Ideas and words, writes Thomas Merton, are not the food of intelligence, but truth.

And not an abstract truth that feeds the mind alone. The Truth that a spiritual man seeks is the whole Truth, reality, existence and essence together, something that can be embraced and loved, something that can sustain the homage and the service of our actions: more than a thing: persons, or a Person.

Reading, he says, ought to be an homage to the God of all truth. We open our hearts to words that reflect reality. Reading is also an act of humility and reverence towards other men. Books can speak to us like God, like men, or like the noise of the world we live in.

For me, truth is an individual thing, not a group, political party, ideology or mob thing, not a thing of the left or the right, they do not own all the good or just ideas of the world, in fact, they seem to have very few good or just ideas for the world. Thinking does not come from the exterior world, but the interior world.

The challenge for me in our somethings unthinkingly connected world is to find time to think at all, to keep my head available to think in world where friendship means the flick of a keyboard on a computer.

Ideas, books, thoughts are no substitute for people, they are instead a way of connecting with other people who think, who offer their own view of humanity. Increasingly, we don’t connect to one another through books but through disjointed and ill-considered messages. Messages are different than thoughts.