|
|
Home
>
4. Spiritual
>
4.2 Thomas Merton
|
Previous
Next 
|
|
|
|
|
Thomas Merton (1915-1968)
was an American writer and Trappist monk at Our Lady
of Gethsemani Abbey near Bardstown, Kentucky. He is the author of more than
seventy books (including the classic "The Seven Storey Mountain", still in print after
more than 50 years) that include poetry, personal journals, collections of letters,
social criticism and writings for peace, social justice and ecumenism.
Kentucky is divided
into six primary physiographic provinces : Bluegrass, Knobs,
Pennyroyal, Eastern Kentucky Coal Field, Western Kentucky Coal Field, and the
Jackson Purchase Regions. Each of these six regions reflects the underlying
geology of that particular area. The monastery is situated at the edge of the Knobs, in
an intensively farmed wooded valley. In his journal 'The Sign of Jonas' Merton tells of
how the farmed landscape and the views of the semi-wild surrounding hills interacted
with his search for the love of God in eternity.
This testimony is important
because he communicates in everyday language what
must have been in the minds of Cistercians through the ages regarding the beauties
and silence of their chosen environment.
|
|
June 27
FEAST OF THE SACRED HEART
Yesterday afternoon
I went out to the woods. There was a wall of black sky beyond
the knobs, to the west, and you could hear thunder growling all the time in the
distance. It was very hot and damp but there was good wind coming from the
direction of the storm.
(Before None, during
the meridienne in the dormitory, I dreamed of going out: and in
the dream I crossed the field where the platform still remains, from the centenary,
and walked up toward Aidan Nally's. Before I got to Nally's, in the dream, the wagon
road developed sidewalks and I came not to solitude but to Jamaica High School,
which we used to pass going up a hill on the way to the movies at Loew's Valencia in
the old days.) But when I woke up and really went out it was nothing at all like the
dream.
First I stopped under
an oak tree on top of the hill behind Nally's and sat there looking
out at the wide sweep of the valley and the miles of flat woods over toward the
straight line of the horizon where Rohan's knob is.
The wind ran over the
bent, brown grasses and moved the shoulders of all the green
trees, and I looked at the dark mass of woods beyond the distillery, on those hills
down to the south of us and realized that it is when I am with people that I am lonely,
and when I am alone I am no longer lonely.
Gethsemani looked beautiful
from the hill. It made much more sense in its
surroundings. We do not realize our own setting as we ought to: it is important to
know where you are put, on the face of the earth. Physically, the monastery is in a
great solitude. There is nothing to complain about from the point of view of
geography. One or two houses a mile and a half away and then woods and pastures
and bottoms and cornfields and hills for miles and miles.
I had a vague idea
there was a nice place beyond the field we call Hick's House
although there has been no house there for years. I went to the calf pasture beyond
St. Malachy's field at the foot of the knob where the real woods begin. It is a sort of
covawhere Our Lady might appear. From there we started walking to get to the
forest fire we went out to fight on All Saints Day two and a half years ago.
It was quiet as the
Garden of Eden. I sat on a high bank, under young pines, and
looked out over this glen. Right under me was a dry creek, with clean pools lying like
glass between the shale pavement of the stream, and the shale was as white and
crumpled as sea-biscuit. Down in the glen were the songs of marvelous birds. I saw
the gold- orange flame of an oriole in a tree. Orioles are too shy to come near the
monastery. There was a cardinal whistling somewhere, but the best song was that of
two birds that sounded as wonderful as nightingales and their song echoed through
the wood. I could not tell what they were. I had never heard such birds before. The
echo made the place sound more remote, and self-contained, more perfectly
enclosed, and more like Eden.
The black clouds meanwhile
piled up over the glen, and I went to where there was a
shed, down at the entrance to the wilderness, a shed for the calves to shelter in, in
cold weather in the fall. And yet it did not rain.
I looked up at the
pines and at the black smoke boiling in the sky: but nothing could
make that glen less peaceful, less of a house of joy.
On my way home I turned
to the storm and saw it was marching northeastward
following the line of the knobs, over on the other side of them, following the line of the
Green River turnpike that is far over there beyond the property in the woods, going
from New Haven to Bardstown. I got in just after the first bell for Vespers. Only when
we were in choir for first Vespers of the Feast of the Sacred Heart did it begin to rain.
Even then it did not rain much.
