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 - February 20

Solitude Is a Stern Mother

I see more and more that solitude is not something to play with. It is deadly serious. And much as I have wanted it, I have not been serious enough. It is not enough to "like solitude," or love it even. Even if you "like" it, it can wreck you, I believe, if you desire it only for your own sake. So I go forward (I don't believe I would go back. Even interiorly I have reached, at least relatively, a point of no return), but I go in fear and trembling, and often with a sense of lostness, and trying to be careful what I do because I am beginning to see that every false step is paid for dearly. Hence I fall back on prayer, or try to. Yet no matter, there is great beauty and peace in this life of silence and emptiness. But to fool around brings awful desolation. When one is trifling, even the beauty of the solitary life becomes implacable. Solitude is a stern mother who brooks no nonsense. The question arises: am I so full of nonsense that she will cast me out? I pray not, and think it is going to take much prayer. February 26, 1965, V.211

A Year With Thomas Merton - January 17

Weary of Words

Zero weather. Good work yesterday afternoon with the novices, cutting wood at the hermitage. Bright and cold. I went over to the Methodist Seminary at Asbury.

On the way over and back, stopped to take pictures at Shakertown. Marvelous, silent, vast spaces around the old buildings. Cold, pure light, and some grand trees. So cold my finger could no longer feel the shutter release. Some marvelous subjects. How the blank side of a frame house can be so completely beautiful I cannot imagine. A completely miraculous achievement of forms.

The moments of eloquent silent and emptiness in Shakertown stayed with me more than anything else--like a vision.

Tired of war, tired of letters, tired of books. Shaving today, saw new lines under the eyes, a new hollowness, a beginning of weariness. So it is good.

What matters most is secret, not said. This begins to be the most real and the most certain dimension.

I had been secretly worried about my writing, especially on peace, getting condemned. Nothing to worry about. Whenever I am really wrong, it will be easy enough to change. But it is strange that such things should be regarded with suspicion. I know this is wrong. Weary of blindness, of this blindness that afflicts all men, but most of all of the blindness afflicting those who ought to see.

January 12 and 19, 1962, IV.194-95

A Year With Thomas Merton - January 15

One Dog's Good Afternoon

This afternoon--a quiet walk in the sun: again down by St. Bernard's pond. The Gannons' dog tagged along--the pretty collie bitch with a feathery tail--running busily into everything, immense interest in all kinds of smells, mysteries, secrets in the bushes and in the grass. She ran on the melting ice, rolled in the manure spread over the pasture (rolled twice!), came out of the brush with her tail full of dead leaves, and, in a final paroxysm of energy, chased a cat into the cow barn. A completely successful afternoon for her anyway!!

I had Martin Buber's Ten Rungs in my pocket and couldn't read a line of it, only looked at the sun, the dead grass, the green soft ice, the blue sky, and felt utterly blank. Will there never be any peace on earth in our lifetime? Will they never do anything but kill, and then kill some more? Apparently they are caught in that impasse: the system is completely violent and involved in violence, and there is no way out but violence, and that leads only to more violence. Really--what is ahead but the apocalypse?

January 26, 1968, VII.47

A Year With Thomas Merton - January 3

New Year's Darkness

The year struggles with its own blackness.

Dark, wet mush of snow under frozen rain for two days. Everything is curtained in purple greyness and ice. Fog gets in the throat. A desolation of wetness and waste, turning to mud.

Only New Year's Day was bright. Very cold. Everything hard and sparkling, trees heavy with snow. I went for a walk up the side of the Vineyard Knob, on the road to the fire tower, in secret hope of "raising the sparks" (as the Hassidim say), and they rose a little. It was quiet, but too bright, as if this celebration belonged not to the New Year or to any year.

More germane to this new year is darkness, wetness, ice and cold, the scent of illness.

But maybe this is good. Who can tell?

The morning was dark, with a harder bluer darkness than yesterday. The hills stood out stark and black, the pines were black over thin pale sheets of snow. A more interesting and tougher murkiness. Snowflakes began to blow when I went down to the monastery from the hermitage, but by 10:30 the sun was fairly out and it was rapidly getting colder.

Evening--new moon--snow hard crackling and squealing under my rubber boots. The dark pines over the hermitage. The graceful black fans and branches of the tall oaks between my field and the monastery. I said Compline and looked at the cold valley and tasted its peace. Who is entitled to such peace? I don't know. But I would be foolish to leave it for no reason.

January 3 and 4, 1968, VII.32-33

A Year With Thomas Merton - December 1

Advent Weather

It is beautiful Advent weather, greyish and cold, with clouds of light snow howling across the valley, and I see it is really winter. I put some bread out for the birds.

I feel closer to my beginning than ever, and perhaps I am near my end. The Advent hymns sound as they first did, as if they were the nearest things to me that ever were, as if they had been decisive in shaping my heart and my life, as if I had received their form, as if there could never be any other melodies so deeply connatural to me. They are myself, words and melody and everything. So also the Rorate Coeli that brought me here to pray for peace. I have not prayed for it well enough, or been pure enough in heart, or wise enough. And today, before the Blessed Sacrament, I was ashamed of my impertinences and the deep infidelities of my life, rooted in weakness and confusion.

