A Year With Thomas Merton - Christmas Day

I Heard and Believed

I am finally reading Vladimir Lossky's fine book La Vision de Dieu, which reminds me that the best thing that has come out of the Second Vatican Council is the Declaration on Ecumenism, particularly on oriental theology. If it were a matter of choosing between "contemplation" and "eschatology," there is no question that I am, and would always be, committed entirely to the latter. Here in the hermitage, returning necessarily to beginnings, I know where my beginning was, having the Name and the Godhead of Christ preached in Corpus Christi Church. I heard and believed. And I believe that He has called me freely, out of pure mercy, to His love and salvation, and that at the end (to which all is directed by Him) I shall see Him after I have put off my body in death and have risen together with Him. And that at the last day "all flesh shall see the salvation of God."

What this means is that my faith is an eschatological faith, not merely a means of penetrating the mystery of the divine presence, resting in Him now. Yet because my faith is eschatological it is also contemplative, for I am even now in the Kingdom and I can even now "see" something of the glory of the Kingdom and praise Him who is King. I would be foolish, then, if I lived blindly, putting all "seeing" off until some imagined fulfillment (for my present seeing is the beginning of a real and unimaginable fulfillment!). Thus contemplation and eschatology are one in Christian faith and in surrender to Christ. They complete each other and intensify each other. It is by contemplation and love that I can best prepare myself for the eschatological vision--and best help all the Church, and all men, to journey toward it.

December 22, 1964, V.181-82

A Year With Thomas Merton - July 14

When My Books Are Read at Me

Here I sit surrounded by bees and I write in this book. The bees are happy and therefore they are silent. They are working in the delicate white flowers of the weeds among which I sit. I am on the east side of the house, where I am not as cool as I thought I was going to be, and I sit on top of the bank that looks down over the beehives and the pond where the ducks used to be and Rohan’s Knob in the distance.

In the Chapter Room they are finishing Seeds of Contemplation, reading a couple of pages each evening before Compline.

I am glad the book has been written and read. Surely I have said enough about the business of darkness and about the “experimental contact with God in obscurity” to be able to shut up about it and go on to something else for a change. Otherwise it will just get to be mechanical—grinding out the same old song over and over again. But if it had not been read aloud at me, I might have forgotten how often I had said all those things, and gone on saying them again, as if they were discoveries. For I am aware that this often happens in our life. Keep a journal has taught me that there is not so much new in the interior life as one sometimes thinks. When you reread your journal you find out that your newest discovery is something you found out five years ago. Still, it is true that one penetrates deeper and deeper into the same ideas, the same experiences.

As usual, after one of my books has been read at me, I am left with the wish that I were simpler.

July 10, 1949, II.333