

Therefore I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

~ Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude, Part 2, Chapter 2

This prayer, commonly referred to as The Merton Prayer is referenced by Posse Comitatus the finale of Season 3 of The West Wing where Leo makes an off-hand comment asking who the monk was who said “I don’t always know the right thing to do, Lord, but I think the fact that I want to please you, pleases you.” (The scene begins around 35 minutes into the episode on the DVD.)

Leo didn’t get the word precisely right, but he nailed the spirit and the heart of the prayer.

This might be the best and truest prayer ever uttered by Man. Or maybe it’s just one which speaks to me especially strongly.

I used to have a copy of it printed out and hung on my wall. I realized tonight that I don’t, and I should, so I turned it into a PDF formatted in the way that I liked it, suitable for printing. I post it here in case you want to print it out too.

Elsewhere

• Merton Institute
• Thomas Merton at Wikipedia
• Merton Center

In the third season, episode 16 “The U.S. Poet Laureate” there is a sub-story about a “fan site” devoted to Josh Lyman called “LemonLyman.com”.

In it Josh falls prey to one of the most sinister traps on all the Internet, summarized brilliantly here in XKCD #386:

Unfortunately for Josh he doesn’t seem to realize the futility of this, and (even worse) ignores the sage advice of the lovely and smarter Donna, who tries repeatedly to warn him.

Enough preamble. Here’s the clip (7min 32sec, about 12.5mb):

Some highlights (note that the times are of the clip above, not from the actual episode):

Starting at 1:33:

Josh: Sit down, we’re going to post a response on the site.
Donna: What site?
Josh: Lemon-
Donna: No.
Josh: Yeah, we gotta post a response to someone.
Donna: It’s a bad idea.
Josh: Why?
Donna: You don’t know these people.
Josh: Neither do you.
Donna: Yes I do.
Josh: What’s wrong with them?
Donna: Nobody knows.

3:00 Donna: [After typing the response Josh insists on sending] What Josh doesn’t know is that some of these people haven’t taken their medication. Let’s watch what happens now.

3:18 Josh: Donna… something weird is happened here.
Donna: What?
Josh: Lemon-
Donna: No…
Josh: They don’t seem to have taken my response in the spirit it was intended.
Donna: Yeah
Josh: Seems to be a very unusual social structure…for instance, there’s a leader who seems to pride herself on her organizational skills and a certain amount of discipline…
Donna: Right, that’s what’s called a “control freak”.
Josh: She does seem to do an awful lot of scolding: “You posted in the wrong place… Stay on topic, people… Don’t use capital letters… I don’t have time to tell you twice” when clearly she does have time to tell us twice.

4:58
Josh: (dictating) “… and I believe I’ll use capital, lowercase, or san-skrit right up until the moment that the ‘font police’ cuff me and read me Miranda.”
Donna: That’ll show ‘em.
Josh: I think these are good people by and large, but they’ve come under the thumb of a dictatorial ruler, so as with a small central american country, my role is to incite the people to topple her.

5:28
Josh: The internet people are going crazy…
Donna: (mockingly incredulous) You’re kidding!
…
Josh: … a page and a half of posts debating whether or not I was mocking Egyptians with the san-skrit reference.
Donna: I told you they were hysterical.
Josh: I thought you meant they were funny.
Donna: They’re not!
Josh: I know they’re not! It’s Lord of the Flies in there!

(Around 6:06 C.J. comes onto the scene.)

6:40
CJ: The people on these sites, they’re the cast of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Brilliant. And just as accurate now as it was six years ago when it first aired. Maybe even more.

ps: “LemonLyman.com” is not a real website, by the way. It simple redirects to Warner Brothers website.