Recently I logged on to Facebook to find this lovely meme from Thomas Merton:
“If the you of five years ago doesn’t consider the you of today a heretic, you are not growing spiritually.”
It’s a great sentiment, but my malarkey radar went off at the attribution to Merton.
This language of “growing spiritually” is awfully modern for someone who died half a century ago and dedicated his adult life to a religious tradition that he believed contained, at its foundations, an unchanging truth.
And, sure enough, it’s not from Merton. People who have searched through his actual writings haven’t been able to find it.
My own (admittedly lazier) search using Google Books also turned up nothing authentic.
There are plenty more where this came from: quotes that have circulated ad infinitum on social media but can’t be traced to the famous religious figure who allegedly said them. Here are some popular ones.
The Prayer of St. Francis?
I was crushed to find out the famous prayer “Lord make me an instrument of your peace,” is not actually from St. Francis.
This is one of the only prayers I have memorized — thank you, Sarah McLachlan and Buffy — and it was read at my wedding. I love this prayer.
But it’s an early-20th-century French prayer that somehow got stuck on the back of an image of St. Francis, and much like a modern-day meme tends to forever cement a connection between words and pictures, the association was born.
By World War II, people were calling it the Prayer of St. Francis, and we’ve never looked back.
“Be the change”
Since I used this quote in at least two speeches before I found out that Mahatma Gandhi never said it, I’m now officially part of the problem. I’m wicked sorry. Continue reading
- Jana Reiss is a senior columnist at Religion News Service where the above article was first published.
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