A Year With Thomas Merton - August 20

Be Content

(Thomas Merton officially becomes a full-time hermit on the Feast of St. Bernard, August 20, 1965)

I believe with Diadochos that, if, at the hour of my death my confidence in God’s mercy is perfect, I will pass the frontier without trouble and pass the dreadful array of my sins with compunction and confidence and leave them all behind forever.

Lord, again, I do not doubt my call to holiness, even though I am not faithful. I do not doubt that You will fulfill Your will in me in spite of my cowardice and lack of effort, in spite of all my unconscious and even conscious prevarications. You are God and You have destroyed my sins on the Cross before they were committed. Keep me from s inning again, keep me even from material sin, make me avoid even imperfections, although so often I cannot even guess at them.

Our glory and our hope—we are the body of Christ. Christ loves us and espouses us as His own flesh. Isn’t that enough for us? But we do not really believe it. No! Be content, be content. We are the Body of Christ. We have found Him, He has found us. We are in Him, He is in us. There is nothing further to look for, except the deepening of this life we already possess. Be content.

August 20, 1956, III.70

A Year With Thomas Merton - August 19

Taste and See

From moment to moment, I remember with surprise that I am satisfied, even though everything is not yet fulfilled. I lack nothing. Omnino replete me—He satisfies me in all things. Sapientia—wisdom = sapor boni—savoring the good (St. Bernard). To know and taste the secret good that is present but is not known to those who, because they are restless and because they are discontent and because they complain, cannot apprehend it. The present good—reality—God. Gustate et videte—Taste and see.

It is easy to say of every new idea that one meets, “It is all in St. Bernard.” It is very doubtful, for instance, whether Freud is “all in St. Bernard.” However, Emmanuel Mounier’s “Personalism” is essentially in St. Bernard. Hence to read Mounier with understanding is most profitable spiritual reading not only because it helps to understand St. Bernard but helps us to use him. We are paralyzed in our individualism and we turn everything to the advantage of sterile self-isolation (self-centered) and we do this in the name of our contemplative calling. What a disaster to build the contemplative life on the negation of communication. That is why there is so much noise in a Trappist monastery. The infernal chatter and hullabaloo, the continual roar of the machinery, the crash of objects falling from the hands of distraught contemplatives—all this protests that we hate silence with all our power because, with our wrong motives for seeking it, it is ruining our lives. Yet the fact remains that silence is our life—but a silence which is communion and better communication than words! If only someone could tell us how to find it.

August 20, 1956, III.70-71