[CAA: I thought this could be retitled "Letter to a USENET Activist".]

Letter to a Young Activist
by Thomas Merton

	Do not depend on the hope of results.  When you are doing the
sort of work you have taken on ... you may have to face the fact that
your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at
all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect.  As you get
used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the
results but the value, the truth of the work itself.  And there, too,
a great deal has to be gone through as gradually you struggle less and
less for an idea and more and more for specific people.  The range
tends to narrow down but it gets much more real in the end; it is the
reality of personal relationships that saves everything.
[...]

[A short selection from a chapter by Jim Forest in _Thomas Merton,
Prophet in the Belly of a Paradox_.  New York: Paulist Press.]
