With a Pure and Empty Heart
My great obligation is to obey God, and to seek His will carefully with a pure and empty heart. Not to try to impose my own order on my life but let God impose His. To serve His will and His order by realizing them in my own life. This means certainly a deep consent to all that is actually and manifestly His will for me.
After dinner--read the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus. Shattered by it. I do not know when I have read anything so stupendous and so completely contemporary. I felt like throwing away everything and reading nothing but Aeschylus for six months. Like discovering a mountain full of diamond mines. It is like Zen--like Dostoevsky--like existentialism--like Francis--like the New Testament. It is inconceivably rich. I consider this a great grace. A great religious experience. Prometheus, archetypal representation of the suffering Christ. But we must go deep into this. Prometheus startles us by being more fully Christ than the Lord of our own clichés--I mean, he is free from all the falsifications and limitations of our hackneyed vision which has slowly emptied itself of reality.
January 17 and 19, 1960, III.370
