A Year With Thomas Merton - May 26

Lost in His Mercy

(Thomas Merton is ordained a priest on the Feast of the Ascension, May 26, 1949)

I was very happy to sing the Gospel—the magnificent triumph of Christ, which is echoed and expressed in the ordination to the priesthood of a thing like myself that He picked up out of the wreckage of the moral universe and brought into His house. It is He Who looks up to heaven, in my own soul full of weakness and infidelity, and cries out, “Father, the hour is come, glorify thy Son, that thy Son may glorify thee.” And the context reminds me to whom I belong: “As Thou hast given him power over all flesh, that he may give life everlasting to all whom Thou hast given him.” My joy is the great power of Christ. And for that, above all, I am glad of my deep moral poverty, which is always before me these days, but which does not obsess or upset me because it is all lost in His mercy.

May 26, 1949, II.316