A Year With Thomas Merton - April 26

Heavenliness in the Nature of Things

Real spring weather--these are the precise days when everything changes. All the trees are fast beginning to be in leaf, and the first green freshness of a new summer is all over the hills. Irreplaceable purity of these days chosen by God as His sign!

Mixture of heavenliness and anguish. Seeing "heavenliness" suddenly, for instance, in the pure white of mature dogwood blossoms against the dark evergreens in the cloudy garden. "Heavenliness" too of the song of the unknown bird that is perhaps here only for these days, passing through, a lovely, deep, simple song. Seized by this "heavenliness" as if I were a child--a child's mind I have never done anything to deserve to have and which is my own part in the heavenly spring. Not of this world, or of my making. Born partly of physical anguish (which is not really there, though. It goes quickly). Sense that the "heavenliness" is the real nature of things, not their nature, but the fact they are a gift of love and of freedom.

April 23, 1964, V.99

A Year With Thomas Merton - February 17

Absent from the Wedding Feast

Today was the prophetic day, the first of the real shining spring: not that there was not warm weather last week, not that there will not be cold weather again. But this was the day of the year when spring became truly credible.

The morning got more and more brilliant and I could feel the brilliancy of it getting into my own blood. Living so close to the cold, you feel the spring. And this is man's mission! The earth cannot feel all this. We must. But living away from the earth and the trees, we fail them. We are absent from the wedding feast.

There are moments of great loneliness and lostness in this solitude, but often then come other, deeper moments of hope and understanding, and I realize that these would not be possible in their purity, their simple, secret directions anywhere but in solitude. I hope to be worthy of them.

After dinner, when I came back to the hermitage, the whole hillside was so bright and new that I wanted to cry out, and I got tears in my eyes from it!

With the new comes also memory: as if that which was once so fresh in the past (days of discovery when I was nineteen or twenty) were very close again, and as if one were beginning to live again from the beginning. One must experience spring like that. A whole new chance! A complete renewal!

February 17, 1966, VI.18-19

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