A Year With Thomas Merton - April 16

Death in the Newspapers

There is so much death in the newspapers that no one dies in them anymore and no one lives in them.  There are neither lives nor deaths in our press, only a stream of words passing over the living and the dead without ever touching them.

In the monastery, or at any rate in choir, I have been forgetting how to think--and only in the past few days have I woken up to the fact that this is very dangerous!  I mean the constant, habitual passivity we get into.  No matter how honest the surroundings and how clean the doctrine believed in them, no man can afford to be passive and to restrict his thinking to a new rehearsal, in his own mind, of what is being repeated all around him.

But we are not as honest as we think, and our doctrine is not as pure as we hope it is.  I least of all can afford to be passive in this place.

One must constantly be asking himself--"What do I mean by this?  Am I saying what I mean?  Have I understood what this implies?  Have I some notion of the consequences of what I am saying?"  I am particularly bad on the last question because usually I think on paper, that is, I often do not really know what I think until it is set out before me in black and white: then I can agree or disagree.

April 30 and May 2, 1958, III.198-99

A Year With Thomas Merton - June 20

What I Fear Most

There has to be a real fear by which one orients his life. What you fear is an indication of what you seek. What do I fear most? Forgetting and ignorance of the inmost truth of my being. To forget who I am, to be lost in what I am not, to fail my own inner truth, to get carried away in what is not true to me, what is outside me, what imposes itself on me from outside. But what is this? It can take manifold forms. I must fear and distrust them all. Yet I cannot help being to some extent influenced by what is outside me, and hence I must accept that influence to some extent. But always in such a way that it increases my awareness, my remembrance, my understanding, instead of diminishing these.

Fear of ignorance in the sense of avidya: the ignorance that is based on the acceptance of an illusion about myself. The ignorance that comes from the decision to regard my ego as my full, complete, real self, and to work to maintain this illusion against the call of secret truth that rises up within me, that is evoked within me by others, by love, by vocation, by providence, by suffering, by God. The ignorance that hardens the shell, that makes the inner core of selfhood determined to resist the call of truth that would dissolve it. The ignorance that hardens in desire and willfulness, or in conformity, or in hate, or in various refusals of people, various determinations to be “right at any price” (the Vietnam War is a clear example of the American people’s insistence on refusing to see human truth).

June 22, 1966, VI.332