Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism - 11a (Crashaw bonus)

p. 65 (speaking of Dame Gertrude More): "The spirit of her little book is summed up in two epigrams: epigrams of which her contemporary, Crashaw, might have been proud. 'To give all for love is a most sweet bargain.' 'O let me love, or not live!'

A Year With Thomas Merton - April 13

Nothing Counts Except Love

One thing has suddenly hit me--that nothing counts except love; that a solitude that is not simply the wide-openness of love and freedom is nothing. Love and solitude are the one ground of true maturity and freedom. Solitude that is just solitude and nothing else (i.e., excludes everything else but solitude) is worthless. True solitude embraces everything, for it is the fullness of love that rejects nothing and no one, and is open to All in All.

After several days of rain the sky is clearing. Afternoons at the hermitage become once again possible. I walked a bit in the woods, under the pines, and again plan work, study, ideas, not to affirm myself but to give to others. Anything I have that is good is worth sharing. What is not worth sharing is not worth bothering about. What is "mine" is tolerated only insofar as I am willing to share it with everybody.

I see this as ambiguous though. It needs qualification.

I have got to be faithful, detached, obedient, concerned not only for my own life as I want to live it, but for God's will, which remains to be realized in and through me. That is all.

April 14, 1966, VI.40

A Year With Thomas Merton - January 21

My Deep Youthful Shyness

A bright, snowy afternoon, delicate blue clouds of snow blowing down off the frozen trees. Forcibly restrained myself from much work around the hermitage, made sure of my hour's meditation and will do more later. How badly I need it. I realize how great is the tempo and pressure of work I have been in down in the community--with many irons in the fire. True, I have in the community gained the knack of dropping everything and completely relaxing my attention and forgetting the work by going out and looking at the hills. Good that the novitiate work is not exceedingly absorbing. (Biggest trouble now is letter writing.)

Shall I look at the past as if it were something to analyze and think about? Rather, I thank God for the present, but for the present that is His and in Him. The past: I am inarticulate about it now. I remember irrelevant moments of embarrassment, and my joys are seen to have been largely meaningless. Yet, as I sit here in this wintry and lonely and quiet place, I suppose I am the same person as the eighteen-year-old riding back alone into Bournemouth on a bus out of the New Forest, where I had camped a couple of days and nights. I suppose I regret most my lack of love, my selfishness and glibness (covering a deep shyness and need of love) with girls who, after all, did love me, I think, for a time. My great fault was my inability really to believe it, and my efforts to get complete assurance and perfect fulfillment.

January 30, 1965, V.197-98

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