A Year With Thomas Merton - November 18

The Unaccountable Truth

Gelassenheit--letting go--not being encumbered by systems, words, projects. And yet being free in systems, projects. Not trying to get away from all action, all speech, but free, unencumbering Gelassen in this or that action. Error of self-conscious contemplatives: to get hung up on a certain kind of non-action which is an imprisonment, a stupor, the opposite of Gelassenheit. Actually quietism is incompatible with true inner freedom. The burden of this stupid and enforced "quiet"--the self sitting heavily on its own head.

Still thinking of K.C., who wrote from Cincinnati. From a certain point of view my letter to her was a scandal. I was in effect saying, "Don't listen for the voice of God, He will not speak to you." Yet this had to be said. Today, for a certain type of person, to "listen" is to be in a position where hearing is impossible--or deceptive. It is the wrong kind of listening: listening for a limited message, an objective sound, a sensible meaning. Actually one decides one's life by responding to a word that is not well defined, easily explicable, safely accounted for. Once decides to love in the face of an unaccountable void, and from the void comes an unaccountable truth. By this truth one's existence is sustained in peace--until the truth is too firmly grasped and too clearly accounted for. Then one is relying on words, i.e., on one's own understanding and one's own ingenuity in interpreting existence and its "signs." Then one is lost and has to be found once again in the patient Void.

November 13, 1966, VI.160-61

A Year With Thomas Merton - June 1

The Work of the Cell

Coming home—through Shakertown, Harrodsburg, Perryville, and Lebanon. Beautiful June countryside—deep grass and hay, flowering weeds, tall cumulus clouds, corn a foot high and beautifully green tobacco struggling to begin. The old road between Perryville and Lebanon—winding between small farms and old barns, with wooded knobs nearby—is one I like.

The great joy of the solitary life is not found simply in quiet, in the beauty and peace of nature, song of birds, etc., nor in the peace of one’s own heart, but in the awakening and attuning of the heart to the voice of God—to the inexplicable, quite definite inner certitude of one’s call to obey Him, to hear Him, to worship Him here, now, today, in silence and alone, and that this is the whole reason for one’s existence, this makes one’s existence fruitful and gives fruitfulness to all one’s other good acts, and is the ransom and purification of one’s heart, which has been dead in sin.

It is not simply a question of “existing” alone, but of doing, with joy and understanding, “the work of the cell,” which is done in silence and not according to one’s own choice or the pressure of necessity, but in obedience to God. But the Voice of God is not “heard” at every moment, and part of the “work of the cell” is attention so that one may not miss any sound of that Voice. When we see how little we listen, and how stubborn and gross our hearts are, we realize how important the work is and how badly prepared we are to do it.

June 6 and 8, 1965, V.253-54

Enjoy

Enjoy. Get in it and enjoy it. Whatever it is. Listen closely, as if you were a birder and were listening for that rare bird you've been waiting your entire birder career to hear. It will be there. Today I heard it in a drum riff in a song while I walked my 25 minutes before Jeopardy. So strange how one tiny little something ENJOYABLE can turn around a crappy day. Suddenly, the water of life hope is flowing again and practically dancing through your woods. Enjoy.