A Year With Thomas Merton - January 11

With a Pure and Empty Heart

My great obligation is to obey God, and to seek His will carefully with a pure and empty heart. Not to try to impose my own order on my life but let God impose His. To serve His will and His order by realizing them in my own life. This means certainly a deep consent to all that is actually and manifestly His will for me.

After dinner--read the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus. Shattered by it. I do not know when I have read anything so stupendous and so completely contemporary. I felt like throwing away everything and reading nothing but Aeschylus for six months. Like discovering a mountain full of diamond mines. It is like Zen--like Dostoevsky--like existentialism--like Francis--like the New Testament. It is inconceivably rich. I consider this a great grace. A great religious experience. Prometheus, archetypal representation of the suffering Christ. But we must go deep into this. Prometheus startles us by being more fully Christ than the Lord of our own clichés--I mean, he is free from all the falsifications and limitations of our hackneyed vision which has slowly emptied itself of reality.

January 17 and 19, 1960, III.370

A Year With Thomas Merton - October 2

Dialogue in the Kingdom of God

Two letters have arrived from Pasternak. My letter and "Prometheus" got through to him and apparently quite easily. He commented on "Prometheus," saying that he liked especially section IV and VII, and that the last had some "fine individual Christosophic touches." I was very pleased. Will write to him again. He keeps insisting that his early work is "worthless." His heart is evidently in Doctor Zhivago, to which he does not refer by the full name. Only as "Dr Zh" or "the book published by Pantheon."

Talking to Frater Lawrence about it, I remarked on the strange and marvelous fact of this apparently easy and natural communication between a monk in a strictly guarded Trappist monastery and a suspect poet behind the Iron Curtain. I am in closer contact with Pasternak than I am with people in Louisville or Bardstown or even in my own monastery--and have more in common with him.

And all this while our two countries, deeply hostile to one another, have nothing to communicate between themselves--and yet spend millions trying to communicate with the moon!

The simple and human dialogue with Pasternak and a few others like him is to me worth thousands of sermons and radio speeches. It is to me the true Kingdom of God, which is still so clearly, and evidently, "in the midst of us."

October 18, 1958, III.224