A Year With Thomas Merton - March 28

Offering Christ Our Sorry World

The center of all spiritual life is Christ in His Mass, Christ our Pasch who is slain and "dies now no more" but "draws all things to Himself," that we who are baptized in His death, crucifying our flesh and its desires, may live His life with a life hidden in Christ in God. And the heart of all life is not merely the static presence of the Blessed Sacrament, although Christ is truly living in our tabernacles, but above all in the action of the Mass, which is the center of all contemplation, an action in which the Christian family is gathered around Christ and in which Christ in His Body glorifies His Father. A sacrament of living unity in which Love Who is God unites men to God and men to one another in Christ. When the Mass recovers its meaning, then devotion to the Blessed Sacrament reserved in the Tabernacle acquires its own true meaning and begins to live. Then the whole interior life is unified and vitalized and every department of it flows with life. In fact, "departments" and "sections" of one's life cease to exist in isolation and everything functions together.

I go to the altar offering Christ a sorry world to give to His Father in Thanksgiving, a world transformed into His own human life by our union with Him and His union with us in His Sacrifice and our Sacrifice which is His Pasch.

O God, give peace to your world. Give strength to the hearts of men. Raise us up from death in Christ. Give us to eat of His immortality and His glory. Give us to drink of the wine of His Kingdom.

March 25, 1948, II.191-92

A Year With Thomas Merton - March 25

Only One Is Your Teacher

The feast of Saint Thomas Aquinas, the Angelic Doctor, falls this year on the Tuesday of the Second Week in Lent. So there is a very striking coincidence in the liturgy: the Gospel of the feast speaks of the true Teachers, the salt of the earth, who "do and teach" and whose works shine before men. The Gospel for Tuesday in the Second Week of Lent speaks of the false teachers who have sat in the chair of Moses and have not done the works of Moses, that is, they have not kept the laws they talked about. Yet they have done works that have been dazzling in the eyes of men and have done them in order to shine before men, to have the first places in the synagogues and to be called Rabbi. The theme of both the feast and the ferial day is summed up in the line Unus est Magister vester, Christus: "Only one is your Teacher, Christ." It is Jesus Who teaches us in and through St. Thomas Aquinas and in St. Bonaventure and St. Augustine and in all the other doctors of the Church. We have no other Father and no other Doctor than Christ. It is Jesus Whose works shine in the lives of the saints. It is Jesus Who manifests Himself to us through the words of the Fathers and the theologians. The false doctors preach their own sanctity and Christ is not seen or heard in them. But the true teachers preach the sanctity of Christ, and He shines through them. He it is Whose Truth has made them holy.

March 7, 1950, II.416