Dancing in the Water of Life

by Thomas Merton

  I did indeed speak up to say at least one or two houses ought to keep the Latin liturgy and Gregorian, but met with no sympathy except from Dom Alfonse, who had been led to believe there was complete unanimity on this point. That everyone wanted vernacular. Actually, in Canada, where the houses tend to be bilingual, Latin is something of a blessing.

  Though the Abbots in general seemed disposed to favor a little more solitude (days of recollection, perhaps week retreats) it seems unlikely that a full-scale hermitage project, such as Dom James was interested in two weeks ago, when I proposed it would be accepted. The General seems frightened of it.

  October 13, 1964

  One good result of the change in thinking, on the part of Dom James, is his desire for solitude. He gave me permission to sleep at the hermitage, without any special restriction, though not necessarily all the time. The understanding is that I can spend the night there once in a while, when I wish to. Last night I did this for the first time. (Brother Colman brought a bed up there Saturday evening) and it was most helpful. It finally helped me to get the noise and agitation of the Abbots’ meeting out of my system.

  Though it had been quite cold for several days, I got enough sun into the place in the afternoon to dry it out and warm it up. Got up there about nightfall. Wonderful silence, saying compline gently and slowly with a candle burning before the icon of Our Lady. A deep sense of peace and truth. That this was the way things are supposed to be, that I was in my right mind for a change (around the community I am seldom in my right mind). Total absence of care and agitation. Slept wonderfully well, even though there was a great pandemonium of dogs in the woods when I got up about 12:20 and went out to urinate off the edge of the porch.

  I thought I would hear the bell for Vigils at the monastery and didn’t. However, I woke up soon after that and lit the fire and said Lauds quietly, slowly, thoughtfully, sitting on the floor. I felt very much alive, and real, and awake, surrounded by silence and penetrated by truth. Wonderful smell of pre-dawn woods and fields in the cold night!

  October 16, 1964

  Yesterday afternoon news got all over the monastery that Krushchev was fired. I understand his pictures were all being taken down, nobody is quite sure where he is, and meanwhile the Chinese have, it seems, exploded an atom bomb (?). And though the papers say the two successors of Krushchev will carry on his policies, it is by no means sure that there will not be a reunion of Russia and China, a “hard line” in Asia, etc. Here we go again!

  Also the Cardinals came up in a month from fourth place (I mean the St. Louis Cardinals) and won the World’s Series. Disedifying news but it is known through the monastery. Rather, not that the news is “disedifying” but the fact that it is known may be so to some. Apparently it was a “great Series.”

  Today I was supposed to see Dr. [Randolph] Scheen about the skin on my hands, had an appointment, and had also arranged to say Mass in Carmel. But Reverend Father told me to meet Georgio La Pira at the airport instead. So I went there from Carmel. He was there with the head of his school board (a lady), a reporter and a young physicist-is on a quick official visit, full of strong statements (“The Council ought to canonize John XXIII by acclamation”–and I agree). There was a mix-up at the airport, but I found him and his companions, we talked volubly in French in the car coming out (on the Council, on his trips to Moscow, Africa, etc.). Less volubly during dinner with Dom James (at which Dubonnet was served as a wine) and after dinner my volubility was gone, but his was still in gear. I showed them the novitiate, the refectory, etc. I was left at last with a strong impression of the meaning and greatness of Florence, and his “spes contra spem” [“hope against hope”] and the reality of his convictions and of his mission. As I left him he was writing out a Telegram to Paul VI, hailing him from Gethsemani with the assurance of prayers. Yet when all is said, I don’t think the “crusade of prayers” idea of contemplative monasteries tells the whole story.

  Got on the phone to Dr. Scheen whom I will see next week. The hands are getting better anyway.

