A Year With Thomas Merton - March 27

A Preference for the Chant of Frogs

Warmer. Rain in the night. Frogs again. At first the waterhole (four feet long at most) had one frog or two. Now they are a small nation, loud in the night. The innocent nation, chanting blissfully in praise of the spring rain. Last evening I pruned a few little trees--including the beeches I had planted.

Today I have to go down to see Fr. Vernon Robertson, who evidently wants me to get involved in something--and I will try not to. He has been pestering me to come to Louisville to give a talk at Bellarmine College. And this is confirming me in my resolution to keep out of all that.

Almost every day I have to write a letter to someone refusing an invitation to attend a conference, or a workshop, or to give talks on the contemplative life, or poetry, etc. I can see more and more clearly how for me this would be a sheer waste, a Pascalian diversion, participation in a common delusion. (For others, no: they have the grace and mission to go around talking.) For me what matters is silence, meditation--and writing: but writing is secondary. To willingly and deliberately abandon this to go out and talk would be stupidity--for me. And for others, retirement into my kind of solitude wold be equally stupid. They could not do it--and I could do not what they do.

March 16, 1968, VII.68

A Year With Thomas Merton - January 9

Deepening the Present

I have entered the new and holy year with the feeling that I have somehow, secretly, been granted a new life and a new hope--or a return of the old life and hope I used to have.

The contemplative life becomes awfully thin and drab if you go for several days at a time without thinking explicitly of the Passion of Christ. I do not mean, necessarily, meditation, but at least attending with love and humility to Christ on the Cross. For His Cross is the source of all our life, and without it prayer dries up and everything goes dead.

A saint is not so much a man who realizes that he possesses virtues and sanctity as one who is overwhelmed by the sanctity of God. God is holiness. And therefore things are holy in proportion as they share Who He is. All creatures are holy in so far as they share in His being, but we are called to be holy in a far superior way--by somehow sharing His transcendance and rising above the level of everything that is not God.

Solitude is not found so much by looking outside the boundaries of your dwelling, as by staying within. Solitude is not something you must hope for in the future. Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for solitude in the present, you will never find it.

January 2-3, 1950, II.391-92

A Year With Thomas Merton - October 18

What We Most Need

The anchor in the window of the Old Zion Church, before it burned in 1924 or 1925: this is the earliest symbol of which I remember being conscious. I was struck by it, aged perhaps seven or eight, but could not see why it was in a church window. Perhaps I did not know what it was. Yet I had seen the symbol somewhere in crossing the ocean (and I desired to be a sailor). Anyway, there was an anchor in the window and I was aware of it. I have forgotten almost every other detail of the church, except perhaps the eagle on whose outspread wings the Bible rested, and even of this I am not sure. Was there really such an eagle? Whether or not, it is relevant that the anchor is a symbol of hope; hope is what I most need. And the world needs most.

Letter from the Fellowship of Reconciliation. They want to reprint "The Root of War" as a pamphlet. Convinced again that I must set everything aside to work for the abolition of war. Primarily, of course, by prayer. I remain a contemplative, but as for writing, contacts, letters, that kind of effort: here it seems to me everything should yield first place to the struggle against war.

October 30, 1961, IV.175-76

A Year With Thomas Merton - October 11

Witnessing to the Personal

A day of spiritual fires, quiet fires, warm skies. Pink beasts in the field (pigs).

Angry kingfisher rattles over the foul creek and swings upward, to head for the clear lake.

Everything adds up to these two points:

A. My instinct to regard as an evil and as an oversimplification the thought of "losing oneself" in total identification with (submersion in) any group as such--this instinct against such is correct, it is good. To be a man of the church I have to be fully myself--and fully responsible and free before God--not a "unit" or a mere "number."

B. My vocation and task in this world is to keep alive all that is usefully individual and personal in me, to be a "contemplative" in the full sense--and to share it with others--to remain as a witness of the nobility of the private person and his primacy over the group.

October 2 and 7, 1958, III.221-22