A Year With Thomas Merton - February 4

A Priest with the World as My Parish

Looking at the crucifix on the white wall of Saint Anne's--overwhelmed at the realization that I am a priest, that it has been given to me to know something of what the Cross means, that St. Anne's is a special part of my priestly vocation: the silence, the woods, the sunlight, the shadows, the picture of Jesus, Our Lady of Cobre, and the little angels in Fra Angelico's paradise. Here I am a priest with all the world as my parish. Or is it a temptation, the thought of this? Perhaps I do not need to remember the apostolic fruitfulness of this silence. I need only to be nothing and to wait for the revelation of Christ: to be at peace and poor and silent in the world where the mystery of iniquity is also at work and where there is also no other revelation. No, there is so much peace at St. Anne's that it is most certainly the heart of a great spiritual battle that is fought in silence. I who sit here and pray and think and live--I am nothing and do not need to know what is going on. I need only to hope in Christ and hear the big deep bell that now begins to ring and sends its holy sound to me through the little cedars.

This is the continuation of the Mass. This is still my Eucharist, my day-long thanksgiving, worship my hoping for the perfect revelation of Christ.

February 17, 1953, III.33

A Year With Thomas Merton - October 29

Writing Before the World Burns

In choir the less I worried about the singing, the more I was possessed by Love. There is a lesson in that about being poor. You have got to be all the time cooperating with Love in this house, and Love sets a fast pace even at the beginning and, if you don't keep up, you'll get dropped. And yet, any speed is too slow for Love--and no speed is too fast for you if you will only let Love drag you off your feet--after that you will have to sail the whole way. but our instinct is to get off and start walking....

I want to be poor. I want to be solitary. This business burns me. "My strength is dried up like a potsherd" (Psalm 21:16). I am all dried up with desire and I can only think of one thing--staying in the fire that burns me.

Sooner or later the world must burn, and all things in it--all the books, the cloister together with the brothel, Fra Angelico together with the Lucky Strike ads. Sooner or later it will all be consumed by fire and nobody will be left, for by that time the last man in the universe will have discovered the bomb capable of destroying the universe and will have been unable to resist the temptation to throw the thing and get it over with.

And here I sit writing a diary.

But Love laughs at the end of the world because Love is the door to eternity, and he who loves is playing on the doorstep of eternity, and before anything can happen, Love will have drawn him over the sill and closed the door, and he won't bother about the world burning because he will know nothing but Love.

October 3 and 10, 1948, II.234-36