A Year With Thomas Merton - October 13

Truth and Silence

Dan Berrigan arrived by surprise Tuesday--I was not expecting him until the end of the week. We concelebrated twice--once in the regular present rite, and today, with a new Mass he found somewhere which is very fine and simple. I don't know how "legal" we were. It was a very moving, simple English text (Canon and all). I think it was composed by Anglicans and has been used by them. Contrast to the Mass, old style, that I said for Jacques Maritain when he visited last week. That was very sober, austere, solemn, intense. This Mass very open, simple, even casual, but very moving and real. Somehow I think the new is really better--and is very far from anything we will be permitted here for a long time. I have nothing against the old.

A dark October morning with clouds. Extraordinary purple in the north over the pines. Ruins of gnats on the table under the lamp. Albert Camus's preface to L’Étranger--The Stranger--has things to say on truth and silence which have deep monastic implications. I must refuse all declarations and affirmations of what I do not fully and actually know, experience, believe myself. Not making statements that are expected of me, simply because they are expected, whether by the monastery (or monastic life) or by the peace movement, or by various literary orthodoxies and anti-orthodoxies or routine rebellions. If I renounce all this, there will be precious little left to say. But above all (as Jacques Maritain and I agreed) to steer clear of the futilities of "Post-Conciliar" theological wrangling and image making.

October 13 and 14, 1966, VI.149-50

A Year With Thomas Merton - September 19

The Interminable Beauty of Human Beings

In the pile of things I have lying around waiting to be read, I picked out today the mimeographed conference by Jacques Maritain (in December 1964) to the Little Brothers of Jesus on their vocation. Jacques emphasizes the microsignes--the microsigns--of a Christian love that acts without awareness and is received without special or detailed awareness--the human and unconscious "aura" of a contemplative love that is simply there. How does one dare to undertake this? This idea of presence in and to the world is fundamental: "There are no longer walls, but the demands of a constantly purified love for one's fellow being which protects and shelters their contemplation of love." The importance of a purely immanent activity (the contemplative does not do nothing). This can be a basis for an incomparably deep understanding of another's suffering. "The human being down here in the darkness of his fleshly state is as mysterious as the saints in heaven in the light of their glory. There are in him inexhaustible treasures, constellations without end of sweetness and beauty which ask to be recognized and which usually escape completely the futility of our regard. Love brings a remedy for that. One must vanquish this futility and undertake seriously to recognize the innumerable universes that one's fellow being carries within him. This is the business of contemplative love and the sweetness of its regard." September 20, 1966, VI.137-38