A Year With Thomas Merton - February 25

Christ Has Known Our Exile

At the end of the first Epistle of Saint Paul to the Corinthians; "I shall know even as I have been known."

It is in the passion of Christ that God has proved to us that He has "known" us. That He recognized us in our misery. That He has found His lost image in our fallen state and reclaimed it for His own, cleansed in the charity of His Divine Son.

It is on the Cross that God has known us: that He has searched our souls with His compassion and experienced the full extent of capacity for wickedness: it is on the Cross that He has known our exile, and ended it, and brought us home to Him.

We have to return to Him through the same gate of charity by which He came to us. If we had to open the gate ourselves, we could never do it. He has done the work. It is for us to follow Him and enter in by all those things that go together to fulfill in us the law of charity, in which all virtues are complete.

February 14, 1953, II. 31-32

A Year With Thomas Merton - January 23

Unveiling the Heart

Deep snow. A marvelous morning (early in the night hours) in which, among other things, I suddenly wrote a French poem.

Curious dimension of time: in four hours (besides writing this poem, getting breakfast and cleaning up) I reread a few pages of Burtt's book and perhaps twenty pages of Kitaro Nishida. That was all. But the time was most fruitful in depth and awareness, and I did not know what happened to all these hours.

Later I could see by the deer tracks that sometime in the dark before dawn a couple of deer had jumped the fence right out in front of the hermitage--but I did not notice them. (Too dark, and with my desk light in front of me I do not see out when it is dark.)

As regards prayer--in the hermitage. To be snowed in is to be reminded that this is a place apart, from which praise goes up to God, and that my honor and responsibility are that praise. This is my joy, my only "importance." For it is important! To be chosen for this! And then the realization that the Spirit is given to me, the veil is removed from my heart, that I reflect "with open face" the glory of Christ (II Corinthians 3:12-18). It would be easy to remain with one's heart veiled, and it is not by any wisdom of my own, but by God's gift, that it is unveiled.

January 23, 1966, VI.10-11