Dancing in the Water of Life

by Thomas Merton

  December 21, 1963. Feast of St. Thomas

  Very cold. Temperature has not been above freezing, even in the sun, and the snow stays on the ground.

  Zwi Werblowsky has sent Bahya [ben Joseph] ibn Pakuda in the remarkable [Andrãe] Chouraqui translation. This is a very great book [Introduction aux devoirs des coeurs, trans. Andrãe Chouraqui, 1943]. The translation itself is classic. It was made in the time when the Nazis occupied France, and the furnaces of Auschwitz were in operation. Chouraqui was writing in occupied France. His rhythms in translation of the Psalms (the book is full of Biblical quotations) are superb. I think I have never seen such high religious quality in any translation of the Psalms except perhaps the Vulgate. But I think Chouraqui is even better.

  Today I must go to town to see the doctors. I fell in the snow the other day–not a hard fall. The snow broke it, but my shoulder has been sore and the back may have been injured again.

  Quite by accident I discover a reference to my old friend Jean Hering at Strasbourg [University, France] and find that he has been all along one of the earliest authorities on French Phenomenology and a disciple of [Edmund] Husserl–but I was only sixteen and he never talked about phenomenology, or if he did I was not interested. I wrote to him the other day–I wonder if he is still alive.

  December 22, 1963. Fourth Sunday [of] Advent

  Still very cold. The light snow has never melted.

  Merleau-Ponty says: “Je suis a moi au étant au monde” [“I am to myself as being in the world”]. And this would appear to be the exact opposite of what I have been saying for twenty years–that I am my own by withdrawing from the world. Actually I agree with him profoundly. Everything depends on the meaning you give to “monde.” If it means the delusions and clichés that stand between a supposed autonomous “I” and the world of phenomena, well, one does not want to belong to this and struggle for existence in it, thinking oneself to be now free, now not free. Who is this self? But if it means one’s own situation, then how else can one be anything except by being what he is, and how can he be what and who he is apart from all that goes with him? What is with me? What am I in? That is one reason for a Journal like this, to keep honestly situated.

  It is also a reason for taking pictures, for instance, yesterday, down at “The Point” in Louisville, with Jim Wygal, and along the river front. To withdraw from where I am in order to be totally outside all that situates me–this is real delusion. Hence the similarity between Merleau-Ponty and Zen. I am inevitably a dialogue with my surroundings, and have no choice, though I can perhaps change the surroundings. “L’intérieur et l’extérieur sont inseparables. Le monde est font au dedans et je suis tous hors de moi.” [“The interior and the exterior are inseparable. The world is created from within and I am always outside myself.”]

  December 23, 1963

  Karl Jaspers says: “Today no philosophical insight is possible unless Socrates is present, if only as a pale shadow. The way in which a man experiences Socrates is fundamental to his thinking.” It is curious that I “experienced” Socrates in school [at Oakham] as anything but what he was: I reacted to him with suspiciousness as to the bulwark of authority proposed by the “establishment” (the Headmaster [Francis Doherty]). Curious that the one who was in this case conventional was I, not Socrates. Happy if even at this late date Socrates can reveal to me that I am, or have been, to some extent a square, first when I wanted not to be–for in this matter good will is not enough.

  December 25, 1963. Christmas

  As usual, Christmas was a kind of spiritual crisis for me.

  Christmas Eve was fine and quiet. Deep snow. Walked in some wind and snow in St. Teresa’s Field. But the few days before had been hectic. Ambivalent about a terrible drawing I did for the Novices’ Christmas card to Dom James. (Virgin and Child–strictly corn.) Also had to prepare sermon for Christmas Eve. It went well though (if that means anything).

  Christmas night, after little more than an hour’s sleep(!) went to Vigils and then had to be assistant priest at the Midnight Mass. Tired, frustrated and annoyed. I have to recognize that the new altar (facing the choir) is an improvement. But the sanctuary is now like a High School stage set.

