A Year With Thomas Merton - January 19

Reality and the Ordinary

Still very cold and bright.

The best thing about the retreat has been working in the pig barn and then walking back alone, a mile and a half, through the snow.

I think I have come to see more clearly and more seriously the meaning, or lack of meaning, in my life. How much I am still the same self-willed and volatile person who made such a mess of Cambridge. That I have not changed yet, down in the depths, or, perhaps yes, I have changed radically somewhere, yet I have still kept some of the old, vain, inconstant, self-centered ways of looking at things. And that the situation I am in now has been given me to change me, if I will only surrender completely to reality as it is given me by God and no longer seek in any way to evade it, even by interior reservations.

Here at the hermitage, in deep snow, everything is ordinary and silent. Return to reality and to the ordinary, in silence. It is always there, if you know enough to return to it.

What is not ordinary--the tension of meeting people, discussion, ideas. This too is good and real, but illusion gets into it. The unimportant becomes important. Words and images become more important than life.

One travels all over vast areas, sitting still in a room, and one is soon tired of so much traveling.

I need very much this silence and this snow. Here alone can I find my way because here alone the way is right in front of my face and it is God's way for me--there really is no other.

January 25 and 28, 1963, IV.293-95

A Year With Thomas Merton - November 9

Living in the Face of Death

Our great dignity is tested by death--I mean our freedom. When the "parting of the ways" comes--to set one's foot gladly on the way that leads out of this world. This is a great gift of ourselves, not to death but to life. For he who knows how to die not only lives longer in this life (as if it matters) but lives eternally because of his freedom.

Never has man's helplessness in the face of death been more pitiable than in this age when he can do everything except escape death. If he were unable to escape so many other things, man would face death better.

But our power has only strengthened our illusion that we can cling to life without taking away our unconscious fear of death. We are always holding death at arm's length, unconsciously trying to think ourselves out of its presence. This generates an intolerable tension that makes us all the more quickly its victims. It is he who does not fear death who is more ready not to escape it, and, when the time comes, he faces it well.

So he who faces death can be happy in this life and in the next, and he who does not face it has no happiness in either. This is a central and fundamental reality of life, whether one is or is not a "believer" --for this "facing" of death implies already a faith and an uprightness of heart and the presence of Christ, whether one thinks of it or not. (I do not refer to the desperateness of the tough guy, but only to the sincerity of an honest and sober and sensitive person, assuming responsibility for his whole life in gladness and freedom.)

November 25, 1958, III.232

A Year With Thomas Merton - August 14

Tasting the Real

Cool. Cows lowing in the mist. Long but rich night office. “Mary has chosen the better part.” My love for the great responsories.

A seventeenth-century Carmelite attacked Jean Mabillon the French Maurist Benedictine, for his criterion of historical judgment. He asserted that long familiarity with charters and manuscripts gave one a quasi-instinctive “taste” by which one could detect fabrications and falsifications. This, said the critic, was pure subjectivism. And the “objectivity” to which he appealed was that of accepted norms. What had always been regarded as genuine was genuine, because this was the tradition of the Church and the work of God. So too, the appeal to “law” sometimes.

Yet who can guarantee that he has developed the right “instinctive” taste for the real? So the accepted view cannot be disregarded. But it need not be blindly received as final.

The Lespedeza hedge we planted ten or fifteen years ago was blooming with delicate, heather-like purple blossoms, and bees were busy in them. An entirely beautiful, transfigured moment of love for God and the need for complete confidence in Him in everything, without reserve, even when almost nothing is understood.

August 15 and 16, 1963, V.9

A Year With Thomas Merton - July 28

Entering the School of My Life

During the night office and morning meditation, seeing that my whole life is a struggle to seek the truth (at least, I want it to be so) and that the truth is found in the reality of my own life as it is given to me, and that it is found by complete consent and acceptance. Not at all by defeat, by mere passive resignation, by mere inert acceptance of evil and falsity (which are nevertheless unavoidable), but by “creative” consent, in my deepest self, to the will of God, which is expressed in my own self and my own life. And indeed there is a sense in which my own deepest self is in God and even expresses Him, as “word.” Such is the deep meaning of our Sonship.

Gradually I will come more and more to transcend the limitations of the world and of the society to which I belong—while fully accepting my own little moment in history, such as it is.

To be detached from all systems, and without rancor towards them, but with insight and compassion. To be truly “catholic” is to be able to enter into everybody’s problems and joys and be all things to all men.

July 31, 1961, IV.146