A Year With Thomas Merton - August 28

I Must Lead a New Life

Always very fine ideas in Romano Guardini on Providence.

For instance, that the will of God is not a “fate” to which we submit, but a creative act in our life producing something absolutely new (or failing to do so), something hitherto unforeseen by the laws and established patterns. Our cooperation (seeking first the Kingdom of God) consists not solely in conforming to laws, but in opening our wills out to this creative act, which must be retrieved in and by us—by the will of God.

This is my big aim—to put everything else aside. I do not want to create merely for and by myself a new life and a new world, but I want God to create them in and through me. This is central and fundamental—and with this one can never be a mere Marxian communist.

I must lead a new life and a new world must come into being. But not by my plans and my agitation.

August 3, 1958, III.211

A Year With Thomas Merton - August 27

A Blessed Shipwreck in God's Simplicity
I copy out the sentences from Dom Porion's letter, which I spoke of the other day. Speaking of his book on the Holy Trinity--so simple, so deep and so comprehensive--he says:

"It turns out, furthermore, that my book's atmosphere is, of course, no longer my own. I would like my life to be one of continual looking at God, seizing what he is in pure silence. In this light-filled serenity a person could forever experience a blessed shipwreck."
How I sympathize with that sentence! No matter how simple discourse may be, it is never simple enough. No matter how simple thought may be, it is never simple enough. The only thing left is the simplicity of the soul in God or, better, the simplicity of God.

August 12, 1949, II.353-54

A Year With Thomas Merton - August 26

Frater Aelred

Chuang Tzu said: "At the present time the whole world is under a delusion and, though I wish to go in a certain direction, how can I succeed in doing so? Knowing that I cannot do so, if I were to force my way, that would be another delusion. Therefore my best course is to let my purpose go and no more pursue it. If I do not pursue it, whom shall I have to share in my sorrow?"

On Monday Frater Aelred left, which was wise and the only solution--he was getting no education here and would only get into complications. So now he is gone and has left no memorial other than a spot of wine on the altar cloth--and the little India rubber eraser on which he carved my name so that with my ink pad I can stamp it on books, etc. I like the way it is done, rough and crude and simple.

August 5, 1960, IV.25

A Year With Thomas Merton - September 1

With My Writing Pad in Purgatory

This morning, under a cobalt blue sky, summer having abruptly ended, I am beginning the book of Job. It is not warm enough to sit for long in the shade of the cedars. The woods are crisply outlined in the sun and the clamor of distant crows is sharp in the air that no longer sizzles with locusts. And Job moves me deeply. This year, more than ever, it has a special poignancy.

I now know that all my own poems about the world's suffering have been inadequate: they have not solved anything. They have only camouflaged the problem. And it seems to me that the urge to write a real poem about suffering and sin is only another temptation, because, after all, I do not really understand.

Sometimes I feel that I would like to stop writing, precisely as a gesture of defiance. In any case, I hope to stop publishing for a time, for I believe it has now become impossible for me to stop writing altogether. Perhaps I shall continue writing on my deathbed, and even take some asbestos paper with me in order to go on writing in purgatory. Except that I hope our Lady will arrange some miraculous victory over my sins that will make purgatory unnecessary.

September 1, 1949 II.364-65

A Year With Thomas Merton - August 31

In Your Kindness Dispose Me to Your Pleasure

August ending beautifully--bright days, relatively cool. Wonderful vista opened up at the end of the novitiate garden where I got Frater Gerard to cut down the walnut tree that was doing poorly and hiding the valley, woods and knobs into the bargain. Now a problem--the young beech tree that I put there myself. I suppose I must have the sense to transplant it.

Some annoyances, but they hardly matter. Bulldozer on that dam built ten years ago across the road, and now beginning to fall apart. A lot of banging in the new waterworks. I think all the mosquitoes are coming from the new reservoir--never so many in the dormitory as last year! An awful lot of idiot letters. And so on.

Do You Yourself in kindness dispose of me, my thoughts and actions, according to Your good pleasure, so that Your will may always be done by me and in me and concerning me." (St. Anselm)

August 31 and September 1, 1963, V.14

A Year With Thomas Merton - August 30

Brother Mathias to the End

Brother Mathias received Extreme Unction--the sacrament of the sick and dying--after None, sitting in a brown chair at the head of the choir. He is dying of cancer. Again, the mystery of the present. Wasted and changed by illness, he is still Brother Mathias, in fact, more Brother Mathias than ever--his life is crowned by his patience and goodness in his suffering, so that this will be the definitive Brother Mathias--and I am sure he no longer knows anything about this and has lost sight of himself. He just suffers, and the days go by. How strange it would be to say he received the sacrament "with great faith." Which, of course, is true. How true to say he received it with the earnestness and depth of feeling which we know in him and which is his very self to us. He received it as Brother Mathias--as one loved by Christ, and chosen by him. This is the real heart of the mystery, so obvious and simple. The presence of Divine Mercy in the midst of us, in Christ.

August 25, 1958, III.215

A Year With Thomas Merton - August 29

The Flow of Events

Inexorably life moves on toward crisis and mystery.

One must not be too quickly preoccupied with professing definitively what is true and what is false. Not that true and false do not matter. But if at every instant one wants to grasp the whole and perfect truth of a situation, particularly a concrete and limited situation in history or politics, one only deceives and blinds himself. Such judgments are only rarely and fleetingly possible, and sometimes, when we think we see what is most significant, it has very little meaning at all.

So it is possible that the moment of my death may turn out to be, from a human and "economic" point of view, the most meaningless of all.

Meanwhile, I do not have to stop the flow of events in order to understand them. On the contrary, I must move with them or else what I think I understand will be no more than an image in my own mind.

So, the flow of events: Terry Phillips with a wrecking bar smashing the plaster off the walls of the room in the old guest house where, twenty years ago, I first came on retreat, that moonlit night in Lent! Terry--our youngest postulant--was not even born then.

August 16 and 19, 1961, IV.152-53