Yesterday, I celebrated my Mass for the new generation, the new poets, the fighters for peace, and my novices. There is in many of them a peculiar quality of truth that older squares have driven out of themselves in a days of rigidity and secure right thinking. May God keep us from being "right thinking" men, who think, that is, with their own police (and since the police don't think, neither do these others).

December 9, 1962, IV.272-73

A Year With Thomas Merton - November 28

An American Mysticism

At midnight I woke up, and there was a great noise of wind and storm. Rain was rolling over the roof of the hermitage heavy as a freight train. The porch was covered with water and there was a lot of lightning. Now at dawn the sky is clean and all is cold again (yesterday warm). Yesterday I read some article on psychedelics. There is a regular fury of drug-mysticism in this country. I am in a way appalled. Mysticism has finally arrived in a characteristic American mode. One feels that this is certainly it. The definitive turn in the road taken by American religion. The turn I myself will not take (don't need to!). This leaves my own road quieter and more untroubled, I hope. Certainly the great thing, as I see it now, is to get out of all the traffic: peace movement traffic, political traffic, Church traffic. All of it! Big peace protest in Washington (against Vietnam War) today. I am fasting and praying for them, and offering no hosannas of my own.

November 27, 1965, V.318-19

A Year With Thomas Merton - November 16

Through Faith and Fire

(Merton is baptized a Roman Catholic at Corpus Christi Church in New York City on November 16, 1938)

The chief thing that struck me today before the Blessed Sacrament: I have put my fingers too much in the running of my own life.

I put myself in God's hands, and take myself out again to read just everything to suit my own judgment. On that condition I abandon myself to Him.

Consequence? We seek the good and behold we find disturbance. We say "Peace! Peace!" and there is not Peace!

Jesus, I put myself in Your hands. I rest in Your wisdom, which has arranged all things for me. I promise to stop jumping out of Your arms to try and walk on my own feet, forgetting that I am no longer on the ground, or near it!

Now, at last, let me begin to live by faith. "Seek first, therefore, the kingdom of God."

November 16, 1947, II.134

A Year With Thomas Merton - November 7

Working for Peace

I must pray more and more for courage, as I certainly have neither the courage nor the strength to follow the path that is certainly my duty now.

With the fears and rages that possess so many confused people, if I say things that seem to threaten their interests or conflict with obsessions, then I will surely get it.

It is shocking that so many are convinced that the Communists are about to invade or destroy America: "Christians" who think the only remedy is to destroy them first. Who thinks seriously of disarming? For whom is it more than a pious wish, beyond the bounds of practicality?

I need patience to listen, to learn, to try to understand, and courage to take all the consequences and be really faithful. This alone is a full-time job. I dread it, but it must be done, and I don't quite know how. To save my soul by trying to be one of those who spoke and worked for peace, not for madness and destruction.

November 12, 1961, IV.179

A Year With Thomas Merton - July 21

Letting Go of the Perfect

Very hot. The birds sing and the monks sweat and about 3:15 I stood in the doorway of the grand parlor and looked at a huge pile of Kentucky cumulus cloud out beyond Mount Olivet—with a buzzard lazily going back and forth over the sheep pasture, very high and black against the white mountain of the cloud. Blue shadows on the cloud.

On the Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, our Lady made me happy in many different ways. At prayer—aware of God’s purity surrounding my own imperfection with purity and peace. Yet helpless to get myself out of the way so that there could be nothing left but His purity. No other solution but to wait in love and humility and love my imperfection.

All my desires draw me more and more in a direction: to be little, to be nothing, to rejoice in your imperfections, to be glad that you are not worthy of attention, that you are of no account in the universe. This is the only liberation, the only way to solitude.

As long as I continue to take myself seriously, how can I be a saint, a contemplative? As long as I continue to bother about myself, what happiness is possible in life? For the self that I bother about doesn’t really exist and never will and never did, except in my own imagination.

July 18, 1948, II.219

A Year With Thomas Merton - June 9

Something More than Reefers

If we are ever going to have peace again, we will have to hate war for some better reason than that we fear to lose our houses, or our refrigerators, or our cars, or our legs, or our lives. If we are ever to get peace, we have got to desire something more than reefers and anesthetics—but that is all we seem to want: anything to avoid pain.

It is terrifying that the world doesn’t wake up to this irony: that at a time when all our desire is nothing but to have pleasant sensations and avoid painful sensations, there should be almost more pain and suffering and brutality and horror, and more helplessness to do anything about it, than there ever was before!

June 25, 1940, I.233

Basic: the struggle for lucidity, out of which compassion can at last arise. Then you are free. That is, you are lost: there is no self to save. You simply love. Free of desire for oneself, desiring only lucidity for oneself and others.

June 20, 1966, VI.323-24