A Year With Thomas Merton - November 12

The Coming Kingdom

Have mercy on our blindness and our poverty.

Our inability to grasp the infinite riches of God's mercy and His Kingdom. Immense sorrow for those who seek to alleviate man's misery by an earthly parody of the Kingdom. The vicious lie of communist messianism, which can still appeal to the hearts of so many great men. Pablo Neruda--wonderful poet--his faith in that lie breaks my heart. He and his poetry will, of course, be destroyed by what he has chosen to serve, for there is really in him nothing in common with Stalinism.

Inability above all of Christians, of priests, to realize the objective immensity and power of the Kingdom that is established, in mystery, and of the great unknown liturgy that goes up to God from the darkness of the world in which the Kingdom is denied. Its citizens perhaps do not even know for sure of what Kingdom they are citizens, yet they suffer for God, and the Word triumphs in them, and through them man will once again be, in Christ, the perfect ikon of God. (Man is, already, in Christ, that ikon, but even we, who should know it best and be overwhelmed by it, are constantly forgetting."

Subjective faith, personal spontaneity, ascetic goodwill, devotion to duty--these are not enough. Yet they, too, are necessary. But they are only the beginning.

A Year With Thomas Merton - August 3

The “Way of Perfection” Is to Follow Christ

1. Is it true and salutary to say, as some spiritual writers say, that God is our end but that, in order to attain to our end, we must first attain perfection, so that, in practice, our aim is perfection?

2. And is it true, then, that perfection is attained only by a simple-minded concern for “spiritual things” seen as deeply marked off and separate from “temporal things”?

3. And then, are we to look at these “spiritual things” as, in reality, a set of practices which are (allowing, of course, for grace) sure means of attaining to possession of God?

4. This being so, should we then apply ourselves very industriously to the use of these means in order to attain to perfection very quickly and thus gain possession of God?

All of these statements may be perfectly true, though 3 and 4 lend themselves to dangerous misunderstanding, and the other two are already open to much misapprehension. But after all—supposing each of these statements were faultless—the spiritual life would still be something quite different from that!

For we are perfect when we find God or, when God gains possession of us. And, in a sense, from the moment we seek Him, He has already found us. And from the moment He has found us, all that is blessed by His will becomes “spiritual,” even though it may be a material thing like eating.

In the end what does the Gospel say? To follow Christ. This is the spiritual life and the way of perfection.

August 28, 1956, III.74

A Year With Thomas Merton - July 24

Hating No One

I am reading Karl Rahner’s essays on grace—at least those available in translation, and I do not have time to struggle with the German. They seem clear and obvious. I sometimes wonder why Rahner is considered so dangerous. Perhaps because he is too clear and not involved in the technical mumbo jumbo that makes others unreadable. In a word: a readable theologian is dangerous.

How true it is that the great obligation of the Christian, especially now, is to prove himself a disciple of Christ by hating no one, that is to say, by condemning no one, rejecting no one. And how true that the impatience that fumes at others and damns them (especially whole classes, races, nations) is a sign of the weakness that is still unliberated, still not tracked by the Blood of Christ, and is still a stranger to the Cross.

July 22, 1963, IV.342