A Year With Thomas Merton - May 9

My Hands Were Always Empty

Since Easter was early we are already on the threshold of Pentecost. Yesterday, in bright, blazing sun, we planted cabbage seedlings in the garden and, over the way, I could hear them mowing hay in St. Joseph's field, where probably tomorrow we will all be loading wagons.

Every time I have been in the woods to pray I have loved them more.

At once I remember all the afternoons I had been out in the woods, the dark afternoons in the gullies along the creeks and the rainy afternoons on top of the knobs and the day I sang the Pater Noster on one knob and then on another; the day I found the daffodils in an unexpected place, and the other day when I picked them in a place where I knew they would be; and the immense silence of last Good Friday, when I sat on a rotten log in a sheltered corner by a stream with a relic of the Holy Cross. It set the seal on all the silences in which I had found Him without seeming to find anything, and I knew (as I always guessed) that I had every time come home with something tremendous, although my hands were always empty.

May 7, 1951, 457-58

A Year With Thomas Merton - March 15

God Is All in Christ

Went out to work clearing brush near the lake by the Bardstown Road yesterday and got my eyes infected. Conjunctivitis, they say. During the night office and especially during my Mass it was extremely painful today. Now I know what Gerard Manley Hopkins was talking about when, after correcting hundreds of exam papers, he said he felt as if his eyes were full of lemon juice. Got the thing fixed up with ointment and even bandaged, and it was better. Practically no reading all day--spent a lot of time "empty" and it was a happy, salutary day--a gift from God!

One thing Christ has said: "He who sees me sees the Father also."

In emptying Himself to come into the world, God has not simply kept His reality in reserve, in a safe place, and manifested a kind of shadow or symbol of Himself. He has emptied Himself and is all in Christ. Christ is not simply the tip of the little finger of the Godhead, moving in the world, easily withdrawn, never threatened, never really risking anything. God has acted and given Himself totally. He has become not only one of us but even our very selves.

March 24 and 25, 1960, III.380-81