A Year With Thomas Merton - December 22

The Unknown Power of the Cross

Yesterday, day of recollection, realized again above all my need for profound and total humility--especially in any work I may do for peace. Humility is more important than zeal. Descent into nothingness and dependence on God. Otherwise I am just fighting the world with its own weapons and there the world is unbeatable. Indeed it does not even have to fight back, for I will exhaust myself and that will be the end of my stupid efforts.

To seek strength in God, especially in the Passion of Christ.

The mysterious, unknown power of the Cross. Preachers of the Cross hide its power and distort its meaning by their own image of the Crucified.

The crucifixion is literally the destruction of the "Image" of God.

An "image" is presented and then taken away from man (and restored if man follows into the night). There is no adequate image. Preachers preserve an image, often a very faulty one. Meaning of the stress on the Resurrection here.

But to descend into the Night of the Passion, the Night of Christ's death, baptism in His sufferings, without image.

December 11, 1961, IV.184-85

A Year With Thomas Merton - December 9

The Complexity of Our Real "I"

When I got up it was about thirty degrees on the porch and now at dawn it is down to twenty-one. These are the coldest hours--meditation, lectio (spiritual reading), and hot tea with lemon and a good fire. I am reading Paul Evdokimov's La Femme et le salut du monde (Woman and the Salvation of the World)--after tea--and then Rilke's Duino Elegies.

"The cross is made up of our weaknesses and failures, it is constructed by our ego and above all by our profound gloom and unspeakable and culpable ugliness, in short, by all the complexity that is at this time the real I."

I experience the truth of this very real and exact insight of Evdokimov. Still, in regard to the Catholic Peace Fellowship--about which nothing is settled--I see how much there was that was inauthentic (i.e., false, spurious) in my own initial enthusiasm for identification with peace activities, The Catholic Worker, etc. It was in reality selfish and naive at the same time. And I did not foresee that necessarily they and I could hardly go along forever in agreement, living in totally different circumstances. Yet I do agree with their ideal in general--not with all its particular implementations. One could go on analyzing interminably. I must accept this result of my own inner contradictions and trust God to bring a solution in which His will may be done by me and all of them too. And I don't know what to do next--hence I must be content not to act at all, when I would very much like to settle everything in a big sweep.

A Year With Thomas Merton - July 27

Facing Death

Does my solitude meet the standard set by my approaching death? No. I’m afraid it does not. That possibility which is most intimate, isolated, my own, cannot be shared or described. I cannot look forward to it as an experience I can analyze and share. It is not something to be understood and enjoyed. (To “understand” and “contemplate” it beforehand is a kind of imposture.) But the solitary life should partake of the seriousness and incommunicability of death. Or should it? It that too rigid and absolute an ideal? The two go together. Solitude is not death, it is life. It aims not at a living death but at a certain fullness of life. But a fullness that comes from honestly and authentically facing death and accepting it without care, i.e., with faith and trust in God. Not with any social justification: not with reliance on an achievement which is approved or at least understood by others. Unfortunately, even in solitude, though I try not to (and sometimes claim not to), I still depend too much, emotionally, on being accepted and approved.

The greatest “comfort” (and a legitimate one, not an invasion) is to be sought precisely in the Psalms, which face death as it is, under the eye of God, and teach us how we may face it. The Psalms bring us at the same time into contact, rather communion, with all those who have seen death and accepted it. Most of all the Lord Himself, who prayed from Psalm 21 on the Cross.

July 5, 1965, V.264-65

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