A Year With Thomas Merton - August 17

Be Here Now

In the afternoon I went out to the old horse barn with the Book of Proverbs and indeed the whole Bible, and I was wandering around in the hayloft, where there is a big gap in the roof. One of the rotting floorboards gave way under me and I nearly fell through. Afterwards I sat and looked out at the hills and the grey clouds and couldn’t read anything. When the flies got too bad, I wandered across the bare pasture and sat over by the enclosure wall, perched on the edge of a ruined bathtub that has been placed there for horses to drink out of. A pipe comes through the wall and plenty of water flows into the bathtub from the spring somewhere in the woods, and I couldn’t read there either. I just listened to the clean water flowing and looked at the wreckage of the horse barn on top of the bare knoll in front of me and remained drugged with happiness and prayer.

Presently the two mares and the two colts came over to see me and to take a drink. The colts looked like children with their big grave eyes, very humble, very stupid, and they were tamer than I expected. They came over and nudged me with their soft muzzles and I talked to them a bit.

Later on I saw other interesting things—for instance a dead possum in a trap and a gold butter-and-egg butterfly wavering on the dead possum’s back. There are many Rhode Island Reds over in the southwest corner of the enclosure. When I was on retreat for ordination to the priesthood, I galloped to be at work on the roosts we were building for them then.

August 30, 1949, V.363

A Year With Thomas Merton - July 3

Live in the Present and Where You Are

It is certain that Gethsemani is God’s work. Who shall ever be able to say how much depends and has depended in the past on the prayers and sufferings of the men of this house? I am convinced that the fate of America is tied up with the fate of Gethsemani and her foundations. This obscure unit is tremendously important to the whole Church of God.

Can I love God and love the Church if I despise Gethsemani?

What am I heading for? Where am I going? The answer to that one is: I don’t need to know. All these troubles come from mistrusting the love of God. Shall I start asking myself all those same old questions all over again? God knows what He wants to do with me. Rest in His tremendous love—to know the savor and sweetness of God’s love expressed from moment to moment in all the contacts between Him and your soul—from outside in events, in His signified will and will of good pleasure, from within myself by the flow of actual graces. Rest in that union. It will feed you, fill you with life. There is nothing else you need. He will show you the way to increase it, and, if necessary, He will lead you into perfect solitude in His own good time. Leave it all to Him. Live in the present.

July 3 and 6, 1947, II.89-90

A Year With Thomas Merton - May 24

The Great Work of Sunrise

The great work of sunrise again today.

The awful solemnity of it. The sacredness. Unbearable without prayer and worship. I mean unbearable if you really put everything else aside and see what is happening! Many, no doubt, are vaguely aware that it is dawn, but they are protected from the solemnity of it by the neutralizing worship of their own society, their own world, in which the sun no longer rises and sets.

Sense of importance, the urgency of seeing, fully aware, experiencing what is here: not what is given by men, by society, but what is given by God and hidden by (even monastic) society. Clear realization that I must begin with these first elements. That it is absurd to inquire after my function in the world, or whether I have one, as long as I am not first of all alive and awake. And if that, and no more, is my job (for it is certainly every man's job), then I am grateful for it. The vanity of all false missions, when no one is sent. All the universal outcry of people who have not been told to cry out, but who are driven to this noise by their fear, their lack of what is right in front of their noses.

May 31, 1961, IV.123