A Year With Thomas Merton - December 29

Idolizing the Calendar

Incomparable richness of Ananda K. Coomaraswamy! His book on Hinduism and Buddhism. I am giving it a first reading, in which I do not expect to understand and appreciate everything.

One point--already familiar--driven home more: whatever is done naturally may be either sacred or profane, according to the degree of our awareness, but whatever is done unnaturally is essentially and irrevocably profane!

One of the great problems of monastic life here, today, with machines, noise, etc., and commercialism, is that the unnatural is taken for the supernatural. No concern at all for the natural or for natural process leads to perversion and degradation of the spiritual life.

End of 1960. The tree still decorated. The tinfoil bell, the cedar wreaths, the drying pine boughs, the colored lights. I was wondering at the beginning of morning meditation if it would be given me to see another twelve years--to come to New Year's, say 1973. The live to be fifty-seven or nearly fifty-eight. Can such an age be possible? What foolish perspectives we get onto, by believing in our calendars. As if numbers, good old numbers, faceless, voiceless, will surely be there with nothing to say.

What is likely to happen in twelve more years? Is the final war so feared and so expected that it cannot after all happen--as if what everyone expected was by that very fact excluded?

Is this inanity of man's world finally going to work itself out to its ultimate absurdity?

December 27 and 31, 1960, IV.80-81

A Year With Thomas Merton - November 1

Virgin Time

Marco Pallis on grace in Buddhism: "The word 'grace' corresponds to a whole dimension of spiritual experience; it is unthinkable that this should be absent from one of the great religions of the world.

"The function of grace...is to condition man's homecoming to the center itself...which provides the incentive to start on the Way and the energy to face and overcome its many and various obstacles. Likewise grace is the welcoming hand into the center when man finds himself at long last on the brink of the great divide where all familiar human landmarks have disappeared" ("Is There Room for 'Grace' in Buddhism?").

November 6, 1968, VII.260

The contemplative life must provide an area, a space of liberty, of silence, in which possibilities are allowed to surface and new choices--beyond routine choice--become manifest. It should create a new experience of time, not as stopgap, stillness, but as temps vierge--virginal time--not a blank to be filled or an untouched space to be conquered and violated, but a space which can enjoy its own potentiality and hopes--and its own presence to itself. One's own time. But not dominated by one's own ego and its demands. Hence, open to others--compassionate time, rooted in the sense of common illusion and in criticism of it.

November 7, 1968, VII.262