A Year With Thomas Merton - November 19

Being a Teacher

Finishing William of Conche's Philosophia Mundi. Beautiful little chapter on the Teacher. I was very moved by it. I usually ignore this element in my own vocation, but obviously I am a writer, a student, and a teacher, as well as a contemplative of sorts, and my solitude, etc., is that of a writer and teacher, not a pure hermit. And the great thing is, or should be, love of truth. I know there is nothing more precious than the bond of charity created by communicating and sharing the truth. This really is my whole life.

Yesterday Aidan Nally came up to me by the woodshed and said, "Father, it seems the wars have ceased."

Later I conjectured he was referring to the cessation of atmospheric nuclear testing announced by Kennedy.

Today (a blacker day than usual and there have been many) Aidan Nally met me out by the greenhouse just before dinner and uttered some prophecies of doom according to something he had seen on TV. None of it was clear. Probably the Russians trying to make up for their loss of face over Cuba. Something on Germany? Berlin?

The problem is not to lose one's sense of perspective and seriousness. It is always "the end" and each time it gets closer. The students at the Oxford Union drank up their best wine in the Cuban crisis. They will not have any for this one, whatever it is--if it is a crisis, and not something imagined by Aidan. But Aidan's imagination is as good as any paper--only a little foggy.

November 13 and 17, 1962, IV.264-66

A Year With Thomas Merton - October 7

America, The World's Mad Abbot

Clarity in the early morning studying William of Conches on Plato's Timaeus. The dark, the silence. Then, clarity at Mass, exactly at down. The sun is now rising at seven and I am clothed in dawn light as I stand at the altar (the first rays of the sun add the only warmth in the chapel). Then after, the day is warm.

The United States is now spending more each year on armaments than was spent in any year before 1942 for the entire national budget.

People demand that the government "interfere" in nothing, just pour money into the armament industry and provide a strong police for "security." But stay out of everything else! No interference in medicine, mental health, education, etc., etc. Never was a country at once shrewder and less wise--shrewd in nonessentials and lunatic in essentials.

I have no doubt the world feels toward America the way many monks feel toward an abbot who wants to exercise total power, to receive unquestioning obedience on the basis of slogans about which he himself ceased thinking twenty-five years ago, and who above all wants to be loved, so that he may never, at any time, to himself, seem to be exercising power, or loving it. Nobody denies him the power he has: few give him the love that he needs in order to be safe and content. And therefore he uses his power, from time to time, in unpredictable, arbitrary, and absurd ways in which he defends his own ends and makes everybody miserable.

October 20, 1962, IV.259