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 20

Solitude Is a Stern Mother

I see more and more that solitude is not something to play with. It is deadly serious. And much as I have wanted it, I have not been serious enough. It is not enough to "like solitude," or love it even. Even if you "like" it, it can wreck you, I believe, if you desire it only for your own sake. So I go forward (I don't believe I would go back. Even interiorly I have reached, at least relatively, a point of no return), but I go in fear and trembling, and often with a sense of lostness, and trying to be careful what I do because I am beginning to see that every false step is paid for dearly. Hence I fall back on prayer, or try to. Yet no matter, there is great beauty and peace in this life of silence and emptiness. But to fool around brings awful desolation. When one is trifling, even the beauty of the solitary life becomes implacable. Solitude is a stern mother who brooks no nonsense. The question arises: am I so full of nonsense that she will cast me out? I pray not, and think it is going to take much prayer. February 26, 1965, V.211

A Year With Thomas Merton - February 13

Get Warm and Love God Any Way You Can

A great deal of wood I have for the fire is wet or not sufficiently seasoned to burn well--though finally this morning I got a pretty hot fire going with a big cedar log on top of it.

It is hard but good to live according to nature with a primitive technology of wood chopping and fires rather than according to the mature technology that has supplanted nature, creating its own weather, etc., etc. Yet there are advantages, too, in a warmed house and a self-stoking furnace. No need to pledge allegiance to either one. Get warm any way you can, and love God and pray.

I see more and more that now I must desire nothing else than to be "poured out as a libation," to give and surrender my being without concern. The cold woods make this more real. And the loneliness: coming up last night at the time of a very cold sunset, with two little birds still picking up crumbs I had thrown for them on the frozen porch. Everywhere else, snow. In the morning, coming down: all tracks covered by snow blown over the path by the wind, except tracks of the cat that hunts around the old sheep barn. Solitude = being aware that you are one man in this snow where there has been no one but one cat.

February 2, 1965, V.201

A Year With Thomas Merton - January 18

An Ecology of Silence

The new bells sound wonderful from the woods.

St. John's day--Frater Tarcisius and I walked all the way to Hanekamp's in the afternoon. Wonderful, quiet little valley! The silent house, the goats in the red sage grass, the dry creek, and Hanekamp's vineyard. The beautiful silence of the woods on every side! Frater Tarcisius looked about with such reverence that you would have thought he was seeing angels. Later we separated to pray apart in the thinned pine grove on the southeastern hillside. And I could see how simple it is to find God in solitude. There is no one else, nothing else. He is all there to find there. Everything is in Him. And what could be more pleasing to Him than that we should leave all things and all company to be with Him and think only of Him and know Him alone, in order to give Him our love?

To be alone by being part of the universe--fitting in completely to an environment of woods and silence and peace. Everything you do becomes a unity and a prayer. Unity within and without. Unity with all living things--without effort or contention. My silence is part of the whole world's silence and builds the temple of God without the noise of hammers.

December 29 and January 28, 1953, III.27, 29

A Year With Thomas Merton - January 9

Deepening the Present

I have entered the new and holy year with the feeling that I have somehow, secretly, been granted a new life and a new hope--or a return of the old life and hope I used to have.

The contemplative life becomes awfully thin and drab if you go for several days at a time without thinking explicitly of the Passion of Christ. I do not mean, necessarily, meditation, but at least attending with love and humility to Christ on the Cross. For His Cross is the source of all our life, and without it prayer dries up and everything goes dead.

A saint is not so much a man who realizes that he possesses virtues and sanctity as one who is overwhelmed by the sanctity of God. God is holiness. And therefore things are holy in proportion as they share Who He is. All creatures are holy in so far as they share in His being, but we are called to be holy in a far superior way--by somehow sharing His transcendance and rising above the level of everything that is not God.

Solitude is not found so much by looking outside the boundaries of your dwelling, as by staying within. Solitude is not something you must hope for in the future. Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for solitude in the present, you will never find it.