Back in the refectory
one of the novices read to us at supper an article, taken from
the American Ecclesiastical Review, on the privileges of a minor basilica and all the
monks were laughing themselves silly at the description of the half-open parasol and
the bell on the end of a pole and the other incidentals which go to make life unusually
complicated in a minor basilica. Today we are back in the middle of a book about
Russia called God's Underground, parts of which I almost but not quite believe. |
|
August30
Last Sunday was the
Feast of Our Lady's Most Pure Heart– whose Mass I love well,
and the whole day was beautiful. Beautiful, I mean, for me, although the weather was
cloudy and it rained in the morning. After Chapter I was on the kitchen-refectory
squad and spent one hour going around the one hundred and ninety-two places
counting out four thin cookies for each Trappist and handing out various very small
bon-bons and some stuff that pretended to be candied orange. I was very happy
doing all this, not because of the candy, which nauseates me, but because of God
and Our Lady, and the Feast Day.
In the afternoon I
went out to the old horsebarn with the Book of Proverbs and indeed
with the whole Bible, and I was wandering around in the hay loft, where there is a big
gap in the roof, and one of the rotting floorboards gave way under me and I nearly fell
through.
Afterwards I sat and
looked out at the hills and the gray clouds and couldn't read
anything. When the flies got too bad, I wandered across the bare pasture and sat by
the enclosure wall, perched on the edge of a ruined bathtub that has been placed
there for the horses to drink out of. A pipe comes through the wall and plenty of water
flows into the bathtub from a spring somewhere in the woods, and I couldn't read
there, either. I just listened to the clean water flowing and looked at the wreckage of
the horsebarn on top of the bare knoll in front of me, and remained drugged with
happiness and with prayer. Presently the two mares and the two colts came over to
see me and to take a drink. The colts looked like children with their big grave eyes,
very humble, very stupid and they were tamer than I expected. They came over and
nudged me with their soft muzzles and I talked to them for a bit and then Father
Nabor who was hiding behind some sumacs a hundred paces away came out to see
what was the matter.
Later on I saw other
interesting things–for instance a dead possum in a trap and a
gold, butter-and-egg butterfly wavering on the dead possum's back. There are many
Rhode Island reds over in the southwest corner of the enclosure this year. When I
was on retreat for ordination to the priesthood I did half a day's work on the roosts we
were building for them then. |
|
January 4 OCTAVE OF
THE HOLY INNOCENTS
There has been no sun
in the sky since New Year's but the dark days have been
magnificent. The sky has been covered with wonderful black clouds, the horizon has
been curtained with sheets of traveling rain. The landscape has been splendidly
serious. I love the strength of our woods, in this bleak weather. And it is bleak
weather. Yet there is a warmth in it like the presence of God in aridity of spirit, when
He comes closer to us than in consolation. On Sunday, that is on New Year's Day, I
took one of the two torn raincoats that hang in the grand parlor for the use of the
monks, and went out into the woods. Although I had not at first determined to do so, I
found myself climbing the steepest of the knobs, which also turned out to be the
highest–the pyramid that stands behind the head of the lake, and is second in line
when you begin to count from the southwest. Bare woods and driving rain.
There was a strong
wind. When I reached the top I found there was something
terrible about the landscape. But it was marvelous. The completely unfamiliar aspect
of the forest beyond our rampart unnerved me. It was as though I were in another
country. I saw the steep, savage hills, covered with black woods and half buried in
the storm that was coming at me from the southwest. And ridges traveled away from
this center in unexpected directions. I said, "Now you are indeed alone. Be prepared
to fight the devil." But it was not the time of combat. I started down the hill again
feeling that perhaps after all I had climbed it uselessly.
Halfway down, and in
a place of comparative shelter, just before the pine trees begin,
I found a bower God had prepared for me like Jonas's ivy. It had been designed
especially for this moment. There was a tree stump, in an even place. It was dry and
a small cedar arched over it, like a green tent, forming an alcove. There I sat in
silence and loved the wind in the forest and listened for a good while to God.
After that I quickly
found my way into the gully that leads through the heart of the hills
to Hanekamp's house. Hanekamp is the hermit who comes down to Mass in the
secular church. He used to be a monk here. I saw him Christmas eve, kneeling at
the communion rail in his black beard and he reminded me–quite unreasonably–of
Bob Lax. He does not really look like Lax at all. I came home walking along the
shelves of shale that form the bed of the creek. Our woods are beautiful. The peace
of the woods almost always steals over me when I am at prayer in the monastery. |
|
February 10
SAINT SCHOLASTICA
I went to the garden
house attic, as usual, after dinner. Climbed up the ladder,
observing all the hoes and shovels lying on the floor. I made my way through the litter
of old stove- pipes and broken strawberry boxes to the chair by the window. On the
chair is a sack, stained with either paint, creosote, or the blood of something
slaughtered. I opened the small window (a pane fell out one day when I let it slam; I
can still see the fragments of glass on the red roof of the shed below).
