Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism - 18

pp. 83 – 85

“It was this re-discovery of Nature’s Christliness which Blake desired so passionately when he sang—

‘I will not cease from mental fight,

Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand

Till we have built Jerusalem

In England’s green and pleasant land.’”

“Quia per incarnate Verbi mysterium nova mentis nostrae oculis lux tuae claritatis infulsit: ut dum visibiliter Deum cognoscimus, per hunc in invisibilium amorem rapiamur.” …for through the Mystery of the Word made flesh, the new light of Thy glory hath shone upon the eyes of our mind so that while we acknowledge God in visible form, we may through Him be drawn to things invisible.

Says Underhill, “The essence of mystical Christianity seems to be summed up in these lovely words.”

They embrace both immanence and transcendence and begin to express their mutuality. This Incarnation is no commercial transaction, but is the Reveal of Reveals, the only Reality worth revealing.

A Year With Thomas Merton - April 22

My Old Freedom in the Silence of "What Is"

Once again the old freedom, the peace of being without care, of not being at odds with the real sense of my own existence and with God's grace to me. Far better and deeper than any consolation of eros. A sense of stability and substantiality--of not being deceived. Though I know there was much good in our love--M.'s and mine--I also see clearly how deceptive it was and how it made me continually lie to myself. How we both loved each other and lied to each other at the same time. How difficult it must be to keep going in truth in a marriage. Heroic! For me the other truth is better: the truth of simply getting along with eros and resting in the silence of "what is." The deep inner sustaining power of silence. When I taste this again, so surely, after so long, I know what it means to repent of my infidelity an foolishness; yet at the same time I do not try to build up again anything that was properly torn down. It was good that (we) went through the storm: it was the only way to learn a truth that was otherwise inaccessible.

All the old desires, the deep ones, the ones that are truly mine, come back now. Desire of silence, peace, depth, light. I see I have been foolish to let myself be so influenced by the current trends, though they perhaps have their point. On the other hand, I know where my roots really are--in the mystical tradition, not in the active and anxious secular city business. Not that I don't have an obligation to society. This evening on the porch I sang the Alleluias and the Introit of tomorrow's Mass.

April 10 and 15, 1967, VI.217-18

A Year With Thomas Merton - April 5

Baptized by Darkness

The darkness is thinning and expects the sun. Birds begin to sing. No Mass. Everything is waiting for the Resurrection.

At the end of night office, when the whole choir sank into the darkness of death and chanted without the faintest light, I thought of the darkness as a luxury, simplifying and unifying everything, hiding all the accidents that make one monk different from another monk, and submerging all distinctions in plain obscurity. Thus we are all one in the death of Christ. The darkness that descends upon us at the end of Lauds hears us sing the Benedictus, the canticle of thanksgiving for the Light who is to be sent. Now He is sent. He has come. He has descended into the far end of night, gathered our Fathers, the Patriarchs and Prophets, to Himself in Limbo. Now we will all be manifest. We will see one another with white garments, with palm branches in our hands. The darkness is like a font from which we shall ascend washed and illumined, to see one another, no longer separate, but one in the Risen Christ.

April 8, 1950, II.428

A Year With Thomas Merton - February 11

Sunlight on a Vase of Carnations

Beauty of the sunlight falling on a tall vase of red and white carnations and green leaves on the altar in the novitiate chapel. The light and shade of the red, especially in the darkness in the fresh crinkled flower and the light warm red around the darkness, the same color as blood but not "red as blood," utterly unlike blood. Red as a carnation. This flower, this light, this moment, this silence, = Dominus est, eternity! Best because the flower is itself and the light is itself and the silence is itself and I am myself--all, perhaps, an illusion, but no matter, for illusion is nevertheless the shadow of reality and reality is the grace that underlies these lights, these colors, and this silence.

The "simplicity" that would have kept those flowers off the altar is, to my mind, less simple than the simplicity that enjoys them there, but does not need them to be there.

February 4, 1958, III.164-65

A Year With Thomas Merton - November 30

On the Threshold of a Hard Winter

All day it has been deceptively like spring. Not only because of light and cool-warm air (warm with a slightly biting March-like wind) but because I fasted and it felt like Lent. Then in the evening (I had my meal about four instead of supper at five) it was suddenly much lighter, as thought it were March.

At noon, when I was not eating, I was out by St. Bernard's lake (which is surprisingly low) and the sky, hills, trees, kept taking on an air of clarity and freshness that took me back to springs twenty years ago when Lents were hard and I was new in the monastery.