January 2-3, 1950, II.391-92

A Year With Thomas Merton - January 8

Solitude and Gentleness

It is in deep solitude that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brothers. The more solitary I am, the more affection I have for them. It is pure affection, and filled with reverence for the solitude of others. Solitude and silence teach me to love my brothers for what they are, not for what they say. It is no longer a question of dishonoring them by accepting their fictions, believing in their image of themselves, which their weakness obliges them to compose, the wan work of communication. Yet there will, it is true, always remain a dialectic between the words of men and their being. This will tell something about them we would not have realized if the words had not been there.

Solitude is not merely a negative relationship. It is not merely the absence of people or of presence with people. True solitude is a participation in the solitariness of God--Who is in all things. Solitude is not a matter of being something more than other men, except by accident: for those who cannot be alone cannot find their true being and they are less than themselves. Solitude means withdrawal from an artificial and fictional level of being which mean, divided by original sin, have fabricated in order to keep peace with concupiscence and death. But by that very fact the solitary finds himself on the level of a more perfect spiritual society--the city of those who have become real enough to confess and glorify God (that is, life) in the teeth of death. Solitude and society are formed and perfect in the Sacrifice of the Mass.

January 12, 1950, II.398-99

A Year With Thomas Merton - January 4

The Speech of God Is Silence

For the first time in my life I am finding you, O Solitude. I can count on the fingers of one hand the few short moments of purity, of neutrality, in which I have found you. Now I know I am coming to the day in which I will be able to live without words, even outside my prayer. For I still need to go out into the no-man's-land of language, which does not quite join me to others and which throws a veil over my own solitude. I say "live without words." By words I mean the half-helpless and half-wise looks by which we seek one another's thoughts. But I do not abdicate all language, for there is the Word of God. This I proclaim and I live to proclaim it. I live to utter the Mass, the Canon, which implicitly contains all words, all revelation, and teaches everything. It is at the Canon and at the words of Consecration that all solitudes come into a single focus. There is the City of God gathered together in that one Word spoken in silence. The speech of God is silence. His Word is solitude. Him I will never deny, by His grace! Everything else is fiction, half-hiding the truth it tries to reveal. We are travelers from the half-world of language into solitude and infinity. We are strangers. Paper, I have not in you a lasting city. Yet, there is a return from solitude to make manifest His Name to them who have not known it. And then to re-enter solitude again and dwell in silence.

January 11, 1950, II.158

A Year With Thomas Merton - December 8

The Old Man in a Thousand Wrappings

Evening: The heart is deceitful above all things
The heart is deep and full of windings
The old man is covered up in a thousand wrappings
(Lancelot Andrewes, Preces)

True sad words, and I would not have felt the truth of them so much if I had not had so much solitude these days, with rain coming down on the roof and hiding the valley. Rain in the night, the nuisance of water in the buckets. Or cutting wood behind the house, and a faint smell of hickory smoke from the chimney--while I taste and see that I am deceitful and that most of my troubles are rooted in my own bitterness. Is this what solitude is for? Then it is good, but I must pray for the strength to bear it! (The heart is deceitful and does not want this--but God is greater than my heart!)

I will acknowledge my faults, O Lord.
O who will give scourges to my mind
That they spare not my sins?

December 3, 1964, V.173

A Year With Thomas Merton - December 7

One Prays to Pray

In the hermitage, one must pray or go to seed. The pretense of prayer will not suffice. Just sitting will not suffice. It has to be real--yet what can one do? Solitude puts your back to the wall (or your face to it!) and this is good. One prays to pray. And the reality of death. John Donne's poems and Lancelot Andrewes.

Then it becomes very important to remember that the quality of one's night depends on the thoughts of the day, on the sanity of the day. I bring there the sins of the day into the light and darkness of truth to be adored without disguise--then I want to fly back to the disguises. Who ever said that the solitary life is one of pretense and deception? As if pretense were easy in solitude!!! It is easier in the community, for there one can have the support of a common illusion or a common agreement in forms that take the place of truth. One can pretend in the solitude of an afternoon walk, but the night destroys all pretences: one is reduced to nothing and compelled to begin laboriously the long return to truth.

