A Year With Thomas Merton - May 15

When Everything Is Wet

Nothing can spoil this morning. The rain has stopped. The birds sing and starlings pursue a crow across the grey sky. Clouds still hang low over the woods. It's cool.

The whiskey barrels by the woodshed stand or lie in wetness, one of them with wet weeds up the navel, others rolling in the smoked chips of wood and bark.

Someone has sawed a keg in half, and it is one of the most beautiful objects on the property at the moment. An example of wabi-sabi (simplicity) that Suzuki talks about. With joy, yesterday, I smelled the charred barrel. How beautiful to see it catch rain.

Yesterday I was bitter for a while, growling to myself. "Yes, we have the Holy Ghost all right--in a cage with His wings clipped." But later, during the Gospel, the "Let not your heart be disturbed" came through into my heart as if especially directed to me and I remembered there was no need to be bitter or to worry, or even to notice what appears to me to be senseless in our life here.

I do not have to react. It is useless. There are much better things to do. And to react is to become implicated--to become a prisoner of the same nonsense that I am compelled to condemn. Do not be compelled.

Here comes a small, shining rabbit. A kingbird gurgles and chortles in the cedars. Everything is wet.

May 18, 1959, III.281-82

A Year With Thomas Merton - April 14

Bearing Witness to What Is Simple

Is there not a false eschatology of the "new heaven and new earth" which places its hope in the power of science to transform earth and heaven into places of happiness and bliss? (With God or without Him for that matter.) Is the true prospect rather that the stupidity and pride of man will ruin the earth, and that God will restore it through charity and the tears of the poor, the "remnant" and the saints? I am not saying this false eschatology is in the article of K. V. Truhlar's, which has excellent things in it--but theologians occupied with the Christian and the world are not sufficiently aware of what technology is doing to the world and, in failing to make distinctions, they tend to embrace all manifestations of progress without question in "turning to the world" and in "Christian temporal action." Hence inevitably we get Christians in the U. S. supporting a criminally stupid military adventure in Vietnam.

There is no question for me that my one job as monk is to live the hermit life in simple, direct contact with nature, primitively, quietly, doing some writing, maintaining such contacts as are willed by God, and bearing witness to the value and goodness of simple things and ways, and loving God in it all. I am more convinced of this than of anything contingent upon my life, and I am sure it is what He asks of me. Yet I do not always respond with simplicity.

A Year With Thomas Merton - February 11

Sunlight on a Vase of Carnations

Beauty of the sunlight falling on a tall vase of red and white carnations and green leaves on the altar in the novitiate chapel. The light and shade of the red, especially in the darkness in the fresh crinkled flower and the light warm red around the darkness, the same color as blood but not "red as blood," utterly unlike blood. Red as a carnation. This flower, this light, this moment, this silence, = Dominus est, eternity! Best because the flower is itself and the light is itself and the silence is itself and I am myself--all, perhaps, an illusion, but no matter, for illusion is nevertheless the shadow of reality and reality is the grace that underlies these lights, these colors, and this silence.

The "simplicity" that would have kept those flowers off the altar is, to my mind, less simple than the simplicity that enjoys them there, but does not need them to be there.

February 4, 1958, III.164-65

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 - January 2 [32nd birthday of Marie Claire Chateau Allen]

The Silence in Yourself

Yesterday it looked like snow. Today there is deep snow, and the sun is out, and the cedars full of snow stand up against a bright blue sky and the white hills are in a sort of haze and the abbey buildings are golden. That is the way Gethsemani looks in winter and Frater Linus's box of Kodachromes is full of just such pictures.

Yesterday, when I was reading in the cemetery, I thought how the silence you find in yourself, when you enter in and rest in God, is always the same and always new, even though it is unchanging. For that silence is true life and, even though your body moves around (as mine did vigorously, being cold), your soul stays in the same place, resting in its life Who is God, now in winter just as it did before in summer, without any apparent difference, as if nothing had changed at all, and the passage of seasons had only been an illusion.

For the first time since the beginning of December, I went out to work to let some fresh air into my stuffy head and let a few phantasms fly away into the trees. We broke rock down on the road to the lower bottom, outside the enclosure, past the horse barn. How good it was to be out working with my brothers! and I felt this even about those who ordinarily rub me the wrong way! How good it is to have a rule in which simplicity and poverty and hardship play so large a part so that you can give yourself up to God by it!

January 17 and 21, 1948, II.158-59

A Year With Thomas Merton - January 1

A Breath of Zen

Fidelity to grace in my life is fidelity to simplicity, rejecting ambition and analysis and elaborate thought, or even elaborate concern.

