A Year With Thomas Merton - March 29

Grateful for Another Miracle

Shall I reread the bits in St. John of the Cross’s The Ascent of Mount Carmel about the memory? They seem to do me so much good—always. Year after year, returning to them. In what sense do they make a difference in my life?

This Journal—the one I am writing right now. Apparently I have not yet written enough of it to become completely solitary and to be able to do without it. It is useless to drop the thing and say I am solitary just because I am not writing a Journal, when, in fact, the writing could help me find my way to where I am supposed to be traveling.

So I read about “forgetting” and write down all I remember. And somehow there is no contradiction here. It is simply a somewhat peculiar way of becoming a saint. I by no means insist that it is sanctity. All I say is that I must do what the situation seems to demand, and sanctity will appear when out of all this Christ, in His own good time, appears and manifests His own glory.

Tenderness of the Epistle, austerity of the Gospel in this morning’s Mass, the Vigil of Passion Sunday. Last night, before Compline, out by the horse barn, looking at the orchard and thinking about what St. John of the Cross said about having in your heart the image of Christ crucified.

Confusion and fog pile up in your life, and then, by the power of the Cross, things once again are clear, and you know more about your wretchedness and you are grateful for another miracle.

March 4 and 10, 1951, II.452-53

A Year With Thomas Merton - March 6

The Real in Front of My Nose

The solitary life reduces itself to a simple need--to make the choices that constantly imply preference for solitude fully understood (better: "properly" understood in relation to one's capacity at the moment). I find myself confronted with these choices repeatedly. They present themselves in their own way, and what they add up to these days is the question of emotional dependence on other people, simply, collectively--the community, friends, readers, other poets, etc. Over and over again I have to make small decisions here and there, in regard to one or other. Distractions and obsessions are resolved in this way. What the resolution amounts to, in the end: letting go of the imaginary and the absent and returning to the present, the real, what is in front on my nose. Each time I do this I am more present, more alone, more detached, more clear, better able to pray. Failure to do it means confusions, weakness, hesitation, fear--and all the way through to anguish and nightmares. It is not purely up to me to "succeed" each time. I cannot calculate the force of unidentified emotion that will well out of my unconscious. There are days of obscurity, frustrations, and crises when nothing is straight. However, I know my aim and I try at least to meditate.

So, when it comes to "preparing for death": in my case it means simply this reiterated decision for solitude as the reality called for me by God, as my penance and my cleansing, as my paying off debts, as my return to my right mind, and as my place of worship and prayer.

March 8, 1966, VI. 26

A Year With Thomas Merton - February 23

Belonging Entirely to God

Certainly the solitary life makes sense only when it is centered on one thing: the perfect love of God. Without this, everything is triviality. Love of God in Himself, for Himself, sought only in His will, in total surrender. Anything but this, in solitude, is nausea and absurdity. But outside of solitude, one can be occupied in many things that seem to have and do have a meaning of their own. And their meaning can be and is accepted, at least provisionally, as something that must be reckoned with until such time as one can come to love God alone perfectly, etc. This is all right in a way, except that, while doing things theoretically "for the love of God," one falls in practice into complete forgetfulness and ignorance and torpor. This happens in solitude, too, of course, but in solitude, while distraction is evidently vain, forgetfulness brings nausea. But in society, forgetfulness brings comfort of a kind.

It is therefore a great thing to be completely vulnerable and to feel at once, with every weakening of faith, a total loss. Things that in community are legitimate concerns are seen in solitude to be also temptations, test, questionings: for instance, the skin trouble on my hands.

February 27, 1965, V.211-12

A Year With Thomas Merton - February 14

An Untidy Holy Life

Today we commemorate Blessed Conrad--one of the Cistercian hermits.

I might as well say that in the novitiate I did not like the hermits of our Order. Their stories were inconclusive. They seemed to have died before finding out what they were supposed to achieve.

Now I know there is something important about the very incompleteness of Blessed Conrad: hermit in Palestine, by St. Bernard's permission. Starts home for Clairvaux when he hears St. Bernard is dying. Gets to Italy and hears St. Bernard is dead. Settles in a wayside chapel outside Bari and dies there. What an untidily unplanned life! No order, no sense, no system, no climax. Like a book without punctuation that suddenly ends in the middle of a sentence.

Yet I know those are the books I really like!

Blessed Conrad cannot possibly be solidified or ossified in history. He can perhaps be caught and held in a picture, but he is like a photograph of a bird in flight--too accurate to look the way a flying bird seems to appear to us. We never saw the wings in that position. Such is the solitary vocation. For, of all men, the solitary knows least where he is going, and yet he is more sure, for there is one thing he cannot doubt: he travels where God is leading him. That is precisely why he doesn't know the way. And that too is why, to most other men, the way is something of a scandal.

February 14, 1953, III.30-31

A Year With Thomas Merton - December 14

Arriving at the Place God Destined for Me

Yesterday, went down to the monastery only for my own Mass and dinner. Cooked supper at the hermitage, in fact, cooked too much rice, having miscalculated, and sat half an hour consuming it, with tea. But it was a splendid supper (looking out at the hills in the clear evening light). After that, washing dishes--the bowl, the pot, the cup, the knife (for oleo), the spoon--looked up and set a jet like a small rapid jewel traveling north between the moon and the evening star--the moon being nearly full. Then I went out for a little walk down to my gate (about a hundred yards) and looked out over the valley. Incredibly beautiful and peaceful. Blue hills, blue sky, woods, empty fields, lights going on in the Abbey, to the right, through the screen of trees, hidden from the hermitage. And out there, light on the three farms I can see. One at Newton's and two others out there in the hills behind Gethsemani station.

