A Year With Thomas Merton - March 21

Christ Is My Own Kind

In Louisville I bought marvelous books for a few pennies--including The Family of Man for fifty cents. All those fabulous pictures. And again, no refinements and no explanation are necessary! How scandalized some would be if I said that this whole book is to me a picture of Christ, and yet that is the Truth. There, there is Christ in my own Kind, my own Kind--Kind, "likeness" and which means "love" and which means "child." Mankind. Like one another, the dear "Kind" of sinners united and embraced in only one heart, in only one Kindness, which is the Heart and Kindness of Christ. I do not look for sin in you, Mankind. I do not see sin in you anymore today (though we are all sinners). There is something too real to allow sin any longer to seem important, to seem to exist, for it has been swallowed up, it has been destroyed, it is gone, and there is only the great secret between us that we are all one Kind, and what matters is not what this or that one has committed in his heart, separate from the others, but the love that brings him back to all the others in the one Christ, and this love is not our love but the Divine Bridegroom's. It is the Divine Power and the Divine Joy--and God is seen and reveals Himself as man, that is, in us, and there no other hope of finding wisdom than in God-manhood: our own manhood transformed in God!

March 19, 1958, III.182-83

A Year With Thomas Merton - February 8

Sealed Together in Christ

Can one say that by love the soul receives the very "form" of God? In St. Bernard of Clairvaux's language, this form, this divine likeness, is the identity we were made for. Thus we can say, Caritas haec visio, haec similitudo est: "Charity is this vision and this likeness." By love we are at once made like to God, and (in mystical love, pure love) we already "see" Him (darkly), that is, we have experience of Him as He is in himself, and wisdom is the medium quo cognoscitur: "the medium by which He is known." The soul knows God in this effect, this love, in the same way (analogously) as it knows itself in the consciousness of its own existence and activity. I know God because I am aware of His life in me, and the Spirit bears witness to my conscience, crying out that God is my Father. Thus by loving we know God in God, and through God, for in love the Three Divine Persons are made known to us, sealing our souls, not with a static likeness, but with the impression of Their infinite Life. Our souls are sealed with the character of God as the air is full of sunshine. Glory to God in the highest, Who has sealed us with His holiness, sealed us all together, brothers and sisters in His Christ.

February 12, 1950, II.409