A Year With Thomas Merton - April 5

Baptized by Darkness

The darkness is thinning and expects the sun. Birds begin to sing. No Mass. Everything is waiting for the Resurrection.

At the end of night office, when the whole choir sank into the darkness of death and chanted without the faintest light, I thought of the darkness as a luxury, simplifying and unifying everything, hiding all the accidents that make one monk different from another monk, and submerging all distinctions in plain obscurity. Thus we are all one in the death of Christ. The darkness that descends upon us at the end of Lauds hears us sing the Benedictus, the canticle of thanksgiving for the Light who is to be sent. Now He is sent. He has come. He has descended into the far end of night, gathered our Fathers, the Patriarchs and Prophets, to Himself in Limbo. Now we will all be manifest. We will see one another with white garments, with palm branches in our hands. The darkness is like a font from which we shall ascend washed and illumined, to see one another, no longer separate, but one in the Risen Christ.

April 8, 1950, II.428

A Year With Thomas Merton - April 4

An Ever-Ancient New Creation

The power of the Easter Vigil liturgy in part stems from the fact that so many vestiges of primitive nature rites are included and sanctified in it. Mystery of fire and mystery of water. Mystery of spring: Ver sacrum. Fire, water and spring made sacred and meaningful theologically by the Resurrection of Christ, the new creation. Instead of stamping down the force of new life in us (and turning it into a dragon), let it be sweetened, sanctified and exalted, a figure of the life of the Spirit which is made present in our heart's love by the Resurrection.

One unquestionable improvement in the liturgy of Holy Week is the recovery of the more ancient tone for the singing of the Passion. It is splendidly austere and noble. Tremendously moving, like great tolling Flemish bells stirring whole populations in medieval cities, or like the stone sides of the Cistercian churches of the twelfth century which echoed to these tones. The chant was a mighty and living presence, binding us together in mystery. A great eloquence and sobriety that has almost been lost from the world but has been recovered. This eloquence, though, is stubborn, it is in man, it will not go. Christ preserves it, as He preserves us, from our own vulgarity.

April 1, 1961, IV.104-5

A Year With Thomas Merton - April 3

A Time of Wordless Deepening

Yesterday, on orders from Brother Clement and Reverend Father, I marked the trees Andy Boone is to cut, down in the hollow behind the hermitage, where the spring is. What a tangle of brush, saplings, vines, fallen trees, honeysuckle, etc.! Marks of deer everywhere. A fire in there would be awful. I hope we can get a space of an acre or so good and clear between here and the spring, and keep it clear. And I can use the spring, for I need it. All this is the geographical unconscious of my hermitage. Out in front, the "conscious mind," the ordered fields, the wide valley, tame woods. Behind, the "unconscious"--this lush tangle of life and death, full of danger, yet where beautiful things move, the deer, and where there is a spring of sweet, pure water--buried!

Light rain all night. The need to keep working at meditation--going to the root. Mere passivity won't do at this point. But activism won't do either. A time of wordless deepening, to grasp the inner reality of my nothingness in Him Who Is. Talking about it in these terms seems absurd. Seems to have nothing to do with the concrete reality that is to be grasped. My prayer is peace and struggle in silence, to be aware and true, beyond myself, and to go outside the door of myself, not because I will it, but because I am called and must respond.

April 3 and 4, 1965, V.224

Toujours

Found today at the Gazebo. Must be *some* kind of sign...surely?

A Year With Thomas Merton - April 2

Our Responsibility Toward Creation

"Obedient unto death...." Perhaps the most crucial aspect of Christian obedience to God today concerns the responsibility of the Christian in a technological society toward God's creation and God's will for His creation. Obedience to God's will for nature and for man--respect for nature and for man--in the awareness of our power to frustrate God's designs for nature and for man--to radically corrupt and destroy natural goods by misuse and blind exploitation, especially by criminal waste. The problem of nuclear war in only one facet of an immense, complex and unified problem.

There are very grave problems in the implications of certain kinds of Christian outlooks on "the world." The crux of the matter seems to be what extent a Christian thinker can preserve his independence from obsessive modes of thought about secular progress. (Behind which is always the anxiety for us and for the Church to be "acceptable" in a society that is leaving us behind in a cloud of dust.) In other words, where is our hope? If in fact our hope is in a temporal and secular humanism of technological and political progress, we will find ourselves, in the name of Christ, joining in the stupidity and barbarism of those who are despoiling His creation in order to make money or get power for themselves. But our hope must be in God. And he who hopes in God will find himself sooner or later making apparently hopeless and useless protests against the barbarism of power.

April 15, 1965, V.227-28

Symbole de la Verite

Toujours.

A Year With Thomas Merton - April 1

Love Flowers When It Is Obedient

Dawn is beginning (5:30) on a mild spring morning. Holy Week is about to begin and I was never more conscious of its solemnity and its importance. I am a Christian, and a member of a Christian community. I and my brothers are to put aside everything else and recognize that we belong not to ourselves but to God in Christ. That we have vowed obedience, which is intended to unite us to Christ "obedient unto death--even the death of the Cross." That without our listening and attention and submission, in total self-renunciation and love for the Father's will, in union with Christ, our life is false and without meaning. But in so far as we desire, with Christ, that the Father's will may be done in us, as it is in heaven and in Christ, then even the smallest and most ordinary things are made holy and great. And then in all things the love of God opens and flowers, and our lives are transformed. This transformation is a manifestation and advent of God in the world.

One of the fruits of a solitary life is a sense of the absolute importance of obeying God--a sense of the need to obey and to seek His will, to choose freely to see and accept what comes from Him, not as a last resort, but as one's "daily super-substantial bread." Liberation from automatic obedience into the seriousness and gravity of a free choice to submit. But it is not easy to see always where and how!