A Year With Thomas Merton - February 25

Christ Has Known Our Exile

At the end of the first Epistle of Saint Paul to the Corinthians; "I shall know even as I have been known."

It is in the passion of Christ that God has proved to us that He has "known" us. That He recognized us in our misery. That He has found His lost image in our fallen state and reclaimed it for His own, cleansed in the charity of His Divine Son.

It is on the Cross that God has known us: that He has searched our souls with His compassion and experienced the full extent of capacity for wickedness: it is on the Cross that He has known our exile, and ended it, and brought us home to Him.

We have to return to Him through the same gate of charity by which He came to us. If we had to open the gate ourselves, we could never do it. He has done the work. It is for us to follow Him and enter in by all those things that go together to fulfill in us the law of charity, in which all virtues are complete.

February 14, 1953, II. 31-32

A Year With Thomas Merton - February 19

Healing Our Flesh

Lent is a sunlit season.

Carnivale--farewell to the flesh. It is a poor joke to be merry about leaving the flesh, as if we were to return to it once again. What would be the good of Lent, if it were only temporary?

Jesus nevertheless died in order to return to His flesh; in order to raise His own body glorious from the dead, and in order to raise our bodies with Him. "Unless the grain of wheat, falling into the ground, dies, itself remains alone." So we cast off the flesh, not out of contempt, but in order to heal the flesh in the mercy of penance and restore it to the Spirit to which it belongs. And all creation waits in anguish for our victory and our bodies' glory.

God wills us to recover all the joys of His created world in the Spirit, by denying ourselves what is really no joy--what only ends in the flesh. "The flesh profits nothing."

February 17, 1953, III.33