A Year With Thomas Merton - March 23

Prodigals Going Home

Yesterday afternoon, when Fr. Amadeus was preaching to us about the Holy Ghost in the infirmary chapel, Fr. George came bursting in, made the sign of "Thank you" three or four times, and departed. Last night he came down and wandered around the monastery.

Reverend Father, who used to be the infirmarian, says that sometimes, when they are near death, they get this urge to travel.

There was a Brother Mary up there who used to be the gatekeeper. He was dying. He had a wooden leg and a cane. He used to take his cane and go clumping around instead of staying in bed. They hid his wooden leg. He found it behind the door, and put it on and got going. They hid it again, in a closet where he couldn't find it. He lay in bed waving his hand and making signs, "The cane! The cane!"

There was another Brother who was dying. It was summer, very hot. He was in bed with very few clothes on. They found him walking out of the infirmary with nothing on him but a shirt. "Where are you going?" they asked him. "Nebraska!" he said. Nebraska is where he used to live.

I think I am beginning to understand something about the fifteenth chapter of St. Luke's Gospel--the lost sheep, the lost drachma, the Prodigal Son. Our dearest Lord is showing that He means everything about the fatted calf and the rejoicing to be taken literally, and that He means to pour out every kind of happiness in rivers upon those who ran away from His mercy but could not escape it.

March 15 and 21, 1949, II.292, 295

A Year With Thomas Merton - December 28

The Sense of a Journey Ended

After None--in the pretty pine wood of young pines by Saint Teresa's field (I still call it St. Teresa's wood)--where I have gone many times a week for four years, especially four summers, since 1957. The time has come for a kind of summing up of all this silence and sunlight and of those similar afternoons. Attached and at peace in this wood because it knows me so well now and I have no house there and nothing has ever been said or declared to indicate that I was there always. Nothing said it was "my place."

There I discovered Paraguay and for a while this wood was Paraguay (1957). I read a thing of Kierkegaard with a lovely paragraph on solitude--a bit of Henry Miller on Big Sur (in another place), much Suzuki, Vinoba Bhave. It is an oriental wood. I taught Nels Richardson (Frater Aelred) a little yoga there, walked and planned with Dom Gregorio anxiously there. There walked one afternoon after discovering some lyrics in the I Ching. Read The Leopard and Ungaretti there. Above all prayed and meditated there and will again.

St. Mary of Carmel after Vespers is tremendous: with the tall pines, the silence, the moon and stars above the pines as dark falls, the patterns of shadows, the vast valley and hills: everything speaks of a more mature and complete solitude. The pines are tall and not low. There is frankly a house, demanding not attachment but responsibility. A silence for dedication and not escape. Lit candles in the dusk. "This is my resting place forever"--the sense of a journey ended, of wandering at an end. The first time in my life I ever really felt I had come home and my waiting and looking were ended.

December 26, 1960, IV.79-80