A Year With Thomas Merton - April 21

The Paradise Season

It is already hot as summer. Everything is breaking into leaf, and the pine saw fly worms are all over the young pines.

This morning I sat in the monastery dentist's chair having my teeth cleaned and X-rayed, while the students banged and walloped next door demolishing the old library.

Early mornings are now completely beautiful--with the Easter moon in its last quarter high in the blue sky, and the light of dawn spreading triumphantly over the wide, cool green valley. It is paradise season!

Then yesterday Flannery O'Connor's new book, Everything That Rises Must Converge, arrived, and I am already well into it, grueling and powerful! A relentlessly perfect writer, full of tragedy and irony. But what a writer! And she knows every aspect of the American meanness, and violence, and frustration. And the Southern struggle of will against inertia.

A pine warbler was caught in the novitiate scriptorium, beating against the window, and I got a good look at him letting him out. A couple of towhees are all around the hermitage.

A Year With Thomas Merton - March 1

In Me God Takes His Joy

Yesterday--more truly spring, and this is a spring dawn today, cold, but with birds singing. First time I have heard the whistling of the towhee this year. And the cardinals up in the woods to the west. The promise grows more and more definite. I look up at the morning star: in all this God takes His joy, and in me also, since I am His creation and His son, His redeemed, and member of His Christ. Sorrow at the fabulous confusion and violence of this world, which does not understand His love--yet I am called not to interpret or condemn this misunderstanding, only to return the love which is the final and ultimate truth of everything, and which seeks all men's awakening and response. Basically I need to grow in this faith and this realization, not only for myself but for all men.

To go out to walk slowly in this wood--this is a more important and significant means to understanding, at the moment, than a lot of analysis and a lot of reporting on the things "of the spirit."

March 2, 1966, VI.23