September 20, 2026

Too Much Privacy

Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self. This is the man that I want myself to be but who cannot exist, because God does not know anything about him. And to be unknown of God is altogether too much privacy.

Merton wrote this in 1961 as a Trappist monk at the Abbey of Gethsemani, revising an earlier book into what became his most widely read work on the contemplative life. He had spent two decades inside monastery walls, yet the deepest freedom he wrote about was not physical but psychological: escape from the mask we construct to be seen and approved of by others. That constructed self, he argued, is a kind of hiding, and hiding is the opposite of freedom. The line speaks directly to autonomy today, when so much of daily life is built around managing how we appear rather than living as we actually are.