A Year With Thomas Merton - April 12

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Staying Found

Good Shepherd Sunday. Jesus, the "Shepherd and Bishop" of our souls, gave me many graces appropriate to this day. "I know mine and mine know me" (John 10:14). "My sheep hear my voice." I read over St. John of the Cross's Cautions, which were the things I had in mind to keep when I made my solemn profession, and I see to my dismay how much I had forgotten them.

I went to Fr. Placid in the confessional and he told me I was too restless and that what I was looking for (union with God) was right in front of my nose and I couldn't see it. Also, there was no earthly reason why any amount of work should prevent my union with God, provided it is His will.

And all that is true. My mind is scattered among things, not because of my work, but became (sic) I am not detached, and I do not attend first of all to God. On the other hand, I do not attend to Him because I am so absorbed in all these objects and events. I have to wait on His grace. But how stubborn and slow my nature is. And how I keep confusing myself and complicating things for myself by useless twisting and turning.

What I need most of all is the grace to really accept God as He gives Himself to me in every situation: "He came unto His own and His own received Him not."

Good Shepherd, You have a wild and crazy sheep in love with thorns and brambles. But please don't get tired of looking for me! I know You won't. For You have found me. All I have to do is stay found.

April 11, 1948, II.198-99

A Year With Thomas Merton - March 29

Grateful for Another Miracle

Shall I reread the bits in St. John of the Cross’s The Ascent of Mount Carmel about the memory? They seem to do me so much good—always. Year after year, returning to them. In what sense do they make a difference in my life?

This Journal—the one I am writing right now. Apparently I have not yet written enough of it to become completely solitary and to be able to do without it. It is useless to drop the thing and say I am solitary just because I am not writing a Journal, when, in fact, the writing could help me find my way to where I am supposed to be traveling.

So I read about “forgetting” and write down all I remember. And somehow there is no contradiction here. It is simply a somewhat peculiar way of becoming a saint. I by no means insist that it is sanctity. All I say is that I must do what the situation seems to demand, and sanctity will appear when out of all this Christ, in His own good time, appears and manifests His own glory.

Tenderness of the Epistle, austerity of the Gospel in this morning’s Mass, the Vigil of Passion Sunday. Last night, before Compline, out by the horse barn, looking at the orchard and thinking about what St. John of the Cross said about having in your heart the image of Christ crucified.

Confusion and fog pile up in your life, and then, by the power of the Cross, things once again are clear, and you know more about your wretchedness and you are grateful for another miracle.

March 4 and 10, 1951, II.452-53

A Year With Thomas Merton - November 20

Another Lost Customer

Reading Mabillon's wise and delightful book on monastic studies. Among other things, this beautiful quotation from Seneca: "If you will give yourself to study, you will ease every burden of life, you will neither wish for night to come or the light to fail; neither shall you be worried or preoccupied with other things."

Warm sun, quiet morning. Pigs bang the lids of their feeding troughs. Frater Placid madly at the honeysuckle. I sit on the very low bench under the cedars, outside the wall. Frater John of the Cross told a story about Brother Clement and "his men" trying to "capture" Brother Colman and a local farmer to whom Colman was selling pigs. They thought the farmer was stealing pigs because Brother Colman, zealous for poverty, did not put on the lights. One brother rushed upon Brother Colman in the dark crying, "This one's all for me!" Nobody was hurt, but the farmer was paralyzed and speechless for five minutes. He said he would never come here to buy pigs again.

November 10, 1958, III.229-30

A Year With Thomas Merton - July 19

Landscapes of Contemplation

How beautiful it was last evening with a longer interval after supper. The sun was higher than it usually is in that interval, and I saw the country in a light that I usually do not see. The low-slanting rays picked out the foliage of the trees and highlighted a new wheat field against the dark curtain of woods on the knobs that were in shadow. Deep peace. Sheep on the slopes behind the sheep barn. The new trellises in the novitiate garden leaning and sagging. A cardinal singing suddenly in the walnut tree, and piles of fragrant logs all around in the woodshed, waiting to be cut in bad weather.

I looked at all this in great tranquility, with my soul and spirit quiet. For me landscape seems to be important for contemplation. Anyway, I have no scruples about loving it.

Didn’t St. John of the Cross hide himself in a room up in a church tower where there was one small window through which he could look out at the country?

Benedictine tranquility. Pax. That’s what I think about. I have more of it perhaps because I am less mixed up today in peculiar tensions of desire and pride that come from fighting the will of God in an obscure way, under the pretext of a greater good.

There is only one way to peace: be reconciled that of yourself you are what you are, and it might not be especially magnificent, what you are! God has His own plan for making something else of you, and it is a plan which you are mostly too dumb to understand.

July 2, 1948, II.216-17