  Above all, all day long I was irritated by the “style” of the liturgy here. The constant effort to achieve new liturgical “effects,” new vessels, new vestments, new decorations and yet the consistent mediocrity of the performance. Sincere no doubt in a way, but also vapid. No one is to blame, and the whole thing is relatively good, except that it lacks religious depth and seriousness. However, I will admit that at the Midnight Mass I was the one most lacking in these qualities. I was simply vexed and peeved, angry at the Abbot, finding fault with him and with all possible grievances against him simmering in my consciousness. This was in part due to the fact that I had a talk the other night with Father Prior (Flavian) and his observations in this regard. It is not just my problem: the whole house and the whole Order in America is a little sore at Dom James and his authoritarian manner (disguised under the most appalling sweetness), his solid position in the power group which, under Dom Gabriel, kept the Order “under control.” (Dom Gabriel said when he was dying that he was afraid the Order was “getting away from him”!!) What an idiotic situation for one twenty-two years in a monastery–and yet how common, how “normal.” This perhaps most of all infuriates me.

  So with all that is said about liturgy, and I believe the Council, the fact remains that I cannot stay sane living on a level of “yes” and “no,” and of opinion and of “correct thinking” and “right and wrong.” This is simply absurd. My life makes sense only when oriented to a totally different level of consciousness: not an escape into false interiority, not a dilemma between interior and exterior, but the level of “no-mind” which gives some sense to “mind” if anything can.

  But I am still afflicted with doubt and hesitation, even guilt–(This is a “Buddhist” trend! And how reprehensible, how frowned on by those who have no capacity to understand it correctly!!). This is the problem and it is here that truth and courage are needed, along with prudence–the gift of the Spirit of Counsel. The fact is that the choice between a kind of quiet interior contemplation and an outgoing liturgical piety is an illusion. Neither meditation nor liturgy can make sense for me unless I see them from the other angle–and my ability to do so depends (with grace) on my decision.

  I hope I have once again made that decision.

  December 26, 1963

  I have to admit the truth that the particular frustrations of this life here are first of all not intrinsic to monasticism as such, and not essential to my own “way” by any means. And they are the product of social background and involvement in the economic and cultural pattern of the country (unavoidable). We are much more involved than we think, and my assessments of the Abbot are based mostly on this: that he is through and through a business man, and indeed even prides himself on his practicality and shrewdness, and yet he “gets away” with this by a formal unworldliness in certain spheres–discouraging correspondence, visits, recreations, etc. (He resents my involvement in the intellectual world.) (My frustrations are to some extent those of all intellectuals in a society of business men and squares.)

  The great fault in my own spirituality is a negativism which is related to bourgeois sterility. What Sartre calls “right wing existentialism.” Regarding angst as an ordinary, universal element in all life…(maybe this is to some extent true, however). Projecting my own frustrations and incapacities on the whole world. The fact remains that I here suffer from the sterility of my culture, and its general impotence. The optimism I reject is the optimism that denies this sterility. But where is the real optimism I should have as a Christian?

  “The simplicity of the adult,” says Mounier, “is won by long error, without miracles.” Grace alone, the grace of the heights, sets the final grace upon the rejuvenation of the new man!

  December 27, 1963

  Yesterday afternoon was long, q
uiet, beautiful. Meditation by the field, sitting on dead branches, under low pines, sun and wind.

  The determination to meditate right, and to seek “salvation.” To concentrate on this, everything else worthless–except insofar as it helps clarify meditation.

  Dark woods. The red squirrel in the tree top vanishes into his hole, which gets a little winter sun. A moment when the flame could be believed to be out, only the moon, the tall trees, the red grass, the wet snow under the boots. All of it cool, without the flame.

  Utter madness of all life even here. Ferocity and desperation of Father Andrew’s silly sermon, attacking everything, querulous, disoriented. How our community life really seriously maintains a flaming contagion of noxious and perverse thought! Cramped, violent, desperate, because always clinging to opinions of right and wrong in every smallest thing where no “certitude” is possible except by force, by doing violence to the truth.