Tonight it is cold again and, as I came up in the dark, a few small snowflakes were flying in the beam of the flashlight. The end of an oak log was still burning with small flames in the fireplace. Came up with candles, and sugar for coffee, and jar to urinate in so that I won't have to go out in the snow in the middle of the night. What greater comforts could a man want?

December 5, 1964, V.175-76

A Year With Thomas Merton - November 27

One Small Miracle in a Day of Noise

A lovely afternoon but full of noise. Reading after dinner--snatches from the Dhammapada--I thought of this clear sky and how it must be like Mexican sky.

And now, noise everywhere. Hammers all over the roof of the east wing--the buzz saw cutting hickory for the smokehouses. Novices kicking pigs. A huge road-grader sent by the politicians, roaring up and down significantly on the day before elections. ("Get out the vote," says the Abbot. "Show them that we have power!")

Sick of writing, sick of letters, sick of self-expression.

Silence and solitude and peace.

Even if everything else is noise, I can be silent within my own house.

Read a little about the Indians who make lacquer at Patzcuaro. The Night of All Souls is a great night on the Island of Juntzio (Sibylle Akers's photographs of the Indian women sitting with candles on the graves, with food).

Hurray! The buzz saw has broken down!

November 2, 1959, III.338-39

A Year With Thomas Merton - November 26

The Community Is My Mother

Our Lady of Gethsemani. Mary is, in a certain sense, the community which is my Mother. It is her love that has brought us here and keeps the community together. It is her love I have known out under the cedars, and working in the fields and singing in choir. It is her love that has made me desire solitude, and she will fulfill that desire. She is my solitude and she is here. It seems I have to keep finding it out over and over again.

Maybe this time it is the end. I hope I have stopped asking questions. I have begged her for the grace to finish the course here and die as a holy monk in the monastery or in a solitude closely dependent on the monastery. I feel great peace and my heart has never been so free, so poor and empty.

November 29, 1952, III.2

A Year With Thomas Merton - October 5

Learning the Tempo of Solitude

I was finally right in the heart of Isaac of Stella--the translation of his "island loneliness" in the metaphysic of being and nothingness of the Sexagisma sermons (Sermon XIV). Hit very hard by a lot of ambiguities of expression, but an unquestionably deep and austere intuition, and very modern. But deeply mystical. Profound implications for my own prayer and solitude opened up. (Prayer of Christ on the Cross!)

I find more and more the power--the dangerous power--of solitude working on me. The easiness of wide error. The power of one's own inner ambivalence, the pull of inner contradiction. How little I know myself really. How weak and tepid I am. I need to work hard, and I don't know how--hence I work at the wrong things. I see that the first two months I got off to a nearly false start with too much excited reading of too many things, and my life has been grossly overstimulated for a solitary (in community, all right). Especially I worked too hard, too obsessively on the book, too frantic a pace for a solitary (again, in community solitude seems crowded and hopped up to me).

Everything has meaning, dire meanings, in solitude. And one can easily lose it all in following the habits one has brought out of common life (the daily round). One has to start over and receive (in meekness) a new awareness of work, time, prayer, oneself. A new tempo--it has to be in one's very system (and it is not in mine, I see).

And what I do not have I must pray for and wait for.

October 25 and 30, 1965, V.309-10

A Year With Thomas Merton - September 7

God's Lucid Afternoon

Out here in the woods I can think of nothing except God, and it is not so much that I think of Him either. I am as aware of Him as of the sun and the clouds and the blue sky and the thin cedar trees.


Engulfed in the simple lucid actuality which is the afternoon: I mean God's afternoon, this sacramental moment of time when the shadows will get longer and longer, and one small bird sings quietly in the cedars, and one car goes by in the remote distance and the oak leaves move in the wind.

