A Year With Thomas Merton - April 15

A Nation of Fetishes

The great sin, the source of all other sins, is idolatry. And never has it been greater, more prevalent, than now. It is almost completely unrecognized—precisely because it is so overwhelming, total. It takes in everything. There is nothing else left. Fetishism of power, machines, possessions, medicine, sports, clothes, etc., all kept going by greed for money and power. The Bomb is only one accidental aspect of the cult. Indeed, the Bomb is not the worst. We should be thankful for it as a sign, a revelation of what all the rest of our civilization points to: the self-immolation of man to his own greed and his own despair. And behind it all are the principalities and powers whom man serves in his idolatry. Christians are as deeply involved in this as everyone else.

This is clearly one of the most important and inescapable messages of the Bible: that
unless man turns from his idols to God, he will destroy himself, or rather this idolatry will prove itself to be his destruction. (The idolater is already self-destroyed.) The other thing: man as a whole will not change. He will destroy himself. The Bible sees no other end to the story. But Christ has come to save from this destruction all who seek to be saved. In and through them He will recreate the world. By no means are we to interpret this to mean that enlightened ethics and polite good intentions are going to make technological society safe for man, and that the new creation will be in fact the technological paradise (plus a renewed liturgy!).

April 17, 1965, V.230-31

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 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