A Year With Thomas Merton - February 25

Christ Has Known Our Exile

At the end of the first Epistle of Saint Paul to the Corinthians; "I shall know even as I have been known."

It is in the passion of Christ that God has proved to us that He has "known" us. That He recognized us in our misery. That He has found His lost image in our fallen state and reclaimed it for His own, cleansed in the charity of His Divine Son.

It is on the Cross that God has known us: that He has searched our souls with His compassion and experienced the full extent of capacity for wickedness: it is on the Cross that He has known our exile, and ended it, and brought us home to Him.

We have to return to Him through the same gate of charity by which He came to us. If we had to open the gate ourselves, we could never do it. He has done the work. It is for us to follow Him and enter in by all those things that go together to fulfill in us the law of charity, in which all virtues are complete.

February 14, 1953, II. 31-32

A Year With Thomas Merton - February 5

We Are Not Shadows of God

I cannot deny that it was a great joy to say the office in private, Lauds and Prime, especially with the sun coming up slowly and shining on the sunny pastures and on the pine woods of the dark knobs, which I see through the novitiate window. Lovely blue and mauve shadows on the snow, and the indescribably delicate color of the sunlit patches of snow. All the life of color is in the snow and the sky. The green of the pines is dull and brownish. The dead leaves, still clinging tenaciously to the white oaks, are also dull brown. The cold sky is very blue, and the air is dry and frozen so that, for the first time in years, I see and breathe the winters of New York and not the mild or ambivalent winters of Kentucky.

The strength of the cold, the austerity and power of the landscape, redeems the snow colors and delicate shadows from anything of pastel shading. I can think of no art that has rendered such things adequately--the nineteenth-century realists were so realistic as to be totally unlike what they painted. There is such a thing as too close a resemblance. In a way, nothing resembles reality less than the average photograph. Nothing resembles substance less than its shadow. To convey the meaning of something substantial, you have to use a sign, which is itself substantial and exists in its own right.

Man is the image of God and not the shadow of God.

February 17, 1958, III. 171

A Year With Thomas Merton - January 29

Going Nowhere, Having Nothing to Do

It is useless to simply substitute the "experience" of oneself as a hermit for the "experience" of oneself as active, as a "monk," as a "writer," etc. The same error is repeated in a new way. In reality the hermit life does imply a certain attrition of one's identity. In context a word that implies "loss of" identity. This must also be resisted: one does not live alone in order to become a vegetable. Yet the resistance does not take the form of asserting a social and evident identity of one who is going somewhere or doing something special. A curious kind of identity, then: "in God."

Merely living alone but continuing to engage in a lot of projects is not yet an authentic hermit life. The projects must go. Solitude demands an emptiness, an aimlessness, a going nowhere, a certain "having nothing to do," especially nothing that involves the growth and assertion of one's "image" and one's "career."

Distraction: the illusory expectation of some fulfillment, which in the end is only a human loneliness.

Were you not forever distracted by expectation, as if everything were announcing to you some (coming) beloved?

(Rainer Maria Rilke, 1st Duino Elegy)

January 29, 1966, VI.356-57