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All My Fathers(Thomas Merton becomes a postulant at Gethsemani on December 13, 1941)
In the cemetery I looked up at the sky and thought of the great sea of graces that was flowing down on Gethsemani as her hundredth year was ending. All the crosses stood up and spoke to me for fair this time. It was as if the earth were shaking under my feet and as if the jubilant dead were just about to sit up and sing.
And I got some taste of how much there is to be glad for in the world because of Gethsemani. Not that I am looking for any such taste anymore: only how to serve God better and belong more completely to Him.Father Amadeus was speaking today of the need for a concrete spiritual ideal. What strikes me is the need of something absolutely concrete and definite--poverty, humility: not something abstract, off in the heavens, but here, at Gethsemani. Not for other people first, but for myself first. To make it a real ideal you work for, not just one you occasionally think and preach about. To ask God somehow to make me the quietest and meekest and most unobtrusive man in the whole house, the poorest man, the one with nothing. I am right at the other end of the pole from that--but in the circumstances God has given me to work with, there are still graces--and all the Fathers of Gethsemani, who I love, will all pray for me.December 20, 1948, II.256-57
A Simple Benedictine LifeBenedictine life is perfectly simple--it is the Gospel pure and simple--it liberates us from ourselves by enabling us to give ourselves entirely to God.I give myself completely to God. He draws me more and more to that. I cannot know what lies ahead for me, for us, but more and more I realize God wants me to put myself in His hands, and let Him take me through the things that are to come, and I must learn to trust Him without fear, or questions, or hesitations, or withdrawal.Yesterday, in the infirmary, old Brother Gregory lay dying.And today it was very beautiful, warmish with the sun out and little neat clouds high up in the sky and the brown dirt piled high on top of Brother Gregory, who turns out to have been Swiss. And one day here a bull got playful and tossed him over a stone wall and that was why he always limped.I asked Reverend Father what made Brother so saintly, and he said, "He was always working, never idle. When he was out tending the cows in the pasture, he would come back with a bucket of blackberries. He couldn't be idle." I might have known what kind of answer I would get!December 14, 16, and 18, 1947, II.145-47
Wanting to Start OverWhile I was saying Mass, at my Communion, I heard the bells ring for an agony--one of the monks is dying--and guessed they were for Brother Gerard (they rang for thee!), and he died about an hour later. Another of the old brothers, the past dying.A distant relative sent an old snapshot taken when he and his wife visited Douglaston--where I lived with my grandparents--thirty years ago. It shows them with Bonnemaman and myself--and the back porch of the house, and the birch tree. There is Bonnemaman as I remember her--within two years of her dying. And there am I: it shakes me! I am the young rugby player, the lad from Cambridge, vigorous, light, vain, alive, obviously making a joke of some sort. The thing shakes me. I can see that that was a different body from the one I have now--one entirely young and healthy, one that did not know sickness, weakness, anguish, tension, fatigue--a body totally assured of itself and with care, perfectly relaxed, ready for enjoyment. What a change since that day! If I were wiser, I would not mind, but I am not so sure I am wiser. I have been through more, I have endured a lot of things, perhaps fruitlessly. I do not entirely think that--but it is possible. What shakes me is that--I wish I were that rugby player, vain, vigorous, etc., and could start over again! And yet how absurd. What would I ever do? Those were, no matter how you look at it, better times! There things we had not heard of--Auschwitz, the Bomb, etc. (Yet it was all beginning, nevertheless).December 21, 1965, V.325-26
Dying and Being Reborn in Christ(Thomas Merton enters Gethsemani on December 10, 1941; he dies by accident while attending a monastic conference in Bangkok, Thailand, on December 10, 1968)
I come into solitude to die and love. I come here to be created by the Spirit in Christ.
I am called here to grow. "Death" is a critical point of growth, or transition to a new mode of being; to a maturity and fruitfulness that I do not know (they are in Christ and in His Kingdom). The child in the womb does not know what will come after birth. He must be born in order to live. I am here to learn to face death as my birth.
This solitude--a refuge under His wings, a place to hide myself in His Name, therefore, a sanctuary where the grace of Baptism remains a conscious, living, active reality valid not only for me but for the whole Church. Here, planted as a seed in the cosmos, I will be a Christ seed, and bring fruit for other men. Death and rising in Christ.
I need to be "confirmed" in my vocation by the Spirit (speaking through the Church, i.e., the abbot and the community). This ordains me to be the person I am and to have the particular place and function I have, to be myself in the sense of choosing to tend toward what God wants me to be, and to orient my whole life to being the person He loves. (We are all "loved in general," but we have to personally accept a special love of God for ourselves.)
December 1, 1965, V.333-34
The Complexity of Our Real "I"When I got up it was about thirty degrees on the porch and now at dawn it is down to twenty-one. These are the coldest hours--meditation, lectio (spiritual reading), and hot tea with lemon and a good fire. I am reading Paul Evdokimov's La Femme et le salut du monde (Woman and the Salvation of the World)--after tea--and then Rilke's Duino Elegies.
"The cross is made up of our weaknesses and failures, it is constructed by our ego and above all by our profound gloom and unspeakable and culpable ugliness, in short, by all the complexity that is at this time the real I."
I experience the truth of this very real and exact insight of Evdokimov. Still, in regard to the Catholic Peace Fellowship--about which nothing is settled--I see how much there was that was inauthentic (i.e., false, spurious) in my own initial enthusiasm for identification with peace activities, The Catholic Worker, etc. It was in reality selfish and naive at the same time. And I did not foresee that necessarily they and I could hardly go along forever in agreement, living in totally different circumstances. Yet I do agree with their ideal in general--not with all its particular implementations. One could go on analyzing interminably. I must accept this result of my own inner contradictions and trust God to bring a solution in which His will may be done by me and all of them too. And I don't know what to do next--hence I must be content not to act at all, when I would very much like to settle everything in a big sweep.
The Old Man in a Thousand WrappingsEvening: The heart is deceitful above all thingsThe heart is deep and full of windingsThe old man is covered up in a thousand wrappings (Lancelot Andrewes, Preces)True sad words, and I would not have felt the truth of them so much if I had not had so much solitude these days, with rain coming down on the roof and hiding the valley. Rain in the night, the nuisance of water in the buckets. Or cutting wood behind the house, and a faint smell of hickory smoke from the chimney--while I taste and see that I am deceitful and that most of my troubles are rooted in my own bitterness. Is this what solitude is for? Then it is good, but I must pray for the strength to bear it! (The heart is deceitful and does not want this--but God is greater than my heart!)I will acknowledge my faults, O Lord.O who will give scourges to my mindThat they spare not my sins?December 3, 1964, V.173
