A Year With Thomas Merton - February 7

My Place in the Scheme of Things

Everything about this hermitage fills me with joy. There are lots of things that could have been far more perfect one way or the other--ascetically and "domestically." But it is the place God has given me after so much prayer and longing--but without my deserving it--and it is a delight. I can imagine no other joy on earth than to have a hermitage and to be at peace in it, to live in silence, to think and write, to listen to the wind and to all the voices of the wood, to live in the shadow of the big cedar cross, to love my brothers and all people, and to pray for the whole world and for peace and good sense among men. So it is "my place" in the scheme of things, and that is sufficient!

Reading some studies on St. Leonard of Port Maurice and his retirement house (Ritiro) and hermitage of the Incontro. How clearly Vatican II has brought into question all the attitudes that he and his companions took completely for granted: the dramatic barefoot procession from Florence to the Incontro in the snow--the daily half-hour self-flagellation in common--etc. This used to be admired, if prudently avoided by all in the Church. Depth psychology, etc., have made these things forever questionable--they belong to another age. And yet there has to be hardness and rigor in the solitary life. The hardness is there by itself. The cold, the solitude, the labor, the need for poverty to keep everything simple and manageable, the need for discipline of long meditation in silence.

February 24, 1965, V.209-10

A Year With Thomas Merton - February 6

Every Next Instant Reveals God's Will

I can have one prayer--to belong to God, to be able to renounce the whole world and follow Him. I say that prayer now. When it pleases Him, He will show me what to do. When? Not next year, every next instant. I I love Him, I will hear.

Anima mea in manibus meis semper: "Constantly I take my life in my hands."

This is what I read in the Bible today:

Isaias 47:1 "Come down, sit in the dust, O virgin daughter of Babylon, sit on the ground: there is no throne for the daughter of the Chaldaeans, for thou shall not any more be called delicate and tender."

55:1 "All you that thirst, come to the waters; and you that have no money, make haste, buy, eat; come ye, buy wine and milk without money, and without any price."

58:10 "When thou shall pour out thy soul to the hungry and shall satisfy the afflicted soul, then shall thy light rise up in the darkness, and thy darkness shall be as noonday."

February 19, 1941, I.311

A Year With Thomas Merton - February 5

We Are Not Shadows of God

I cannot deny that it was a great joy to say the office in private, Lauds and Prime, especially with the sun coming up slowly and shining on the sunny pastures and on the pine woods of the dark knobs, which I see through the novitiate window. Lovely blue and mauve shadows on the snow, and the indescribably delicate color of the sunlit patches of snow. All the life of color is in the snow and the sky. The green of the pines is dull and brownish. The dead leaves, still clinging tenaciously to the white oaks, are also dull brown. The cold sky is very blue, and the air is dry and frozen so that, for the first time in years, I see and breathe the winters of New York and not the mild or ambivalent winters of Kentucky.

The strength of the cold, the austerity and power of the landscape, redeems the snow colors and delicate shadows from anything of pastel shading. I can think of no art that has rendered such things adequately--the nineteenth-century realists were so realistic as to be totally unlike what they painted. There is such a thing as too close a resemblance. In a way, nothing resembles reality less than the average photograph. Nothing resembles substance less than its shadow. To convey the meaning of something substantial, you have to use a sign, which is itself substantial and exists in its own right.

Man is the image of God and not the shadow of God.

February 17, 1958, III. 171

A Year With Thomas Merton - February 4

A Priest with the World as My Parish

Looking at the crucifix on the white wall of Saint Anne's--overwhelmed at the realization that I am a priest, that it has been given to me to know something of what the Cross means, that St. Anne's is a special part of my priestly vocation: the silence, the woods, the sunlight, the shadows, the picture of Jesus, Our Lady of Cobre, and the little angels in Fra Angelico's paradise. Here I am a priest with all the world as my parish. Or is it a temptation, the thought of this? Perhaps I do not need to remember the apostolic fruitfulness of this silence. I need only to be nothing and to wait for the revelation of Christ: to be at peace and poor and silent in the world where the mystery of iniquity is also at work and where there is also no other revelation. No, there is so much peace at St. Anne's that it is most certainly the heart of a great spiritual battle that is fought in silence. I who sit here and pray and think and live--I am nothing and do not need to know what is going on. I need only to hope in Christ and hear the big deep bell that now begins to ring and sends its holy sound to me through the little cedars.

This is the continuation of the Mass. This is still my Eucharist, my day-long thanksgiving, worship my hoping for the perfect revelation of Christ.

February 17, 1953, III.33

A Year With Thomas Merton - February 3

The Fellowship of Stars and Crows

Bright morning--freezing, but less cold than before--and with a hint of the smell of spring-earth in the cold air. A beautiful sunrise, the woods all peaceful and silent, and dried old fruits on the yellow poplar shining like precious artifacts. I have a new level in my (elementary) star-consciousness. I can now tell where constellations may be in the daytime when they are invisible. Not many, of course! But for example: the sun is rising in Aquarius and so I know that in the blue sky overhead the beautiful swan, invisible, spreads its wide wings over me. A lovely thought, for some reason.

Since Hayden Carruth's reprimand I have had more esteem for the crows around here and find, in fact, that we seem to get on much more peacefully. Two sat high in an oak beyond my gate as I walked on the brow of the hill at sunrise saying the Little Hours. They listened without protest to my singing of the antiphons. We are part of a ménage, a liturgy, a fellowship of sorts.

February 13, 1968, VII. 55-56

A Year With Thomas Merton - February 2

Bearing Witness to the Resurrection

A priest bears witness to the Resurrection by holding in his hands the Risen Christ--high over his head for all the people to see. And none of us see, except by faith. Faith itself is the light of the Resurrection, our sharing of the Resurrection. It is the effect of the Resurrection in our souls. By it we are buried and rise from the dead in Christ.

Gone are the days when "mysticism" was for me a matter of eager and speculative interest. Now, because it is my life, it is a torment to think about. Like being in the pangs of childbirth and reading an essay on mother love written by a spinster.

In choir I am happier than I have ever been there, extremely poor and helpless, often strained, hardly able to hold myself in place. "Expecting every moment to be my last." Sometimes it is a great relief to be distracted. There is a "presence" of God that is like an iron curtain between the mind and God.

But when I am at my toolshed hermitage, Saint Anne's, I am always happy and at peace no matter what happens. For here there is no need for anyone but God--no need of "mysticism."

A fly buzzes on the windowpane!

February 24, 1953, III.35-36

A Year With Thomas Merton - February 1

The Climate of My Prayer

Our mentioning of the weather--our perfunctory observations on what kind of day it is--are perhaps not idle. Perhaps we have a deep and legitimate need to know in our entire being what the day is like, to see it and feel it, to know how the sky is grey, paler in the south, with patches of blue in the southwest, with snow on the ground, the thermometer at 18, and cold wind making your ears ache. I have a real need to know these things because I myself am part of the weather and part of the climate and part of the place, and a day in which I have not shared truly in all this is no day at all. It is certainly part of my life of prayer.

February 27, 1963, IV.299-300