A Year With Thomas Merton - January 24

Moments of Angelic Lucidity

I went down to the spring that feeds the stream running through Edelin's pasture. Wonderful clear water pouring strongly out of a cleft in the mossy rock. I drank from it in my cupped hands and suddenly realized it was years, perhaps twenty-five or thirty years since I had tasted such water, no chemicals!! I looked up at the clear sky and the tops of the leafless trees shining in the sun: it was a moment of angelic lucidity. Said Tierce with great joy, overflowing joy, as if the land and woods and spring were all praising God through me. The sense of angelic transparency of everything, and of pure, simple, and total light. The word that comes closest to pointing to it is simple. It was all simple. But a simplicity to which one seems to aspire, only seldom to attain. A simplicity, that is, that has and says everything just because it is simple.

January 6, 1965, V.187