A Year With Thomas Merton - November 13

A Decisive Clarity

Tomorrow is the last Sunday after Pentecost. "Let he who is in Judea flee to the hills." Always the same deep awe and compunction at this Gospel. It has been with me every year since my conversion, and its repetition has not robbed it of significance or turned it into a dead, routine affair. On the contrary, I see more and more how central this is in my life.

Yesterday afternoon at the hermitage, surely a decisive clarity came. That I must definitely commit myself to opposition to, and noncooperation with, nuclear war. This includes refusing to vote for those who favor the policy of deterrence, and going forward in trying to make this kind of position and its obligation increasingly clear. Not that I did not mean this before--but never so wholly and so definitely.

Last evening, a note from Louis Massignon about fasting for the Algerians recently slaughtered in Paris. I have often skipped breakfast but this time skipped my evening meal. Very good. Slept better, much more clarity at the night office and meditation. Also my Mass--too dark to read the Epistle and Gospel without light, but, after the Offertory, only the dawn light. Splendor of the first, dim, holy light of the day. Much meaning.

November 25, 1961, IV.182

A Year With Thomas Merton - November 2

Praying for the Dead

Abbé Jules Monchanin was convinced of the great importance of his prayer for "all the dead of India" as part of his mission to India, as part of the "convergence" of all mankind upon the Christ of the Day of Judgment.

Louis Massignon and Charles de Foucauld were both converted to Christianity by the witness of Islam to the one living God. Someone wrote of Foucauld (and his devotion to the dead of Islam): "For a mystic the souls of the dead count as much as those of the living; and his particular vocation was to sanctify the eternal Islam--for that which has been is forever--in helping to give a saint to Christianity" And again: "Asceticism is not a solitary luxury preparing us for God but the most profound act of mercy: that which heals broken hearts by its own breaks and wounds" (Massignon, Opera Minora III).

November 17, 1964, V.166-67