  October 17, 1964

  My scripture reading today (early morning–firelight and candle light–hermitage) was from Baruch, Chapter 5. I went to it with thirst and got this: “Exue te, Jerusalem, stola luctus et vexationis tuae: et indue te decore, et honore eius, quae a Deo tibi est, sempiternae gloriae…Deus [enim] ostendet splendorem suum in te, omni qui sub caelo est. Nominabitur enim tibi nomen tuum a Deo in sempiternum: pax iustitiae et honor pietatis.” [“Jerusalem, take off your dress of sorrow and distress, put on the beauty of God’s glory for evermore…for God means to show your splendor to every nation under heaven, and the name God gives you for evermore will be: Peace through Justice and Honor through Piety.”](Baruch 5:1–4)

  A beautiful text. I don’t remember having paid any attention to it before! The next line (5), yes, is an advent antiphon. Further on it echoes Isaias. And then this, above all: “Obumbraverunt autem et silvae, et omne lignum suavitatis, Israel ex Mandato Dei. Abducet enim Deus Israel cum iucunditate in lumine maiestatis suae, [cum misericordia et iustitia] quae est ex ipso.” [“And the forests and every fragrant tree will provide shade for Israel, at God’s command: for God will guide Israel in joy by the light of His glory, with the mercy and justice which comes from him.”] (Baruch 5:8–9)

  October 19, 1964

  I am reading the very rich Collectio Monastica from Ethiopian manuscripts (CSCO #239). Late manuscripts but very traditional and full of meat. Von Balthasar’s Word and Revelation excellent. One fine passage where he says substantially what Juliana of Norwich says about “all manner of things shall be well.” Namely that Christ judges and separates good from evil in order to reveal the truth about man in this separation, but the “rejected” will turn out to have been those “chosen” with a greater and more mysterious mercy. Can there be a limit to the mercy of Christ, who has fully satisfied forever all God’s justice, and now has the world in His hand to do with it according to His merciful Love?

  With all this about love and mercy, yet yesterday I was angry as assistant priest, standing next to the abbot at the altar. Clearly it is my pride. It is a real distraction and a threat to faith. But when I think that he has power to be most unreasonable in my life, and has used this power so arbitrarily and still does, I am filled with frustration and resentment. Yet it is precisely this that I must accept, and it should be all the easier when in fact he has, perhaps unreasonably, given me much latitude in other matters. It is galling to have a hermitage as a political benefaction!

  October 20, 1964

  Yesterday afternoon Dom Thomas Aquinas Keating, the Abbot of Spencer, stopped here on his way back East from the new foundation of nuns he has just made in Iowa. There was some more discussion of the two points he will bring up at a meeting before the General Chapter. One regarding the laybrothers and the other regarding solitude in the Order. About this second question I also wrote to Dom Ignace on Sunday. Whether the Order will officially recognize the eremitical life as appropriate for Cistercians and permissible within the Order is not at all certain. But it is possible that a relative solitude (such as I already have) will be at least recognized in some form or other.

  At the same time I am beginning to see that the question of solitude for me is finally getting to be no longer a question of wish but of decision. I still do not know what scope for decision may be given me, but I do know that I must prepare to face a serious decision, and one about which I had more or less given up thinking. It seems to be a real “encounter with the world” that I must not evade, and yet, as in all such things, I am not too sure just where the encounter is, except that my heart tells me that in this question of the solitary life there is for me a truth to be embraced which is not capable of a fully logical explanation, which is not rooted in my nature or my biography, but is something else, and it may also cut clean through the whole network of my own recent work, ideas, writings, experiences, etc., even those that in some way concern the solitary life, monastic
renewal, etc.

  For the moment, it seems to involve also cutting off a hundred contacts in the world and even legitimate and fruitful concerns with the events and needs of the time. I do not know or understand how far this needs to go, except that I am caught in all kinds of affairs that are no longer my business, and that they may prove to be great distractions and evasions. Yet I do not yet see where to begin. And it will also involve renouncing, definitively, some of the securities of the community.

