A Year With Thomas Merton - March 26

One Spirit Praying in All

Contemplative prayer is the recognition that we are the Sons of God, an experience of Who God is, and of His love for us, flowing from the operation of that love in us. Contemplative prayer is the voice of the Spirit crying out in us, "Abba, Pater." In all prayer it is the Holy Spirit who prays in us, but in the graces of contemplation He makes us realize, at least obscurely, that it is He who is praying in us with a love too deep and too secret for us to comprehend. We exult in the union of our voice with His voice, and our soul springs up to the Father, through the Son, having become one flame with the Flame of their Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the soul of the Church, and it is to His presence in us that is attributed the sanctity of each one of the elect. He prays in us now as the Soul of the Church and now as the life of our own soul--but the distinction is real only in the external order of things. Interiorly, whether our prayer is private or public, it is the same Spirit praying in us: He is really touching different strings of the same instrument.

March 21, 1950, II.422

A Year With Thomas Merton - February 9

Out of Touch and Left Behind

The "spiritual preoccupations" of this time--the post-Vatican II Conciliar years. (A imaginary era we have thought up for ourselves--divertissement!) I need perhaps to be less preoccupied with them, to show that one can be free of them, and go one's own way in peace. But there is inculcated in us such a fear of being out of everything, out of touch, left behind. This fear is a form of tyranny, a law--and one is faced with a choice between this law and true grace, hidden, paradoxical, but free.

An unformulated "preoccupation" of our time--the conviction that it is precisely in these (collective) preoccupations that the Holy Spirit is at work. To be "preoccupied with the current preoccupations" is then the best--if not the only--way to be open to the Spirit.

Hence one must know what everybody is saying, read what everybody is reading, keep up with everything or be left behind by the Holy Spirit. Is this a perversion of the idea of the Church--a distortion of perspective due to the Church's situation in the world of mass communications? I wonder if this anxiety to keep up is not in fact an obstacle to the Holy Spirit.

February 24, 1966, VI.363

A Year With Thomas Merton - December 26 [89th birthday of Emma Carlotta Eanes Rabensteiner]

Awakened in the Holy Spirit

The union of contemplation and eschatology is clear in the gift of the Holy Spirit. In Him we are awakened to know the Father because in Him we are refashioned in the likeness of the Son. And it is in this likeness that the Spirit will bring us at last to the clear vision of the invisible Father in the Son's glory, which will also be our glory. Meanwhile, it is the Spirit who awakens in our heart the faith and hope in which we cry for the eschatological fulfillment and vision. And in this hope there is already a beginning, an earnest of the fulfillment. This is our contemplation: the realization and "experience" of the life-giving Spirit in Whom the Father is present to us through the Son, our way, truth and life. The realization that we are on the way, that because we are on the way, we are in that Truth which is the end, and by which we are already fully and eternally alive. Contemplation is the loving sense of this life and this presence and this eternity.

December 22, 1964, V.182

A Year With Thomas Merton - October 3

St. Benedict's Sanity

There is nothing whatever of the ghetto spirit in the Rule of St. Benedict.

That is the wonderful thing about the Rule and the saint. The freshness, the liberty, the spontaneity, the broadness, the sanity and the healthiness of early Benedictine life.

But closed in on itself, interpreting interpretations of interpretations, the monastery becomes a ghetto.

Reforms that concentrate too excessively on a return to strictness do not in fact break the spell. They tend to increase the danger of spiritual suffocation. On the other hand, fresh air is not the air of the world.

Just to break out of the ghetto and walk down the boulevard is no solution. The world has its own stink, too--perfume and corruption.

The fresh air we need is the air of the Holy Spirit "breathing where He pleases," which means that the windows must be open and we must expect Him to come from any direction.

The error is to lock the windows and doors in order to keep the Holy Spirit within our house. The very action of locking doors and windows is fatal.

October 27, 1957, III.130-31