A Year With Thomas Merton - January 4

The Speech of God Is Silence

For the first time in my life I am finding you, O Solitude. I can count on the fingers of one hand the few short moments of purity, of neutrality, in which I have found you. Now I know I am coming to the day in which I will be able to live without words, even outside my prayer. For I still need to go out into the no-man's-land of language, which does not quite join me to others and which throws a veil over my own solitude. I say "live without words." By words I mean the half-helpless and half-wise looks by which we seek one another's thoughts. But I do not abdicate all language, for there is the Word of God. This I proclaim and I live to proclaim it. I live to utter the Mass, the Canon, which implicitly contains all words, all revelation, and teaches everything. It is at the Canon and at the words of Consecration that all solitudes come into a single focus. There is the City of God gathered together in that one Word spoken in silence. The speech of God is silence. His Word is solitude. Him I will never deny, by His grace! Everything else is fiction, half-hiding the truth it tries to reveal. We are travelers from the half-world of language into solitude and infinity. We are strangers. Paper, I have not in you a lasting city. Yet, there is a return from solitude to make manifest His Name to them who have not known it. And then to re-enter solitude again and dwell in silence.

January 11, 1950, II.158

A Year With Thomas Merton - July 17

A New Sweet-Smelling Altar

(Merton celebrates his first Mass in the front room of his hermitage on July 17, 1967)

Today, on the patronal feast of my hermitage, Our Lady of Mount Carmel, first Mass here (after nearly seven years). Went over to Athertonville Saturday after dinner to get the altar, sweet-smelling, in Buck Murfield’s dark shop. Some of the fields were still under water from the floods of the other day. Saturday was bright and glorious—exceptionally cool weather, lovely white clouds, dry and full of sun, clean, pure. Set up in the hermitage, with ikons over it, the altar is just right.

Mass about 4:30 or 4:45. Said it slowly, even sang some parts (of Gregorian Kyrie, Gloria, Preface, and other bits). It was a beautiful Mass, and I now see that having the altar here is a great step forward and a huge help.

Saying Mass up here changes the shape of the day, and eating dinner up here makes it completely leisurely. The best Sunday I can remember in a very long time.

The quiet of the morning, the singing birds, irreplaceable! But the fact of not being able to go anywhere at the moment, when everybody is on planes, means that I am inevitably out of touch with the full reality of my time. Or does it? Everybody on planes? Millions go nowhere—and those monks in Asian monasteries, where do they go? Perhaps going nowhere is better. I don’t know.

July 17 and 18, 1967, VI.265-66