A Year With Thomas Merton - July 25

Praying for Civilized Quail

Heavy rain in the morning and then, after a hot steamy afternoon, a violent thunderstorm at supper time—it blew out the bulb of my desk lamp. After the storm and supper—around bedtime—I went out and there were five small, bedraggled, wet quail, picking around in the path by the doorstep and very tame. Must be from the nursery the brothers had at the Steel Building. They don’t seem very well prepared for life in the woods: they preferred the path to the grass that would hide them; no mistrust of a human being—did not run away, only got out of the way of my feet or skipped away if I reached for them. They are now out on the wet lawn somewhere. This place is full of foxes—not to mention the kids who shoot anything that moves, in or out of season! I feel very sorry for these quail! But there is also the wild covey of a dozen or so trained by a zealous mother who often lured me along the rose hedge away from where the little ones were hiding in the deep weeds by the gate.

(I hear a mature quail whistling in the field. Perhaps it’s that mother gathering in her five “civilized” ones. Hope she tells them a thing or two about people!)

July 17, 1968, VII.146-47

A Year With Thomas Merton - July 24

Hating No One

I am reading Karl Rahner’s essays on grace—at least those available in translation, and I do not have time to struggle with the German. They seem clear and obvious. I sometimes wonder why Rahner is considered so dangerous. Perhaps because he is too clear and not involved in the technical mumbo jumbo that makes others unreadable. In a word: a readable theologian is dangerous.

How true it is that the great obligation of the Christian, especially now, is to prove himself a disciple of Christ by hating no one, that is to say, by condemning no one, rejecting no one. And how true that the impatience that fumes at others and damns them (especially whole classes, races, nations) is a sign of the weakness that is still unliberated, still not tracked by the Blood of Christ, and is still a stranger to the Cross.

July 22, 1963, IV.342

A Year With Thomas Merton - July 23

Prayer to Our Lady of Mount Carmel

What was it that I said to you, at Havana?

Were you not perhaps the last one I saw as the steamer left, you standing on your tower with your back to the sea, looking at the university?

I have never forgotten you. You are more to me now than then, when I walked through the streets reciting. I think I have received them, but I do not remember. More importantly, I have received you whom I know and do not know. Whom I love but not enough.

Prayer is what you bring—for prayer is your gift to us rather than what you ask of us. If only I could pray—and yet I can and do pray. Teach me to go to the country beyond words and beyond names. Teach me to pray on this side of the frontier, here where the woods are.

I need to be led by you. I need my heart to be moved by you. I need my soul to be made clean by your prayer. I need my will to be made strong by you. I need you for all those who suffer, who are in prison, in danger, in sorrow. I need you for all the crazy people. I need your healing hands to work always in my life. I need you to make me, as your Son, a healer, a comforter, a savior. I need you to name the dead. I need you to help the dying cross their particular river. I need you for myself, whether I live or die. I need to be your monk and your son. It is necessary. Amen.

July 17, 1956, III.46-47

A Year With Thomas Merton - July 22

A Paradise of Corn Stalks and Silence

How high the corn is this year, and what joy there is in seeing it! The tall crests nodding twelve to fifteen feet above the ground, and all the silk-bearded ears. You come down out of the novitiate, through the door in the wall, over the trestle, and down into this green paradise of stalks and silence. I know the joy and the worship the Indians must have felt, and the Eucharistic rightness of it! How can one not feel such things—so that I love the Mayas and Incas as perhaps the most human of peoples, as the ones who did most honor to our continents.

The irreligious mind is simply the unreal mind, the zombie, abstracted mind, that does not see the things that grow in the earth and feel glad about them, but only knows prices and figures and statistics. In a world of numbers you can be irreligious, unless the numbers themselves are incarnate in astronomy and music. But, for that, they must have something to do with seasons and with harvests, with the joy of the Neolithic peoples, who for millennia were quiet and human.

July 26, 1963, IV.346

A Year With Thomas Merton - July 21

Letting Go of the Perfect

Very hot. The birds sing and the monks sweat and about 3:15 I stood in the doorway of the grand parlor and looked at a huge pile of Kentucky cumulus cloud out beyond Mount Olivet—with a buzzard lazily going back and forth over the sheep pasture, very high and black against the white mountain of the cloud. Blue shadows on the cloud.

On the Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, our Lady made me happy in many different ways. At prayer—aware of God’s purity surrounding my own imperfection with purity and peace. Yet helpless to get myself out of the way so that there could be nothing left but His purity. No other solution but to wait in love and humility and love my imperfection.

All my desires draw me more and more in a direction: to be little, to be nothing, to rejoice in your imperfections, to be glad that you are not worthy of attention, that you are of no account in the universe. This is the only liberation, the only way to solitude.

As long as I continue to take myself seriously, how can I be a saint, a contemplative? As long as I continue to bother about myself, what happiness is possible in life? For the self that I bother about doesn’t really exist and never will and never did, except in my own imagination.

July 18, 1948, II.219