A Year With Thomas Merton - April 11

My Art of Confession and Witness

The work of writing can be for me, or very close to, the simple job of being: by creative reflection and awareness to help life itself live in me, to give its esse an existent, or to find a place, rather, in esse by action, intelligence, and love. For to write is to love: it is to inquire and to praise, to confess and to appeal. This testimony of love remains necessary. Not to reassure myself that I am ("I write, therefore I am"), but simply to pay my debt to life, to the world, to other men. To speak out with an open heart and say what seems to me to have meaning. The bad writing I have done has all been authoritarian, the declaration of musts, and the announcement of punishments. Bad because it implies a lack of love, good insofar as there may yet have been some love in it. The best stuff has been more straight confession and witness.

April 14, 1966, VI.371

A Year With Thomas Merton - January 14

Thrown into Contradiction

God reveals Himself in the middle of conflict and contradiction--and we want to find Him outside all contradiction.

Importance of contradiction: the contradiction essential to my existence is the expression of the world's present: it is my contribution to the whole. They are my "place." It is in my insight and acceptance of contradiction that the world creates itself anew in and through my liberty--I permit God to act in and through me, making His world (in which all are judged and redeemed). I am thrown into contradiction: to realize it is mercy, to accept it is love, and to help others do the same is compassion. All this seems like nothing, but it is creation. The contradiction is precisely that we cannot "be creative" in some other way we would prefer (in which there is no contradiction).

January 20, 1966, VI.354-55

A Year With Thomas Merton - July 28

Entering the School of My Life

During the night office and morning meditation, seeing that my whole life is a struggle to seek the truth (at least, I want it to be so) and that the truth is found in the reality of my own life as it is given to me, and that it is found by complete consent and acceptance. Not at all by defeat, by mere passive resignation, by mere inert acceptance of evil and falsity (which are nevertheless unavoidable), but by “creative” consent, in my deepest self, to the will of God, which is expressed in my own self and my own life. And indeed there is a sense in which my own deepest self is in God and even expresses Him, as “word.” Such is the deep meaning of our Sonship.

Gradually I will come more and more to transcend the limitations of the world and of the society to which I belong—while fully accepting my own little moment in history, such as it is.

To be detached from all systems, and without rancor towards them, but with insight and compassion. To be truly “catholic” is to be able to enter into everybody’s problems and joys and be all things to all men.

July 31, 1961, IV.146