A Year With Thomas Merton - November 27

One Small Miracle in a Day of Noise

A lovely afternoon but full of noise. Reading after dinner--snatches from the Dhammapada--I thought of this clear sky and how it must be like Mexican sky.

And now, noise everywhere. Hammers all over the roof of the east wing--the buzz saw cutting hickory for the smokehouses. Novices kicking pigs. A huge road-grader sent by the politicians, roaring up and down significantly on the day before elections. ("Get out the vote," says the Abbot. "Show them that we have power!")

Sick of writing, sick of letters, sick of self-expression.

Silence and solitude and peace.

Even if everything else is noise, I can be silent within my own house.

Read a little about the Indians who make lacquer at Patzcuaro. The Night of All Souls is a great night on the Island of Juntzio (Sibylle Akers's photographs of the Indian women sitting with candles on the graves, with food).

Hurray! The buzz saw has broken down!

November 2, 1959, III.338-39

A Year With Thomas Merton - October 6

Praying Through the Noise

The offices at night have been fine. I have slept more and have a clearer head to attend to the Word of God.

Yet it is surprising that I do not lose more sleep, as there is a bulldozer working day and night in the corn fields, in the bottomlands, and I sleep next to the window right over those fields. What are they doing? Can't they be content to let the creek wind the way it always did? Does it have to be straight? Really, we monks are madmen, bitten by an awful folly, an obsession with useless and expensive improvements.

To the east, then, the bulldozer day and night. The noise never stops. To the west, the dehydrator. The noise stops perhaps at midnight. A layman drives the bulldozer, our brothers work at the dehydrator.

To the northwest--a pump, day and night. Never stops. There is nothing making any noise to the south, but then to the south the monks' property soon comes to an end, and there are only lay people whose lives are generally quiet. They only speak. We make "signs," but drown everything in the noise of our machines. One would think our real reason for making "signs" might be that it is not always easy to be heard.

October 19, 1961, IV.170-71

A Year With Thomas Merton - June 14

John Wu and the Tao Pay a Visit

An indigo bunting flies down and grasps the long, swinging stem of a tiger lily and reaches out, from them, to eat the dry seed on top of a stalk of grass. A Chinese painting!

New tractors each year, and each one makes more noise than the last. The one in the valley now sounds like a big bulldozer. Round and round the alfalfa field, in fury. What thoughts it represents, what fury of man, what restlessness, what avidity, what despair.

Around and around it goes, clacking its despair.

John Wu arrived for a visit.

The great simple spirituality of John Wu, who knows Tao and the Logos and the Spirit. Flashes of wit and depth in the things he said, with much searching for words and matter, and his complaints that the Holy Ghost had gone to sleep.

For instance—that suffering is the core of existence.

That we monks can laugh in this monastery as men who know nothing worse can befall them.

He made some astute remarks about pragmatism in the “contemplative life” when questioned about what was “dangerous” to monks in America (the questioner wanted him to say something else, perhaps about love of comfort).

June 15, 16, and 26, 1962, IV.228-29