A Year With Thomas Merton - November 25

Experiences of Seeing

At Mass, which was all before sunrise and without lights, the quality, the "spirituality" of the predawn light on the altar was extraordinary. Silence in the chapel and that pure, pearl light! What could be a more beautiful liturgical sign than to have such light as witness of the Mystery?

Wild grey kitten among the dead leaves in the garden, fleeing to the hole in the wall. Sun on the building work, the waterhouse. Dead leaves.

Hawk on the way up to the hermitage, over the cedars in the low bushy place where the quails were (were!!). He circled four or five times, spreading his tail, which shone rusty in the light, and he flashed silver like the dove in the psalm, when sun caught him under the wings.

November 25, 26, and 27, 1962, IV. 267-69

A Year With Thomas Merton - October 26

Waiting for God

Now is the time to see what great strength comes out of silence--and not without struggle.

Obedience to God means, first of all, waiting, having to wait, sustine Dominum--waiting for the Lord. The first thing then is to accept the fact that one will have to wait. Otherwise obedience is undermined by an implicit condition that destroys it.

To say that I am a child of God is to say, before everything else, that I grow. That I began. A child who does not grow becomes a monster. That idea "Child of God" is therefore one of living growth, becoming, possibility, risk, and joy in the negotiation of risk. In this God is pleased: that His child grows in wisdom and grace.

God is the Father who fights to defend and rescue His child. The life of the Child of God is not in the "development of spirituality" but in obedience to the Good Shepherd who seeks him, knowing he is lost. It is in solitude that we recognize, with a shock, how lost we have been, and that now we are found, rescued, recovering conscience, returning to ourselves, to Truth, carried by Him who has sought and found us.

End of 1965, V.334