Strange feeling! Recapturing the freshness of those days when my whole monastic life was ahead of me, when all was still open: but now it is all behind me, and the years have closed in upon their silly, unsatisfactory history, one by one. But the air is like spring and fresh as ever. And I was amazed at it. Had to stop to gaze and wonder: loblolly pines we planted ten or fifteen years ago are twenty feet high. The first tower shines in the sun like new--though it was up ten years ago (with what hopes, on my part!). Flashing water of the lake. A blue jay flying down as bright as metal. I went over to the wood where the Jonathan Daniel sculptures are now, and read some selections from Origen. And again stood amazed at the quiet, the bright sun, the spring-like light. The sharp outline of the pasture. Knolls, the brightness of bare trees in the hopeful sun. And yet it is not spring. We are the threshold of a hard winter.

November 25, 1967, VII.15

A Year With Thomas Merton - November 25

Experiences of Seeing

At Mass, which was all before sunrise and without lights, the quality, the "spirituality" of the predawn light on the altar was extraordinary. Silence in the chapel and that pure, pearl light! What could be a more beautiful liturgical sign than to have such light as witness of the Mystery?

Wild grey kitten among the dead leaves in the garden, fleeing to the hole in the wall. Sun on the building work, the waterhouse. Dead leaves.

Hawk on the way up to the hermitage, over the cedars in the low bushy place where the quails were (were!!). He circled four or five times, spreading his tail, which shone rusty in the light, and he flashed silver like the dove in the psalm, when sun caught him under the wings.

November 25, 26, and 27, 1962, IV. 267-69

A Year With Thomas Merton - July 7

A Splendor of Light

In Louisville some weeks ago I found the new D. T. Suzuki anthology—really a thorough “Reader,” and since reading it, I am almost irresistibly tempted to write him another letter. Poor good old man. I know he must be flooded with mail, as I am, and that he does what I do: puts the letters in a big box and forgets them.

Asked to speak in a “scientific” symposium on “New Knowledge in Human Values,” he handled it with consummate wisdom and latent humor, the serious, humble, matter-of-fact humor of emptiness: “If anything new can come out of human values it is from the cup of tea taken by two monks.”

Antigone and stoical tropes of St. Eucherius on contemptus mundi—the rejection of the world: the beauty of his prose. How the heavens observe the laws of God when they have been once commanded and we, with volumes of laws, do not obey Him.

This morning, the indescribable magnificence of the dawn. Cirrus clouds on the horizon, first glowing with angry and subtle purple fire, then growing into a great mottled curtain of iridescent flame, of what color I don’t know. But off to the south, a pile of mottled grey with all kinds of delicate pink highlights in it, like some Oriental porcelain.

St. Eucherius on that sunrise! “Think how much more the splendor of the light will be for us in the future, if it shines upon us so brilliantly now. In what magnificent form will the light shine on eternal things, when it shines so beautifully now on what is passing away!”

July 24 and 28, 1962, IV.388-34

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eucherius_of_Lyon

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._T._Suzuki

A Year With Thomas Merton - June 5

Holding On to Nothing

God is using everything that happens to lead me into solitude. Every creature that enters my life, every instant of my days is designed to touch me with the sense of the world’s insufficiency. And that goes for every created thing, including monasteries, including even sensible graces, lights of the mind, ideas, fervor in the will. Everything I touch cauterizes me with a light and healing burn. I can hold to nothing.

It is useless to get upset over these things that pain me. The pain is the token and pledge of God’s love for me. It is the promise of His deep and perfect solitude.

Today I seemed to be very much assured that this solitude is indeed His will for me, and that it is truly He Who is calling me into the desert. Not necessarily a geographical one, but the solitude of His own heart in Which all created joys and light and satisfactions are annihilated and consumed.

Things that should have satisfied me, but did not.

June 13, 1947, II.83

A Year With Thomas Merton - May 25

Hang On To The Clear Light!

In our monasteries we have been content to find our ways to a kind of peace, a simple, undisturbed, thoughtful life. And this is certainly good, but is it good enough?

I, for one, realize that now I need more. Not simply to be quiet, somewhat productive, to pray, to read, to cultivate leisure—otium sanctum—a holy leisure. There is a need for effort, deepening, change and transformation. Not that I must undertake a special project of self-transformation or that I must “work on myself.” In that regard, it would be better to forget it. Just to go for walks, live in peace, let change come quietly and invisibly on the inside.

But I do have a past to break with, an accumulation of inertia, waste, wrong, foolishness, rot, junk, a great need of clarification, of mindfulness, or rather of no mind—a return to genuine practice, right effort, need to push on to the great doubt. Need for the spirit.

Hang on to the clear light!

May 30, 1968, VII.113