A Year With Thomas Merton - October 11

Witnessing to the Personal

A day of spiritual fires, quiet fires, warm skies. Pink beasts in the field (pigs).

Angry kingfisher rattles over the foul creek and swings upward, to head for the clear lake.

Everything adds up to these two points:

A. My instinct to regard as an evil and as an oversimplification the thought of "losing oneself" in total identification with (submersion in) any group as such--this instinct against such is correct, it is good. To be a man of the church I have to be fully myself--and fully responsible and free before God--not a "unit" or a mere "number."

B. My vocation and task in this world is to keep alive all that is usefully individual and personal in me, to be a "contemplative" in the full sense--and to share it with others--to remain as a witness of the nobility of the private person and his primacy over the group.

October 2 and 7, 1958, III.221-22

A Year With Thomas Merton - June 22

My Task

What runs and what ticks is, no longer important. What is important is that life itself should be “lucid” in me (whoever I am). I am nothing but the lucidity that is “in me.” To be opaque and dense with opinion, with passion, with need, with hate, with power, is to be not there, to be absent, to nonexist. The labor of convincing myself that this nonexisting is a real presence: this is the source of all falsity and suffering. This is hell on earth and hell in hell. This is the hell I have to keep out of. The price of keeping out of it is that the moment I give in to any of it, I feel the anguish of falsity. But to extinguish the feeling of anguish, in any way whatsoever short of straight lucidity, is to favor ignorance and nonexistence. This is my central fear and it defines my task in life.

June 22, 1966, VI.333