A breath of Zen blows all these cobwebs out the window.

It is certainly true that what is needed is to get back to the "original face" and drop off all the piled-up garments of thought that do not fit me and are not "mine"--but to take only what is nameless.

I have been absurdly burdened since the beginning of the year with the illusions of "great responsibility" and of a task to be done. Actually whatever work is to be done is God's work and not mine, and I will not help matters, only hinder them, by too much care.

Sunrise--an event that calls forth solemn music in the very depths of one's being, as if one's whole being had to attune itself to the cosmos and praise God for a new day, praise Him in the name of all the beings that ever were or ever will be--as though now upon me falls the responsibility of seeing what all my ancestors have seen, and acknowledging it, and praising God, so that, whether or not they praised God back then, themselves, they can do so now in me.

Sunrise demands this rightness, this order, this true disposition of one's whole being.

January 20-21, 1963, IV.291-92

A Year With Thomas Merton - October 15

Walking on Water

Whether we live or die, we are the Lord's. Life and death alike can be offered up as penance. I can make reparations for my impiety by living as perfectly as I can the Rule and Spirit of St. Benedict--obedience, humility, work, prayer, simplicity, the love of Christ.

The light of truth burns without a flicker in the depths of a house that is shaken with storms of passion and of fear. "You will not fear the terror of the night." And so I go on trying to walk on the waters of the breakdown. Worse than ever before and better than ever before. It is always painful and reassuring when he who I am not is visibly destroyed by the hand of God in order that the simplicity in the depths of me, which is His image, may be set free to serve Him in peace. Sometimes in the midst of all this I am tremendously happy, and I have never in my life begun to be so grateful for His mercy.

And no more professional spirituality! Terrifically purged of ideas about prayer, and of all desire to preach them, as if I had something!

October 22, 1952, III.22

A Year With Thomas Merton - August 27

A Blessed Shipwreck in God's Simplicity
I copy out the sentences from Dom Porion's letter, which I spoke of the other day. Speaking of his book on the Holy Trinity--so simple, so deep and so comprehensive--he says:

"It turns out, furthermore, that my book's atmosphere is, of course, no longer my own. I would like my life to be one of continual looking at God, seizing what he is in pure silence. In this light-filled serenity a person could forever experience a blessed shipwreck."
How I sympathize with that sentence! No matter how simple discourse may be, it is never simple enough. No matter how simple thought may be, it is never simple enough. The only thing left is the simplicity of the soul in God or, better, the simplicity of God.

August 12, 1949, II.353-54

A Year With Thomas Merton - August 13

The Beauty of the Church

I was in Louisville today and had dinner at the Little Sisters of the Poor. The moral beauty of the place, the authentic beauty of Christianity, which has no equal. The beauty of the Church is the charity of her daughters.

The good Mother Superior, whom I shall never forget. Her transparency, unearthliness, simplicity, of no age, a child, a mother, like the Blessed Virgin—as if no name could apply to her, that is, no name known to anyone but God. And yet more real than all the unreal people in the rest of the world.

The old people. The old man playing the piano and the old man dancing. The sweet, dignified Negro lady who had worked for Fr. Greenwell. The old, beat, heavy Negro lady with wisps of white beard, sunk in her dream, her blank expression, slowly coming out of it when spoken to. The lady who had both legs cut off. The little-girl lady who made the speech in the dining room. The old lady with the visor cap on. And the golden wedding couple.

Sweet, good people. Now I have the prayers of the poor, the strong, merciful, invincible prayer of the poor behind me, and in me, changing my whole life and my whole outlook on life.

August 16, 1960, IV.31-32

A Year With Thomas Merton - August 10

God Is All That Matters

My first obligation is to be myself and follow God’s grace, and not allow myself to become the captive of some idiot idea, whether of hermit life and anything else. What matters is not spirituality, not religion, not perfection, not success or failure at this or that, but simply God, and freedom in His Spirit. All the reset is pure stupidity. How often I saw this last year and before, just coming up for the afternoons—because then I was nonattached, nonidentified, and the hermitage was a kind of nowhere. Now the terrible thing is that is has become a very definite home. But since I am a homeless body, being tied to a home disturbs me. But I am sure with God’s grace this will all settle itself, and I can treat the place as any other hole in the wall that is “not mine.” Though I must admit that it is full of a lot of books and nonsense. Here is where I think fasting will be important. Simplifying the meals I take here has already been quite a help. All that cooking of rice and cream of wheat, etc., which I won’t scruple to use in cold weather.

I am impatient of all desires. May the Holy Spirit bring me to a true freedom!!

August 28, 1965, V.287