High up in the summer sky I watch the silent flight of a vulture, and the day goes by in prayer. This solitude confirms my call to solitude. The more I am in it, the more I love it. One day it will possess me entirely and no man will ever see me again.

September 15, 1952, III.16

A Year With Thomas Merton - August 11

What Do You Need?

What do I need? Hard question to answer.

I need something beyond my capacity to know. If I call it solitude, I mistake it. Silence, a primitive life.

What I need, as far as I can interpret the desire in my heart, is to make a journey to a primitive place, among primitive people, and there die. It is at the same time a going out and a “return.” A going somewhere where I have never been or thought of going—a going in which I am led by God, a journey in which I go out of everything I now have. And I feel that, unless I do this, my spiritual life is at an end. Unfortunately this obscure drive is not recognized by theologians and directors. Certainly it is “nature.” But is there no grace in it? I do not know. It is an anxious and imperious thing…call it “acting out.”

But—if you go to Mexico on the strength of that impulse, are you free? Are you not subordinating your spiritual freedom to blind irrationality? Maybe that is the trouble. (The book about the New Yorker—Thurber’s—oppresses me. Civilization oppresses me, or rather all that is new in it does. The most comforting thing in the book is the sketch on the cover, a boat in one of the Manhattan docks. The only good thing about New York is that you can sail from there to France.)

What do I need? If necessary I can get by with plenty of mornings like this. Seriously, I need silence, thought, solitude to enter into myself to see and touch reality, to live the contemplative life.

August 18, 1959, III.319

A Year With Thomas Merton - July 29

Keeping Awake in Obedience to Him Who Is Holy

There is a special peace and sense of blessing on Sunday morning, though all mornings are equally quiet here at the hermitage and the same birds always sing. Today the peace is even greater because of the storm and cleansing in the night.

Seeing more and more that my understanding of myself and of my life has always been most inadequate. Now that I want more than ever to see, I realize how difficult it is. Though there is danger, doubtless, in solitude, I realize more than ever that here, in solitude, for me, is confrontation with the Word, and with God, and with the only possibilities that are fully real, or with those that are most real. (There is something real after all in community, but more and more, as I go down there, I have the sense that reality is smothered there and words are substituted for it.) Yet my job and that of the Church remains this: to awaken in myself and in others the sense of real possibility, of truth, of obedience to Him who is Holy, of refusal of pretences and servitude—without arrogance and hubris and specious idealism. The terrible thing is that our society, which pretends to be Christian, is in fact rejecting the noise of its own propaganda, able to make itself believe whatever it wants. This is a deluding, fanatical, stupid society. It is under judgment—and what can one say to it? It would be useless to pretend to be perfect, for no one, as far as I can see, is “sent” with any prophetic message. Least of all I.

July 18 and 19, 1965,V.271-72

A Year With Thomas Merton - July 27

Facing Death

Does my solitude meet the standard set by my approaching death? No. I’m afraid it does not. That possibility which is most intimate, isolated, my own, cannot be shared or described. I cannot look forward to it as an experience I can analyze and share. It is not something to be understood and enjoyed. (To “understand” and “contemplate” it beforehand is a kind of imposture.) But the solitary life should partake of the seriousness and incommunicability of death. Or should it? It that too rigid and absolute an ideal? The two go together. Solitude is not death, it is life. It aims not at a living death but at a certain fullness of life. But a fullness that comes from honestly and authentically facing death and accepting it without care, i.e., with faith and trust in God. Not with any social justification: not with reliance on an achievement which is approved or at least understood by others. Unfortunately, even in solitude, though I try not to (and sometimes claim not to), I still depend too much, emotionally, on being accepted and approved.

The greatest “comfort” (and a legitimate one, not an invasion) is to be sought precisely in the Psalms, which face death as it is, under the eye of God, and teach us how we may face it. The Psalms bring us at the same time into contact, rather communion, with all those who have seen death and accepted it. Most of all the Lord Himself, who prayed from Psalm 21 on the Cross.

July 5, 1965, V.264-65