A Year With Thomas Merton - December 23

Suspended over Nothingness and Yet in Life

A charming letter from Eleanor Shipley Duckett, who, on returning to Smith College from England (Cambridge), found some notes I had sent and is making them her "Advent reading." I am very attracted to her. She is a sweet person. She wrote part of her letter in Latin. Though I have so far not had much contact with her (it began when the University of Michigan Press sent proofs of her Carolingian Portraits), I feel we can be very good friends, that this friendship can be really precious to us both--with the autumn quality of detachment that comes from the sense that we are coming to the end of our lives (she must be quite older than I, in her sixties, I presume). This sense of being suspended over nothingness and yet in life, of being a fragile thing, a flame that may blow out and yet burns brightly, adds an inexpressible sweetness to the gift of life, for one sees it entirely and purely as a gift. A gift that one must treasure in great fidelity with a truly pure heart.

December 15, 1962, IV.275-76

A Year With Thomas Merton - September 26

Writing to Think and Live and Pray

It is a bright afternoon: what am I going to do? I am going to work with my mind and with my pen, while the sky is clear, and while the soft white clouds are small and sharply defined in it. I am not going to bury myself in books and note-taking. I am not going to lose myself in this jungle and come out drunk and bewildered, feeling that bewilderment is a sign that I have done something. I am not going to write as one driven by compulsions but freely, because I am a writer, and because for me to write is to think and live and also, in some degree, even to pray.

This time is given to me by God that I may live in it. It is not given to make something out of it, but given me to be stored away in eternity as my own.

But for this afternoon to be my own in eternity, it must be my own this afternoon, and I must possess myself in it, not be possessed by books and by ideas not my own, and by a compulsion to produce what nobody needs. But simply to glorify God by accepting His gift and His work. To work for Him is to work that I myself may live.

How else shall I study Boris Pasternak, whose central idea is the sacredness of life?

September 27, 1958, III.219

A Year With Thomas Merton - July 18

All That Matters Is the Gift

Lately, without reading St. Louis de Montfort or thinking about him in any special way, I have been giving myself more fully to the love of our Lady, abandoning myself more and more completely to the graces she has obtained for me from God and to her direction of my life by that grace in all the things that are happening.

The Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel on the seventeenth was a great day. Since then I have felt like a different person. Much more consciously and peacefully united with God’s will. I am more completely determined to abandon all care for my own interests into God’s hands through our Lady, even and especially my highest spiritual interests. I am no longer taking care of my own progress and my own sanctity because it is hopeless. I leave it to Mary’s direction, to the Living Christ within me, acting in me, controlling all that I do for His love. It is true, for the moment at least, He seems to have a much fuller control.

All that matters is to give everything, and the quicker, the better. Fighting, struggling, rebelling, and delaying make it harder, but not more meritorious. On the contrary, less. So it is fruitless to multiply difficulties and delays. Give everything and give it in the quickest possible way. All that matters is the gift. That is what pleases God, atones for sin, converts the world, and leads us into the joys of heaven even here on earth.

July 20, 1947, II.92-93