  After dinner (yesterday) I played the record (borrowed from Red Horn) of Soeur Sourire [“The Smiling Nun”] for the novices, etc. Pleasant in the sunlit room. Bright, genuinely pure, a good thing. This morning I drank my coffee with Dominique-nique-nique going in my ear. But remember the albigeois! It was not all that charming in Languedoc or in the days of Dominque, nor was all brutality and injustice on one side. One I like–“Tous chemins mènent à Dieu.” The first I heard on Wygal’s car radio, outside “The Point” (East End of Louisville) again early afternoon (St. Thomas’ Day).

  Merleau-Ponty and the phenomenology of man’s unfinished business (Herbert Spiegelberg) [The Phenomenological Movement] for whom “projects are loved in ambiguity,” in the subject-object gestalt, where the subject does not withdraw into a given clarity of his own, where, on reflection, he can find all the answers or at least all the principles laid out before hand. We start from our “being-in-the-world” and not from pure being and our business is freedom–up to a point: life an existential (not intellectual) project “a polarization of life against a determined-undetermined goal of which it has no explicit idea and which it does not recognize until it achieves it.” I like his sage philosophy of ambiguity, more sober and better tempered than Sartre’s.

  December 31, 1963

  Yesterday this year drew to a quiet, curious end with an eclipse of the moon.16 We all went out into the fierce zero cold and stood in the darkness of the garden while a last flake of light resisted for a long time the swallowing globe of dark. Then I went back to [Karl] Jaspers on Plato. Also we have a Japanese fish-kite and Brother Dunstan stuck up some bamboo poles in the Zen garden, so I hope we will fly fish and streamers to celebrate the New Year.

  Spent some time running through the typescript of Cold War and Black Revolution17 yesterday. It is testy, ephemeral and insecure. Can’t do anything more with it now.

  January 1, 1964

  The year of the dragon came in with sleet crackling on all the quiet windows. The year of the hare went out yesterday with our red fish kite twisting and flapping in the wind over the Zen garden.

  An ex-postulant (Tom Williams) sent a few pages torn out of U.S. News and World Report, some of them about the investigation of the Kennedy assassination, in which I read this curious sentence: “Oswald was a lone wolf whose background showed that he was inclined to nonviolence up to a point where his mind apparently snapped.” He was a nonconformist–that in itself accounts for any crime. Inclined to nonviolence–this is new! How does one become inclined to a nonviolence that eventually ends in murdering someone? I can see that a “nonviolent” person could suddenly turn completely around and go against what he has professed. Here, however, the implication is that nonviolence quite logically and consistently leads to violence, and that the two are all of one piece. Nonviolence is violence, according to the U.S. News and World Report. They have wonderfully transcended all opposites without benefit either of Hegel or of Zen. And in any case, this is the first I have heard of Oswald being non violent. I suppose now any distribution of leaflets, etc. is called “nonviolence.”

  Cold grey afternoon, much snow, woods bright with snow loom out of the dark, totally new vision of the Vineyard Knob. Dark, etched out with snow, standing in obscurity and in a kind of spaciousness I had never seen before. The wide sweep of snow on St. Benedict’s field. I furiously climbed the Lake Knob, wonderful woods! Slid down, tore my pants on barbed wire, came back through the vast fields of snow.

  Sense of God all day. Now Bultmann’s idea of God (evening, before Night Watch). Our care meets Him at the end of its capacity. He limits our care and cuts it short. Our love of beauty, our need for love, our desire to work, etc. Bultmann’s God is the power who limits, who “sets a terminus” to all this. “It is God who makes man finite, who makes a comedy of man’s care, who allows his longing to miscarry, who casts him into solitude, who sets a terminus to his knowing…etc. Yet at the same time it is God who forces man into life and drives him into care, etc.” Curious? But it is a Biblical notion of God, and very real! (Essays [Form Criticism: Two Essays on New Testament Research, 1962], p. 5). Not Christian yet! It could equally well be the devil! Yet belief is a “Nevertheless” embracing this power and the limits it imposes, with love and confidence. And it is not a weltanschauung [general idea]! “Real belief in God always grows out of the realization that being is an unknown quantity, which cannot be learned and retained in the form of a proposition but of which one is always becoming conscious in the ‘moment’ of ‘loving’” (Essays, p. 7).

