A Year With Thomas Merton - January 27

The Necessity of Adoration

"Nothing is more necessary than to adore the living God," says the Rule for Recluses. It seems a platitude--really it is a deep, mysterious, unfathomable, living need--an imperative for one's whole life, a demand that is often forgotten and not met. I am in solitude precisely to confront this demand and other like it (in Zen terms, for example). I recognize I do not cope with the others really. Yet I must keep on with it, however much I fumble around. No one else can tell me what to do now: I have to try to find out for myself (of course people will come at the right time with the right word--books, too--but I have no one to rely on. This is my life and I don't pretend to understand it. Only, the mere playing of a role would be intolerable and mere living is also not enough, although at times it seems to resolve itself into that. There is living and then there is living.

January 15, 1966, VI.7