Today it was
wonderful. Clouds, sky overcast, but tall streamers of sunlight
coming down in a fan over the bare hills.
Suddenly I became aware
of great excitement. The pasture was full of
birds–starlings. There was an eagle flying over the woods. The crows were all
frightened, and were soaring, very high, keeping out of the way. Even more distant
still were the buzzards, flying and circling, observing everything from a distance. And
the starlings filled every large and small tree, and shone in the light and sang. The
eagle attacked a tree full of starlings but before he was near them the whole cloud of
them left the tree and avoided him and he came nowhere near them. Then he went
away and they all alighted on the ground. They were there moving about and singing
for about five minutes. Then, like lightning, it happened. I saw a scare go into the
cloud of birds, and they opened their wings and began to rise off the ground and, in
that split second, from behind the house and from over my roof a hawk came down
like a bullet, and shot straight into the middle of the starlings just as they were getting
off the ground. They rose into the air and there was a slight scuffle on the ground as
the hawk got his talons into the one bird he had nailed. "In Him all things are made
and in Him all exist."
It was a terrible and
yet beautiful thing, that lightning, straight as an arrow, that killed
the slowest starling.
Then every tree, every
field was cleared. I do not know where all the starlings went.
Florida, maybe. The crows were still in sight, but over their wood. Their guttural
cursing had nothing more to do with this affair. The vultures, lovers of dead things,
circled over the bottoms where perhaps there was something dead. The hawk, all
alone, in the pasture, possessed his prey. He did not fly away with it like a thief. He
stayed in the field like a king with the killed bird, and nothing else came near him. He
took his time.
I tried to pray, afterward.
But the hawk was eating the bird. And I thought of that flight,
coming down like a bullet from the sky behind me and over my roof, the sure aim
with which he hit this one bird, as though he had picked it out a mile away. For a
moment I envied the lords of the Middle Ages who had their falcons and I thought of
the Arabs with their fast horses, hawking on the desert's edge, and I also understood
the terrible fact that some men love war. But in the end, I think that hawk is to be
studied by saints and contemplatives; because he knows his business. I wish I knew
my business as well as he does his.
I wonder if my admiration
for you gives me an affinity for you, artist! I wonder if there
will ever be something connatural between us, between your flight and my heart
stirred in hiding, to serve Christ, as you, soldier, serve your nature. And God's love a
thousand times more terrible! Now I am going back to the attic and the shovels and
the broken window and the trains in the valley and the prayer of Jesus. |
|
April
29 FEAST OF SAINT ROBERT
I have been corresponding
with a Carthusian–a monk of Parkminster–about some
work. A letter from him came the other day, with a couple of pamphlets, including
Umbratilem in Latin and English. The Carthusians seem to have no hesitation in
declaring that infused contemplation is the normal end of the contemplative vocation.
That is a point which, it seems to me, should be made clear. The contemplative life
is not just a complex system of "exercises" which the monks go through in order to
pile up merits. God has brought us to the monastery to reveal Himself to us, although
it may only be in a very intangible and obscure way. "He that loveth me shall be loved
of my Father: and I will love him and manifest myself to him. . . . My Father will love
him and we will come to him and make our abode with him."
Perhaps not everyone
in the monastery will arrive at a real recognition of this intimate
presence of God: but I hardly think it possible that God would allow men to devote
themselves entirely to seeking Him without letting them in some way or other
findHim. I think He wants many of us to find Him and realize Who it is that we have
found. "We have found Him of whom Moses in the Law, and the prophets did write:
Jesus, the son of Joseph, of Nazareth."
Father Nathaniel, a
very young priest who is infirmarian because he has been ill,
preached in Chapter. It was a good sermon, all about the "night of the senses." In
fact, it was the most intelligent sermon I have heard on that kind of topic since I came
here. The monks usually preach well enough on trials and sufferings and
abandonment. All that is quite well understood. But
trials in connection
with contemplative prayer are not so well understood.
The little dogwood
tree that was just planted in the garden is now in full bloom. This
evening, after meditation, a hummingbird got caught in the cloister and was terrified
of the monks walking in procession to the refectory for supper. Two candles are
burning by the relic of Saint Robert's finger bone. In the refectory they are reading the
life of some mystic whose name I cannot catch. Meanwhile I am reading Saint Paul's
Epistle to the Hebrews:"Let us go forth therefore to Him outside the camp, bearing
His reproach, for we have not here a lasting city, but we seek one which is to come.
