A Year With Thomas Merton - July 31

You Are Not Met with Words

The things of Time are in connivance with eternity. The shadows serve You. The beasts sing to You before they pass away. The solid hills shall vanish like a worn-out garment. All things change and die and disappear. Questions arrive, assume their actuality, and also disappear. In this hour I shall cease to ask them and silence shall be my answer. The world that Your love created and that the heat has distorted and that my mind is always misinterpreting shall cease to interfere with our voices.

Minds which are separated pretend to blend in one another’s language. The marriage of souls in concepts is mostly an illusion. Thoughts which travel outward bring back reports of You from outward things—but a dialogue with You, uttered through the world, always ends by being a dialogue with my own reflection in the stream of time. With You there is no dialogue unless You choose a mountain and circle it with cloud and print Your words in fire upon the mind of Moses. What was delivered to Moses on tablets of stone, as the fruit of lightning and thunder, is now more thoroughly born in our souls, as quietly as the breath of our own being.

You, Who sleep in my breast, are not met with words, but in the emergence of life within life and of wisdom within wisdom. With You there is no longer any dialogue, any contest, any opposition. You are found in communion! Thou in me and I in Thee and Thou in them and they in me: dispossession with dispossession, dispassion within dispassion, emptiness within emptiness, freedom within freedom. I am alone. Thou art alone. The Father and I are one.

July 4, 1952, II.487-88

A Year With Thomas Merton - July 11

On Leaving my Hermitage

What business have I to be sitting around in Jim Wygal’s house in Anchorage, listening to records, trying to talk about something? I don’t belong in that anymore, still less in the place where I went with Fr. John Loftus and his friend the other night to hear some jazz. At least I have found out by experience that this just does not go. I am dead to it; it is finished long ago. You don’t drag a corpse down to Fourth Street and set it up in a chair, at a table, and in polite society.

This just made the reading of Chuang Tzu all the better and more meaningful. Here at the hermitage I am not dead, because this is my life, and I am awake, and breathing, and listening with all that I have got, and sinking to the root. There is no question that I am completely committed to interior solitude. Where—makes no difference. Not a question of “where.” Not “tampering with my heart,” or with the hearts of others. This is imperative. “The mind is a menace to wisdom.” To be one who “though walking on dry land, is as though he were at the bottom of a pool.”

The trouble is this being a “writer,” and one of the most absurd things I have gotten into is this business of dialogues and retreats. This has to be faced. I can’t completely back out now, but certainly no more pushing.

If the days in solitude have taught me this, they are good enough.

July 4, 1960, IV.18