  Sleeping here has been a great grace. Last night, full moon. At midnight the whole valley was drenched in silence and dark clarity. Cold this morning. Going down to the monastery in the dark I could feel frost on the grass and the dry corn husks under my feet.

  October 21, 1964

  Lamplight! It is good, quiet. Many years since I have had a lamp to read by! Not since St. Antonin, forty years ago! The lamp came today. It was in a paper bag on my desk in the novitiate after High Mass.

  Dom Leclercq’s book on Otia Monastica came today too (the library copy). I had been waiting a long time for this. It is just what I have been needing.

  October 25, 1964. Twenty-Third Sunday after Pentecost

  On Thursday I was in town, saw the skin doctor (things are slowly improving but the trouble is a greater mystery of pollen and wave-lengths of light than I am capable of grasping).

  I went to Catherine Spalding College with the twenty-six abstract drawings of mine that are to be exhibited in November. They are well framed, thanks to Ulfert Wilke’s advice, and look good, at least to me. I gave them names and prices, not without guilt feelings (perpetuating a hoax?). But the drawings themselves I think are fairly good. As Wilke says, they “are real.” But now Jim Wygal is annoyed that they are being exhibited at Catherine Spalding and not at Bellarmine [College]. I had to send him some others for Bellarmine, etc., etc.

  Yesterday Marco Pallis was here. He is touring with his English Concert of Viols. I was glad to meet him. He spoke a lot of Frithjof Schuon who has a brother in our order at Chimay, who is also a disciple of Ahmad al’Alawi. Schuon has written a fine article on Monasticism for the Collectanea, being forthright about the necessity of not compromising with current fashion in spirituality, especially those which lead the monk to reformulate his life in terms influenced too deeply by Marxism “and the fatal Teilhard de Chardin.” I would have liked to hear the Viols play some Orlando Gibbon but this is not possible.

  We spoke of Zen and of Shiva, and Tibetan Buddhism (a little) and how if the Tibetans were to seek refuge outside of India it would probably be in America rather than Japan, though Japan is Buddhist. And why? Because of the ease and simplicity with which they become totally infatuated with the West.

  Dom Winandy has written an excellent pamphlet on the hermit life. (He is now on Vancouver Island.) Father [Peter] Minard’s monastic notes, which I read some time ago, are very good. There are hermit groups springing up in several places. With Winandy are men from our monastery in Utah and from New Melleray and from Colorado (Snowmass). As well as from Benedictine houses.

  October 29, 1964

  Clouds running across the face of the waning moon. Distant flashes of lightning. I know what it is: a “warm front,” etc. Clouds running over the face of the waning moon. And who cares what the weather may be? It is money that cares about weather and pays to predict it, perhaps someday to control it. And who wants a world in which weather is controlled by money?

  Last night slept in the monastery because [spiritual] direction ran late and my shoulder also was hurting so that I wanted the traction which is fixed up on my bed in the novitiate dorm. Sleeping at the hermitage gives one a totally different sense of time–measured by the phases of the moon (whether or not one will need the flashlight, etc.). This in itself is important. The whole day has different dimensions. And so for office in choir, its artificiality impresses me more and more. Not that it is not a “good thing.” Not that there is not a great will to do good and praise God there. But the whole decor of habits and stalls and stained glass seems unreal when you have been praying the psalms among pine trees. The thing I most appreciate about the monastery is the electric light. The lamplight of the hermitage is primitive and mysterious, but the lamp smokes and one cannot read well by it. Which is all right since it means more meditation. Yet I like and need to sit here with the book open and really read, take notes, study.

  As to the brethren, it is good to be with them and to see them (even though I know them enough to recognize their tensions and troubles) but I can tell that a feeling of loneliness for them would probably be a deception–or a reflex. One can love them and still live apart from them without explanation.

