A Year With Thomas Merton - September 5

Beauty's Holiness

You flowers and trees, you hills and streams, you fields, flocks and wild birds, you books, you poems, and you people, I am unutterably alone in the midst of you. The irrational hunger that sometimes gets into the depth of my will tries to swing my deepest self away from God and direct it to your love. I try to touch you with the deep fire that is in the center of my heart, but I cannot touch you without defiling both you and myself, and I am abashed, solitary and helpless, surrounded by a beauty that can never belong to me. But this sadness generates within me an unspeakable reverence for the holiness of created things, for they are pure and perfect and they belong to God and are mirrors of His beauty. He is mirrored in all things like sunlight in clean water: but if I try to drink the light that is in the water, I only shatter the reflection. And so I live alone and chaste in the midst of the holy beauty of all created things, knowing that nothing I can see or hear or touch will ever belong to me, ashamed of my absurd need to give myself away to any one of them or to all of them. The silly, hopeless passion to give myself away to any beauty eats out my heart. It is an unworthy desire, but I cannot avoid it. It is in the hearts of us all, and we have to bear with it, suffer its demands with patience, until we die and go to heaven, where all things will belong to us in their highest causes.

A Year With Thomas Merton - September 4

Swimming

A dream last night that was in many ways beautiful and moving--a hieratic dream.

I am invited to a party. I meet some of the women going to the party, but there is an estrangement. I am alone by the waterfront of a small town. A man says that for five dollars I can get across on a yacht to where I want to go. I have five dollars and more than five dollars, hundreds of dollars, and also francs. I am conscious of my clerical garb. The yacht is a small schooner, a workaday schooner, and no yacht. It does not move from shore--we make it move a little by pushing it from inside. Then I am swimming ahead in the beautiful water, magic water from the depths of which comes a wonderful life to which I am entitled, a life and strength that I fear. I know that by diving into this water I can find something marvelous, but that it is not fitting or right for me to dive, as I am going to the further shore, with the strength that has come from the water, immortality.

Then in the summerhouse on the other side, where I have arrived, first of all I play with the dog, and then the child brings me two pieces of buttered white bread that I am to eat on arrival.

September 12, 1961, III.161-62

A Year With Thomas Merton - September 3

A Visit from My Good Teacher

Mark and Dorothy Van Doren were here yesterday on their way back to Illinois--long enough to walk to the cow barn and back and for me to show Mark the novitiate.

I was happy to have him stand in these rooms, so wise a person, and lean against the bookshelf in the scriptorium and talk about some things that had come up when he was at the Hampton Institute the day before. The English professor there complained that his students had no preparation to read Shakespeare, and Mark said that everyone is prepared to read Shakespeare by the time they are eighteen. They have been born, they have had fathers, mothers, they have been loved, feared, hated, been jealous, etc.

At the cow barn we looked at brushfires being lit along the hillside of St. Bernard's field, and Mark talked about his love for fires and I talked of mine. We decided that everybody loves fires and that those who admit it are not pyromaniacs but just love fires reasonably.

When I talked a moment about Bulgakov, Mark quoted the wonderful lines at the end of Dante where he sees in Christ the face of man and the Face of God and they are one face. "But to explain it as hard as to square the circle," Mark said.

They were pleased that both their sons had married Jews this summer, and I too.

A Year With Thomas Merton - September 2

A Compassionate Transparency

And yet it seems to be that writing, far from being an obstacle to spiritual perfection in my own life, has become one of the conditions on which my perfection will depend. If I am to be a saint--and there is nothing else that I can think of desiring to be--it seems that I must get there by writing books in a Trappist monastery. If I am to be a saint, I have not only to be a monk, which is what all monks must do to become saints, but I must also put down on paper what I have become. It may sound simple, but it is not an easy vocation.

To be as good a monk as I can be, and to remain myself, and to write about it: to put myself down on paper, in such a situation, with the most complete simplicity and integrity, masking nothing, confusing no issue: this is very hard because I am all mixed up in illusions and attachments. These, too, will have to be put down. But without exaggeration, repetition, useless emphasis. To be frank without being boring: it is a kind of crucifixion. Not a very dramatic or painful one. But it requires much honesty that is beyond my nature. It must come somehow from the Holy Spirit.

A complete and holy transparency: living, praying and writing in the light of the Holy Spirit, losing myself entirely by becoming public property just as Jesus is public property in the Mass. Perhaps this is an important aspect of my priesthood--my living of my Mass: to become as plain as a Host in the hands of everybody. Perhaps it is this, after all, that is to be my way to solitude. One of the strangest ways so far devised, but it is the way of the Word of God.

September 1, 1949, I.365-66

A Year With Thomas Merton - August 28

I Must Lead a New Life

Always very fine ideas in Romano Guardini on Providence.

For instance, that the will of God is not a “fate” to which we submit, but a creative act in our life producing something absolutely new (or failing to do so), something hitherto unforeseen by the laws and established patterns. Our cooperation (seeking first the Kingdom of God) consists not solely in conforming to laws, but in opening our wills out to this creative act, which must be retrieved in and by us—by the will of God.

This is my big aim—to put everything else aside. I do not want to create merely for and by myself a new life and a new world, but I want God to create them in and through me. This is central and fundamental—and with this one can never be a mere Marxian communist.

I must lead a new life and a new world must come into being. But not by my plans and my agitation.

August 3, 1958, III.211

A Year With Thomas Merton - August 27

A Blessed Shipwreck in God's Simplicity
I copy out the sentences from Dom Porion's letter, which I spoke of the other day. Speaking of his book on the Holy Trinity--so simple, so deep and so comprehensive--he says:

"It turns out, furthermore, that my book's atmosphere is, of course, no longer my own. I would like my life to be one of continual looking at God, seizing what he is in pure silence. In this light-filled serenity a person could forever experience a blessed shipwreck."
How I sympathize with that sentence! No matter how simple discourse may be, it is never simple enough. No matter how simple thought may be, it is never simple enough. The only thing left is the simplicity of the soul in God or, better, the simplicity of God.

August 12, 1949, II.353-54

A Year With Thomas Merton - August 26

Frater Aelred

Chuang Tzu said: "At the present time the whole world is under a delusion and, though I wish to go in a certain direction, how can I succeed in doing so? Knowing that I cannot do so, if I were to force my way, that would be another delusion. Therefore my best course is to let my purpose go and no more pursue it. If I do not pursue it, whom shall I have to share in my sorrow?"

On Monday Frater Aelred left, which was wise and the only solution--he was getting no education here and would only get into complications. So now he is gone and has left no memorial other than a spot of wine on the altar cloth--and the little India rubber eraser on which he carved my name so that with my ink pad I can stamp it on books, etc. I like the way it is done, rough and crude and simple.

August 5, 1960, IV.25