A Year With Thomas Merton - February 27

Clinging to God

Yesterday in the morning, when I went out for a breath of air before my novice conference, I saw men working on the hillside beyond the sheep barn. At last the electric line is coming to my hermitage! All day they were working on the holes, digging and blasting the rock with small charges, young men in yellow helmets, good, eager, hardworking guys with machines. I was glad of them and of American technology, pitching in to bring me light, as they would for any farmer in the district. It was good to feel part of this, which is not to be despised, but is admirable. (Which does not mean that I hold any brief for the excess of useless developments in technology.) Galley proofs of the little Gandhi book for New Directions came and I finished them in a couple of hours. A good letter from Morcelliana, and an architect in Madrid who will use two essays on art from Disputed Questions, etc., etc. Drawings from Lax. And a couple of the usual letters from crazy people. It is good to be part of that too! Vanity. But that is the thing about solitude. To realize how desperately we depend on the "existence" that recognition by others gives us, and how hopeless we are without it until God gives us feet to stand alone on. I have those feet sometimes, but once again, let me realize that there is no absolute "standing alone"--only awful poverty and insecurity and clinging to God in one's need of others, and greater appreciation of the smallest and most insignificant of communal verities. February 16, 1965, V.206-7

A Year With Thomas Merton - September 30

Clinging to the Invisible God

Can I hope that I am now in a new area, traveling more securely, and that my commitment to the hermit life will be something more than a comic gesture? Is the whole thing just a fantastic private comedy? I question myself and my whole life very seriously. The real absurdity of it all! The unreality of so much of it. I mean especially the unreality of years I look back on when, being Master of Students, for example, my job gave an appearance of substance and consistency, but actually I was floating in a kind of void! I think I enjoyed it to a great extent, but, if I had been more fully aware, I would probably have not been able to cope with it.

In a word, what I see is this: that, while I imagined I was functioning fairly successfully, I was living a sort of patched-up, crazy existence, a series of rather hopeless improvisations, a life of unreality in many ways. Always underlain by a certain solid silence and presence, a faith, a clinging to the Invisible God. This clinging (perhaps rather His holding on to me) has been in the end the only thing that has made sense. The rest has been absurdity. What is more, there is no essential change in sight. I will probably go on like this for the rest of my life. Here "I" am: this patchwork, this bundle of questions and doubts and obsessions, this gravitation to silence and to the woods and to love. This incoherence!

There is no longer anything to pride myself in, least of all "being a monk" or being anything--a writer or anything.

September 5, 1966, VI.125