A Year With Thomas Merton - May 28 <**warning - adult content**>

On America in the Sixties

Yesterday I dipped into the manuscript that Julian Miller at Harcourt, Brace & World wanted me to comment on—nuns used as whores by Viet Cong, etc. The correct mythology, which assumes a compound of oversexuality, crude violence, honest bourgeois privatism, native American honesty, a bit of lesbianism for kicks. In other words, a pile of stupid shit. What revolted me was not so much the sex as the attitude—the mixture of superficial objectivity and Time-Life self-righteousness—and the suburb sophistication. America as she sees herself. The kind of America that makes Norman Mailer vomit—and me too.

It always gets back to the same thing. I have dutifully done my bit. I have been “open to the world.” That is to say, I have undergone my dose of exposure to American society in the ‘60s—particularly in these last weeks. I love the people I run into, but I pity them for having to live as they do, and I think the world of U.S.A. in 1967 is a world of crass, blind, overstimulated, phony, lying stupidity. The war in Asia slowly gets worse—and almost more inane. The temper of the country is one of blindness, fat self-satisfied, ruthless, mindless corruption. A lot of people are uneasy about it but helpless to do anything against it. The rest are perfectly content with the rat race as it is, and with its competitive, acquisitive, hurtling, souped-up drive into nowhere. A massively aimless, baseless, shrewd cockiness that simply exalts itself without purpose. The mindless orgasm, in which there is no satisfaction, only spasm.

May 27, 1967, VI.239

A Year With Thomas Merton - May 27

Visiting the Brothers

The long yellow side of the monastery faces the sun on a sharp rise with fruit trees and beehives. I climb sweating into the novitiate, put down the water bottle on the cement floor. The bell is ringing. I have some duties in the monastery. When I have accomplished these, I return to the woods. In the choir are the young monks, patient, serene, with very clear eyes, thin, reflective, gentle. For fifteen years I have given them classes, these young ones who come, and grow thin, become more reflective, more silent. But many of them are concerned with questions. Questions of liturgy, questions of psychology, questions of history. Are they the right questions? In the woods there are other questions and other answers, for in the woods the whole world is naked and directly present, with no monastery to veil it.

Chanting the Alleluia in the second mode; strength and solidity of the Latin, seriousness of the second mode, built on the Re as to an inevitable center. Sol-Re, Fa-Re, Sol-Re, Do-Re. Many other notes in between, but suddenly one hears only the one note. Consonantia: all notes, in their perfect distinctness, are yet blended in one.

In the heat of noon I return through the cornfield, past the barn under the oaks, up the hill, under the pines, to the hot cabin. Larks rise out of the long grass singing. A bumblebee hums under the wide shady eaves.

May 1965, V.241-42

A Year With Thomas Merton - May 26

Lost in His Mercy

(Thomas Merton is ordained a priest on the Feast of the Ascension, May 26, 1949)

I was very happy to sing the Gospel—the magnificent triumph of Christ, which is echoed and expressed in the ordination to the priesthood of a thing like myself that He picked up out of the wreckage of the moral universe and brought into His house. It is He Who looks up to heaven, in my own soul full of weakness and infidelity, and cries out, “Father, the hour is come, glorify thy Son, that thy Son may glorify thee.” And the context reminds me to whom I belong: “As Thou hast given him power over all flesh, that he may give life everlasting to all whom Thou hast given him.” My joy is the great power of Christ. And for that, above all, I am glad of my deep moral poverty, which is always before me these days, but which does not obsess or upset me because it is all lost in His mercy.

May 26, 1949, II.316

A Year With Thomas Merton - May 25

Hang On To The Clear Light!

In our monasteries we have been content to find our ways to a kind of peace, a simple, undisturbed, thoughtful life. And this is certainly good, but is it good enough?

I, for one, realize that now I need more. Not simply to be quiet, somewhat productive, to pray, to read, to cultivate leisure—otium sanctum—a holy leisure. There is a need for effort, deepening, change and transformation. Not that I must undertake a special project of self-transformation or that I must “work on myself.” In that regard, it would be better to forget it. Just to go for walks, live in peace, let change come quietly and invisibly on the inside.

But I do have a past to break with, an accumulation of inertia, waste, wrong, foolishness, rot, junk, a great need of clarification, of mindfulness, or rather of no mind—a return to genuine practice, right effort, need to push on to the great doubt. Need for the spirit.

Hang on to the clear light!

May 30, 1968, VII.113

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

A Year With Thomas Merton - May 23

All the Moods of My Place

This morning at four. Great full moon over Nally’s hill, pale and clear. A faint mist hanging over the wet grass of the bottoms.

More and more I appreciate the beauty and solemnity of the “Way” up through the woods, past the bull barn, up the stormy rise, into the grove of tall, straight oaks and hickories, and around through the pines on top of the hill, to the cottage.

Sunrise. Hidden by pines and cedars on the east side of the house. Saw the red flame of it glaring through the cedars, not like sunrise but like a forest fire. From the window of the front room, then he, the Sun (can hardly be conceived as other than he), shone silently with solemn power through the pine branches.

Now after High Mass the whole valley is glorious with morning light and with the song of birds.

It is essential to experience all the times and moods of this place. No one will know or be able to say how essential. Almost the first and most important element of a truly spiritual life, lost in the constant, formal routine of Divine offices under the fluorescent lights in choir—where there is practically no change between night and day.

May 30, 1961, IV.122

A Year With Thomas Merton - May 22

Patiently Exploring Interior Space

Hot, stuffy, misty summer weather.

Now I have got to get my life in order at last without desperation and without compromise. A long succession of waster opportunities. The need for serious spiritual discipline, especially long periods of meditation. Going on my own, not being held within the limits of accepted practice and custom in the community. I owe it to the community, which has allowed me opportunities for it, more or less, to forge ahead where they do not go. This is certainly implied by the situation in which I have been placed.

I have misused this to a great extent, thinking I was obliged to form a judgment concerning world affairs. That obligation is by no means certain, whereas my obligation to explore "the interior space" is absolutely clear.

From Tertullian: Malim nullum bonum quam vanum: I would rather have nothing than have vanity."

When we face the vanity of our best efforts, their triviality, their involvement in illusion, we become desperate. And then we are tempted to do anything as long as it seems to be good. We may abandon a better good with which we have become disillusioned, and embrace a lesser good with a frenzy that prevents us from seeing the greater illusion.

So, through efforts that may seem to be waster, we must patiently go towards a good that is to be given to the patient and the disillusioned.

May 29 and 30, 1962, IV.221-22