By Him, Jesus, let us therefore offer sacrifice of praise always to God. . . ." "Laying
aside every weight and sin which surrounds us, let us run by patience to the fight
proposed to us: looking to Jesus the author and finisher of faith, who having joy set
before Him endured the Cross, despising the shame, and now sitteth on the right
hand of the throne of God. . . ."
April30
We had a moral theology
exam and then my chest was X-rayed. The mystic in the
refectory turns out to be the Venerable Maria Celeste Crostarosa. I had never heard
of her. She is eighteenth century. She started the Redemptorist
nuns–contemplatives. |
|
September 14
FEAST OF THE EXALTATION OF THE HOLY CROSS
There has been a legal
change of seasons, and the monastic fast has begun today.
It is cool again, and the leaves of the sycamores are already beginning to turn yellow
and brown. We brought down our mattresses and blankets from our dormitory cells
and spread them out in the bright September sun. My mind is full of Saint Francis on
Mount Alvernia.
A moment ago, someone
was playing the harmonium in the novitiate. Our psalms
sound very wistful and strange on a harmonium: plaintive, sentimental and thin, as if
they were rilled with an immense nostalgia for the heaven of the books of
meditations. It reminded me of the night Father Alberic died, three years ago. I
watched by the body in the middle of the night, and then went back to the dormitory
and could not get to sleep, even when I stayed to catch up my two hours while the
others went down to church for the Night Office. Finally they sang Matins and Lauds
of the Dead, for Father Alberic, and I could hear the garbled music coming into the
dormitory through the back of the organ pipes–that great, big, dusty closet full of
muffled chords! The poignancy of that music was very affecting. It seemed to sum
up all the sufferings of the long life that was now over. Poor little gray Father Alberic,
writing the history of the Order on scraps of paper up in the infirmary! All the relief, all
the mystery, all the unexpected joy of his meeting with God could be guessed at in
those strange harmonies. And so, this morning, the sound of this harmonium in the
novitiate (it has begun to play again) chimes in with the last days of a two weeks'
battle, and I feel a wistful and chastened sobriety filling my heart, as if I were one of
the eight human survivors of the deluge, watching the world come back to view from
the summit of Mount Ararat!
In the tempest, I have
discovered once again, but this time with a peculiarly piercing
sharpness, that I cannot possess created things, 1 cannot touch them, I cannot get
into them. They are not my end, I cannot find any rest in them. We who are
supposed to be Christians know that well enough, abstractly. Or rather, we say we
believe it. Actually we have to discover it over and over again. We have to experience
this truth, with deeper and deeper intensity, as we go on in life. We renounce the
pursuit of creatures as ends on certain sacramental occasions. And we return, bit by
bit, to our familiarity with them, living as if we had in this world a lasting city. . . .But
creatures remain untouchable, inviolable. If God wants you to suffer a little, He allows
you to learn just how inviolable they are. As soon as you try to possess their
goodness for its own sake, all that is sweet in them becomes bitter to you, all that is
beautiful, ugly. Everything you love sickens you. And at the same time your need to
love something, somebody, increases a hundred times over. And God, Who is the
only one who can be loved for His own sake alone, remains invisible and
unimaginable and untouchable, beyond everything else that exists.
You flowers and trees,
you hills and streams, you fields, flocks and wild birds, you
books, you poems, and you people, I am unutterably alone in the midst of you. The
irrational hunger that sometimes gets into the depths of my will, tries to swing my
deepest self away from God and direct it to your love. I try to touch you with the deep
fire that is in the center of my heart, but I cannot touch you without defiling both you
and myself, and I am abashed, solitary and helpless, surrounded by a beauty that
can never belong to me.
But this sadness generates
within me an unspeakable reverence for the holiness of
created things, for they are pure and perfect and they belong to God and they are
mirrors of His beauty. He is mirrored in all things like sunlight in clean water: but if I
try to drink the light that is in the water I only shatter the reflection.
And so I live alone
and chaste in the midst of the holy beauty of all created things,
knowing that nothing I can see or hear or touch will ever belong to me, ashamed of
my absurd need to give myself away to any one of them or to all of them. The silly,
hopeless passion to give myself away to any beauty eats out my heart. It is an
unworthy desire, but I cannot avoid it. It is in the hearts of us all, and we have to bear
with it, suffer its demands with patience, until we die and go to heaven where all
things will belong to us in their highest causes. |
|
|
|
|
|