  Yesterday a small deer fell into the reservoir by the new waterworks and thrashed around trying to climb out, but the concrete wall was not negotiable. I was afraid it might drown. But it got through the joists of the footbridge and to the other end where there was foothold, and trotted off across the road into the woods looking beat and confused.3

  Rewrote “Monastic Vocation and Modern Thought.” Perhaps too much concerned with it. In the end I saw I was getting too complicated and trying to deepen it so as to avoid merely repeating platitudes about “identity crisis” and “authenticity.” Not successful.

  Trouble with Marie Tadié. A letter from a brother novice who left recently to try to join the Little Brothers of Jesus in Detroit. He is working on the docks, though rather small for a stevedore. [Ping] Ferry sent Jacques Ellul’s book on Technology [The Technological Society, 1964], just out. Long telegram from Heschel asking me to join him in protest against Goldwater’s hypocritical outcry about “morality” in the current campaign–criticizing a “morality charge” of some Democrats with not a word about the moral implications of slums, nuclear war, etc. Gnats and Camels!

  Good news. Dom James has had a letter from the Abbot General saying that he is not opposed on principle to experiments in the hermit life within our Order and that such an experiment on the property of one of our monasteries is quite feasible. And that he thinks Gethsemani would be a reasonable place for such an experiment. He will discuss it at the December meeting of Abbots and it will be taken up at the General Chapter.

  October 30, 1964

  For three days they have been reading in refectory the Bulletin of the Liturgical Commission and the Congregation of Rites on the new changes to go into effect next Lent. The changes are good in the main, and are the ones that have been expected. But while the changes tend to simplicity, this document is itself complicated, tedious, a ponderous, grim effort to organize everything, leave nothing unforeseen, even that which seems to be a concession to initiative. How can we have “renewal” with such elaborate formalities as this?

  Reading Jacques Ellul’s book The Technological Society. Great, full of firecrackers. A fine provocative book and one that really makes sense. Good to read while the Council is busy with Schema 13 (as it is). One cannot see what is involved in the question of “The Church and the Modern World” without reading a book like this. I wonder if the Fathers are aware of all the implications of a technological society? Those who can only resist it may be wrong, but those who want to go along with all its intemperances are hardly right. Or do they know this might be what they were wanting?

  Gentle whistles of a bluebird and in the mist a SAC plane swoops huge and low over the ridges where Edelin’s valley is and where the final hermitages are to be. I wonder if it carries bombs? Most probably. They all do, I am told. The technological society! I will go out and split some logs and gather a basket of pine cones. Good for starting fires in my fireplace, in the small hours of the morning.

  October 31, 1964

  An impressive passage in Balthasar’s “Verbum Caro”–a deep and poignant essay. I will use part of it perhaps in conferences to novices and juniors on poetry and human experience. But I cannot help seeing it rather in its reference to my own vocation at the hermitage. These nights I have spontaneously been remembering the days when I first came to
Gethsemani twenty-three years ago: the stars, the cold, the smell of night, the wonder, the Verlassenheit [abandonment] (which is something else again than despondency) and above all the melody of the Rorate coeli [Drop down dew, heavens]. That entire first Advent bore in it all the stamp of my vocation’s peculiar character. The solitude inhabited and pervaded by cold and mystery and woods and Latin liturgy. It is surprising how far we have got from the cold and the woods and the stars since those days.

  My fiftieth year is ending and if I am not ripe now I never will be. It is the Kairos, say the stars, says Orion, says Aldebaran, says the sickle moon rising behind the dark tall cedar cross. And I remember the words I said to Father Philotheus, which may have been in part a cliché, but they were sincere and I know at the time that I really meant them. And they were unpremeditated: that “I want to give God everything.” Until now I really have not, I think. Or perhaps in a way I have tried to. Certainly not too hard! I cannot say my life in the monastery has been useless, or a failure. Nor can I say where or how it has had a meaning. Nor will I probably find where and how the hermitage has a meaning. It is enough that there is the same mixture of anguish and certitude, the same sense of walking on water, as when I first came to the monastery.