A Year With Thomas Merton - March 3

With Contrite Hearts to God

Every day I mean to pray, especially in choir, for all the priests in the world who hear confessions and for all their penitents. I ask that everywhere this Sacrament may be administered and received in truth and justice and prudence and mercy and sorrow, and that priests and penitents may better know what they are doing and that they be filled with a great love and reverence for what they do. I ask that everywhere men may discover in themselves a great admiration for this Sacrament and may love it with their whole being, giving themselves entirely with contrite hearts to the mercy and truth of God, that His love may remake them in His own likeness--that is, that He may make them true.

Down there in the wooded hollow full of cedars I hear a great outcry of blue jays, and yonder is one of the snipes that are always flying and ducking around St. Joseph's hill. In all this I am reassured by the sweet, constant melody of my cardinals, who sing their less worldly tunes with no regard for any other sound on earth. And now the jays have stopped. Their tribulation rarely lasts very long.

Now I am under the sky. The birds are all silent except for some quiet bluebirds. But the frogs have begun singing their pleasure in all the waters and in the warm, green places where the sunshine is wonderful. Praise Christ, all you living creatures. For Him you and I were created. With every breath we love Him. My psalms fulfill your dim, unconscious song. O brothers in this wood.

A Year With Thomas Merton - February 18

In the Darkness of My Empty Mind

The blue elm tree near at hand and the light blue hills in the distance: the red bare clay where I am supposed to plant some shade trees: these are before me as I sit in the sun for a free half hour between spiritual direction and work. Today, as I sit in the sun, big blue and purple fish swim past me in the darkness of my empty mind, the sea which opens within me as soon as I close my eyes. Delightful darkness, delightful sun, shining on a world which, for all I care, has already ended.

It does not occur to me to wonder whether we will ever transplant the young maples from the wood, yonder, to this bare leveled patch--the place where the old horse barn once stood. It does not occur to me to wonder how everything came to be transformed. I sit on a cedar log half chewed by some novice's blunt axe, and do not reflect on plans I have made for this place of prayer, because they do not matter. They will happen when they happen.

The hills are pure as jade in the distance. God is in His transparent world, but He is too sacred to be mentioned, too holy to be observed. I sit in silence. The big deep fish are purple in my sea.

February 26, 1952, II.467

A Year With Thomas Merton - September 7

God's Lucid Afternoon

Out here in the woods I can think of nothing except God, and it is not so much that I think of Him either. I am as aware of Him as of the sun and the clouds and the blue sky and the thin cedar trees.


Engulfed in the simple lucid actuality which is the afternoon: I mean God's afternoon, this sacramental moment of time when the shadows will get longer and longer, and one small bird sings quietly in the cedars, and one car goes by in the remote distance and the oak leaves move in the wind.

High up in the summer sky I watch the silent flight of a vulture, and the day goes by in prayer. This solitude confirms my call to solitude. The more I am in it, the more I love it. One day it will possess me entirely and no man will ever see me again.

September 15, 1952, III.16