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The Hope Faith Gives Us(From Thomas Merton's letter to Tommie O'Callaghan upon the death of her mother)
It seems that we all have to face one sad thing after another. But let us not forget the hope our faith gives us. God is our strength and no amount of trouble should make us fail to realize it. On the contrary, trouble should help us deepen and confirm our trust. This is an old story, but as far as I am concerned, it is the one we always get back to. There is no other.
June 28, 1968
A Happy Ending
Last night, after a prayer vigil in the novitiate chapel (didn't do a good job--was somewhat disorganized and distracted), I went to bed late at the hermitage. All quiet. No lights at Boone's or Newton's. Cold. Lay in bed and realized that it was there, not as an "it" or object. It simply was. And I was that. And this morning, coming down, seeing the multitude of stars above the bare branches of the wood, I was suddenly hit, as it were, with the whole package of meaning of everything: that the immense mercy of God was upon me, that the Lord in infinite kindness had looked down on me and given me the vocation out of love, and that He had always intended this, and how foolish and trivial had been all my fears and desperation. And no matter what anyone else might do or say about it, however they might judge or evaluate it, all is irrelevant in the reality of my vocation to solitude, even though I am not a typical hermit. Quite the contrary, perhaps. It does not matter how I may or may not be classified. In the light of this simple fact of God's love and the form it has taken in the mystery of my life, classifications are ludicrous, and I have no further need to occupy my mind with them (if I ever did)--at least in this connection.The only response is to go out from yourself with all that one is, which is nothing, and pour out that nothingness in gratitude that God is who He is. All speech is impertinent; it destroys the simplicity of that nothing before God by making it seem as if it had been "something."December 9, 1964, V.178
Idolizing the CalendarIncomparable richness of Ananda K. Coomaraswamy! His book on Hinduism and Buddhism. I am giving it a first reading, in which I do not expect to understand and appreciate everything.One point--already familiar--driven home more: whatever is done naturally may be either sacred or profane, according to the degree of our awareness, but whatever is done unnaturally is essentially and irrevocably profane!One of the great problems of monastic life here, today, with machines, noise, etc., and commercialism, is that the unnatural is taken for the supernatural. No concern at all for the natural or for natural process leads to perversion and degradation of the spiritual life.End of 1960. The tree still decorated. The tinfoil bell, the cedar wreaths, the drying pine boughs, the colored lights. I was wondering at the beginning of morning meditation if it would be given me to see another twelve years--to come to New Year's, say 1973. The live to be fifty-seven or nearly fifty-eight. Can such an age be possible? What foolish perspectives we get onto, by believing in our calendars. As if numbers, good old numbers, faceless, voiceless, will surely be there with nothing to say.What is likely to happen in twelve more years? Is the final war so feared and so expected that it cannot after all happen--as if what everyone expected was by that very fact excluded?Is this inanity of man's world finally going to work itself out to its ultimate absurdity?December 27 and 31, 1960, IV.80-81
The Sense of a Journey EndedAfter None--in the pretty pine wood of young pines by Saint Teresa's field (I still call it St. Teresa's wood)--where I have gone many times a week for four years, especially four summers, since 1957. The time has come for a kind of summing up of all this silence and sunlight and of those similar afternoons. Attached and at peace in this wood because it knows me so well now and I have no house there and nothing has ever been said or declared to indicate that I was there always. Nothing said it was "my place."There I discovered Paraguay and for a while this wood was Paraguay (1957). I read a thing of Kierkegaard with a lovely paragraph on solitude--a bit of Henry Miller on Big Sur (in another place), much Suzuki, Vinoba Bhave. It is an oriental wood. I taught Nels Richardson (Frater Aelred) a little yoga there, walked and planned with Dom Gregorio anxiously there. There walked one afternoon after discovering some lyrics in the I Ching. Read The Leopard and Ungaretti there. Above all prayed and meditated there and will again.St. Mary of Carmel after Vespers is tremendous: with the tall pines, the silence, the moon and stars above the pines as dark falls, the patterns of shadows, the vast valley and hills: everything speaks of a more mature and complete solitude. The pines are tall and not low. There is frankly a house, demanding not attachment but responsibility. A silence for dedication and not escape. Lit candles in the dusk. "This is my resting place forever"--the sense of a journey ended, of wandering at an end. The first time in my life I ever really felt I had come home and my waiting and looking were ended.December 26, 1960, IV.79-80
Happy to Be MarginalYesterday I thought it would be snow--skies have been grey and even black for over a week. Clouds of birds gathered around the hermitage. Twenty robins or more, a dozen finches, jays, many juncos (including one I found dead on the porch), other small birds and even a couple of bluebirds--I had not seen them around in the winter. Yesterday morning about two I heard something scampering around in the house and found it was a little flying squirrel. I have no idea how he got in. I thought for a moment of keeping him and taming him, but opened the door and turned him loose. At least let the animals be free and be themselves! While they still can.A man wrote an article in America magazine on the vernacular liturgy: "If the Church wants to sweep the world like the Beatles..." With this kind of mentality, what can you expect? But I am afraid that is the trouble. The Church is conscious of being inferior now not only to the Communists but to four English kids with mops of hair (and I like them OK). More and more I see the importance of not mopping the world with the mops, Beatle or liturgical. I am glad to be marginal. The best thing I can do for the "world" is stay out of it--in so far as one can.December 14, 1966, VI.168-69
Awakened in the Holy SpiritThe union of contemplation and eschatology is clear in the gift of the Holy Spirit. In Him we are awakened to know the Father because in Him we are refashioned in the likeness of the Son. And it is in this likeness that the Spirit will bring us at last to the clear vision of the invisible Father in the Son's glory, which will also be our glory. Meanwhile, it is the Spirit who awakens in our heart the faith and hope in which we cry for the eschatological fulfillment and vision. And in this hope there is already a beginning, an earnest of the fulfillment. This is our contemplation: the realization and "experience" of the life-giving Spirit in Whom the Father is present to us through the Son, our way, truth and life. The realization that we are on the way, that because we are on the way, we are in that Truth which is the end, and by which we are already fully and eternally alive. Contemplation is the loving sense of this life and this presence and this eternity.December 22, 1964, V.182
