A Year With Thomas Merton - February 26

Our Blindness

Although it is almost unbelievable to imagine this country being laid to waste, yet that is very probably what is going to happen.

Without serious reason, without people "wanting" it, and without them being able to prevent it, because of their incapacity to use the power they have acquired, they must be used by it.

Hence the absolute necessity of taking this fact soberly into account and living in the perspectives that it establishes--an almost impossible task.

1. Preeminence of meditation and prayer, of self-emptying, cleaning out, getting rid of the self that blocks the view of truth. The self that says it will be here and then that it will not be here.

2. Preeminence of compassion for every living thing, for life, for the defenseless and simple beings, for the human race in its blindness. For Christ, crucified in His image. Eucharistic sacrifice, without justification.

3. Weariness of words, except in friendship, and in the simplest and most direct kind of communication, by word of mouth or letter.

4. Preeminence of the silent and inconclusive action--if any presents itself. And meaningful suffering, accepted in complete silence, without justification.

February 27, 1962, IV.205-6

A Year With Thomas Merton - December 6

This Precious Poverty

I think more and more in terms of self-emptying and self-forgetfulness--but not in order merely to drown in a communal superstition and hopelessness. To renounce myself to serve truth and patiently to minister to individuals who, one by one, come needing help. To see their need, and try to minister to it, and not worry about results, or rewards. Ecce!--Behold!

Evening: rain, silence, joy.

I am certain that where the Lord sees the small point of poverty and extenuation and helplessness to which the monk is reduced, the solitary and the man of tears, then He must come down and be born there in this anguish, and make it constantly a point of infinite joy, a seed of peace in the world. And this is, and always has been, my mission. There is for me no truth and no sense in anything that conceals from me this precious poverty, this seed of tears and joy. I have a right to speak to others in so far as I speak to the same truth in them, and assuage their doubts, and make them strong in this small point of exhaustion in which the Lord becomes their wisdom and their life everlasting. What do the Psalms say but this?

"Be firm, you will see the help of the Lord upon you!"

How deep is this truth, how tremendously important!

December 25, 1962, IV.280-81