  “Real belief in God is not a general truth at my disposal which I perceive and apply; on the contrary it is what it is only as something continually perceived afresh and developing afresh…Not a general cosmic purpose, etc.” (p. 7). This will lead him back to say that there is no valid knowledge of God outside of Christian revelation (all other knowledge of Him is weltanschauung). But is this true? Are they merely “general ideas”? (We can see in the longing for a weltanschauung, an escape from the enigma and from the decisive question of the moment…etc. But he has apparently not learned the religious and existentialist quality of Buddhism, Taoism, etc.)

  Yet he admits that such a belief, genuine though it may be, need not be any more than a belief in man. And it does not yet have the “right” to speak to God (which Christianity assumes through the Word). Christianity fully exercises this right in acknowledging the fruit of lovelessness and this by positive recognition of existence “for the other” (person) and the “claims of this moment in love.” What does this involve? A constant crisis in belief! Hence “Belief in God is never something we can have as a possession.” Momentous consequences for our concept of time. Time is given us not to keep a faith we once had, but to acquire a faith we need now.

  Let me therefore inscribe this at the head of a New Year, not of the dragon but of the Lord: “If in Christian belief in God we understand the claims of the ‘moment’ to be those of the ‘thou’ and of the demand to love, then it is clear that this crisis is in the constant struggle of hate against love and that this crisis becomes acute in every encounter with the ‘thou’ which thoughtlessly or selfishly we would disregard, maintaining our own rights and our own interests, in contempt or in undisguised hate.” (p. 15)

  January 3, 1964

  Warm wind, bright sun, melting snow, water off the roof flashing in all the buckets. A good letter from Ernesto Cardenal came today–he has been with the Cuna Indians on the San Bias Islands off Panama, speaks very highly of them, loves them very much.

  [Martin] Heidegger’s notion that the realization and acceptance of death is the guarantee of authenticity in life and existence is very close to Rancé and probably a better formulation of what Rancé himself saw and wanted to say. It is in short a very monastic intuition. And I find much in the existentialists that is monastic. In any case, Heidegger is also fully Socratic–(his idea of “Nothing”). “Knowledge is in its very validity a form of untruth because it conceals the ignorance which it does not abolish.”

  ([Harold John] Blackham, Six Existentiali
st Thinkers, [1959], p. 104)

  January 4, 1964

  The monks in Georgia think they are going to have the choral office in English immediately–and their Bishop is behind it. I don’t know what the General Chapter (in two weeks, for the election of the new General) will do about this.

  I got a letter from Jean Hering this morning: he is still in Strasbourg, retired, living in the old city, so it appears (Ovai des Bateliers). It was a very good letter and he sent some bibliographical references. I want to look up some of his articles.

  A hunter, a fat-bottomed Robin Hood in a green outfit, was blasting into the treetops up at the end of the field to the east of the hermitage, too far for an edifying shout. But he went away.

  The French nuclear deterrent shows something of the ridiculousness of this theory of war.

  1. It can never really protect France against a serious determination on the part of an enemy to destroy it. Only make the enemy “pay for it”–and think twice in consequence before wiping the place out.

  2. The payment? Cities. Cities only. There is no intention whatever of “counterforce” strategy, not even a pretense. It would be totally useless. Not that the destruction of cities would be “useful.” This is the tactic of the elder daughter of the Church, and the land of St. Louis. It is possible St. Bernard would have approved. The late Abbot General certainly did.

  3. If missiles are used, the country may have five minutes warning. That is to say it will take the missiles five minutes to arrive. Nothing is said about how long it will take the computers to figure out whether or not they are missiles.

  4. Planes will take fifteen minutes from Russia. But how to identify them? The sky is always full of all kinds of planes.

  5. The decision will be determined by computers. Machines will decide whether Christian France is menaced and ought to wipe out a few Russian cities. It is taken as an article of (Christian) faith that the menace will come from Russia. This does not seem to be questioned even for a moment. With five minutes in which to ask questions, who will think of a good one? At any rate, only the machine can answer, and probably only the machine can ask one!