Everything that the Fathers say about the solitary life is exactly true. The temptations and the joys, above all, the tears and the ineffable peace and happiness. The happiness that is so pure because it is simply not one's own making, but sheer mercy and gift! And the sense of having arrived at last in the place destined for me by God, and for which I was brought here twenty-three years ago!

December 16, 1964, V.179-80

A Year With Thomas Merton - September 8

The Need for New Directions

I believe that I have the right and the duty to try to go on to a more pure and simple and primitive form of life. I believe that I have the right to appeal to a higher superior for permission to make this trial. I can ask and wait and see what happens. On the one hand, I have to be really sincere about looking for a simpler, poorer, more solitary life, more abandoned to Providence. On the other hand, there are all the things that enter into this and spoil this: desire of liberty, desire to be out from under a stupid form of authority, desire to travel--to go to a more beautiful and primitive country. All these things are there, unfortunately, and they are strong.

The one thing necessary is a true interior and spiritual life, true growth, on my own, in depth in a new direction. Whatever new direction god opens up for me. My job is to press forward, to grow interiorly, to pray, to break away from attachments and to defy fears, to grow in faith, which has its own solitude, to seek an entirely new perspective and new dimension in my life. To open up new horizons at any cost. To desire this and let the Holy Spirit take care of the rest. But really to desire this and work for it.

September 21 and 22, 1959, III.331

A Year With Thomas Merton - June 15

An Old Friend, My Bookend

A touching letter came today from Nora Chadwick—this is one I really love, though I have never actually met her. She is an old retired Cambridge professor in her eighties and an authority on Celtic monasticism. She is busy writing still. All about the old monks. She writes that she is delighted that I am living the same kind of life as the old guys she writes about: that there actually should be something of the sort in the world today. This is important to me. For she knows what monasticism is, and she respects the reality of monastic solitude (not the ersatz and the institutionalized forms that have survived today). That there should be men willing to live in real solitude. Seeing it through her eyes, I am deeply moved by the meaning of this strange life. Here I am in the middle of it. I know I have not been truly faithful to it in many ways. I have evaded it. Yet who can say what its real demands are, other than the one who must meet them? And who knows what were the failures and problems of those forgotten people who actually lived as solitaries in the past? How many of them were lonely, and in love?

All I know is that here I am, and the valley is very quiet, the sun is going down, there is no human being around, and as darkness falls I could easily be a completely forgotten person, as if I did not exist for the world at all. (Though there is one who remembers and whom I remember.) The day could easily come when I would be just as invisible as if I never existed, and still be living here on this hill. And I know that I would be perfectly content to do so.

June 18, 1966,VI.314

A Year With Thomas Merton - June 7

Solitude as My Everyday Mind

Corpus Christi was yesterday. I did not concelebrate. It was a good, cool day. Wrote to Marco Pallis in answer to a good letter of his. John Wu wrote and sent some chapters of his book on Zen.

“Solitude” becomes for me less and less of a specialty, and simply “life” itself. I do not seek to “be a solitary” or anything else, for “being anything” is a distraction. It is enough to be, in an ordinary human mode, with only hunger and sleep, one’s cold and warmth, rising and going to bed. Putting on blankets and taking them off (two last night. It is cold for June!). Making coffee and drinking it. Defrosting the refrigerator, reading, meditation, working, praying. I live as my fathers have lived on this earth, until eventually I die. Amen. There is no need to make an assertion of my life, especially to assert it is MINE, though it is doubtless not somebody else’s. I must learn to gradually forget program and artifice. I know this, at least in my mind, and want it in my heart, but my other habits of awareness remain strong.

Will say the Mass of St. Alban when I go down today (Day of Recollection). Misty morning. Lots of noise from Boone’s cows. Yesterday Father Matthew, with his crazy little tractor, cut the long grass in the field next to the hermitage, and in order to do work that would not require too much concentration, did some texts of St. Maximus on nonviolence, perhaps for the Catholic Worker.

June 22, 1965, V.257-58

A Year With Thomas Merton - June 1

The Work of the Cell

Coming home—through Shakertown, Harrodsburg, Perryville, and Lebanon. Beautiful June countryside—deep grass and hay, flowering weeds, tall cumulus clouds, corn a foot high and beautifully green tobacco struggling to begin. The old road between Perryville and Lebanon—winding between small farms and old barns, with wooded knobs nearby—is one I like.

The great joy of the solitary life is not found simply in quiet, in the beauty and peace of nature, song of birds, etc., nor in the peace of one’s own heart, but in the awakening and attuning of the heart to the voice of God—to the inexplicable, quite definite inner certitude of one’s call to obey Him, to hear Him, to worship Him here, now, today, in silence and alone, and that this is the whole reason for one’s existence, this makes one’s existence fruitful and gives fruitfulness to all one’s other good acts, and is the ransom and purification of one’s heart, which has been dead in sin.

It is not simply a question of “existing” alone, but of doing, with joy and understanding, “the work of the cell,” which is done in silence and not according to one’s own choice or the pressure of necessity, but in obedience to God. But the Voice of God is not “heard” at every moment, and part of the “work of the cell” is attention so that one may not miss any sound of that Voice. When we see how little we listen, and how stubborn and gross our hearts are, we realize how important the work is and how badly prepared we are to do it.

June 6 and 8, 1965, V.253-54