A Year With Thomas Merton - January 24

Moments of Angelic Lucidity

I went down to the spring that feeds the stream running through Edelin's pasture. Wonderful clear water pouring strongly out of a cleft in the mossy rock. I drank from it in my cupped hands and suddenly realized it was years, perhaps twenty-five or thirty years since I had tasted such water, no chemicals!! I looked up at the clear sky and the tops of the leafless trees shining in the sun: it was a moment of angelic lucidity. Said Tierce with great joy, overflowing joy, as if the land and woods and spring were all praising God through me. The sense of angelic transparency of everything, and of pure, simple, and total light. The word that comes closest to pointing to it is simple. It was all simple. But a simplicity to which one seems to aspire, only seldom to attain. A simplicity, that is, that has and says everything just because it is simple.

January 6, 1965, V.187

A Year With Thomas Merton - December 12

A Simple Benedictine Life

Benedictine life is perfectly simple--it is the Gospel pure and simple--it liberates us from ourselves by enabling us to give ourselves entirely to God.

I give myself completely to God. He draws me more and more to that. I cannot know what lies ahead for me, for us, but more and more I realize God wants me to put myself in His hands, and let Him take me through the things that are to come, and I must learn to trust Him without fear, or questions, or hesitations, or withdrawal.

Yesterday, in the infirmary, old Brother Gregory lay dying.

And today it was very beautiful, warmish with the sun out and little neat clouds high up in the sky and the brown dirt piled high on top of Brother Gregory, who turns out to have been Swiss. And one day here a bull got playful and tossed him over a stone wall and that was why he always limped.

I asked Reverend Father what made Brother so saintly, and he said, "He was always working, never idle. When he was out tending the cows in the pasture, he would come back with a bucket of blackberries. He couldn't be idle." I might have known what kind of answer I would get!

December 14, 16, and 18, 1947, II.145-47