Dancing in the Water of Life

by Thomas Merton

  No matter how naive the medieval doctrine of “quies” may seem, it makes sense. It is part of a whole which we no longer have (Chartres!) but I am nevertheless not divorced from it. Realized it clearly singing with attention the Gregorian melodies of the Feast. They are simple, solid, incomparable (only the Common): perfectly satisfying without being the best in Gregorian. Always I have the sense that anything we may attempt will be less good–no adequate replacement. (How in my early days here the chant gave meaning and coherence to the whole life for me!)

  Adam the Carthusian (Scotus) in a fine text on quies claustralis [quiet of the cloister] (published by Leclercq in Otia Monastica) sums it all up, simply and adequately, the need for quies, not bothering with concerns foreign to our life. I want to give up the retreats. Yet already a letter has come from the Baptist Seminary begging me not to stop my talks. I was touched by it. No one could be more sincere and less political than Glenn Hinson, who wrote it.

  November 23, 1964

  Péguy’s prayer at Chartres–how close to my own feeling. The past cannot be restored and we do not seek for that.

  Nous ne demandons pas que le grain sous la meule

  Soit jamais replacé dans le coeur de l’épi,

  Nous ne demandons pas que l’âme errante et seule

  Soitjamais reposée enjardin fleuri.

  …

  Nous ne demandons rien dans ces amendements,

  Reine, que de garder sous vos commandements

  Une fidelité plus forte que la mort.6

  [We do not ask that the grain under the millstone

  Ever be replaced in the heart of the corn,

  We do not ask that the soul, wandering and alone,

  ever be relaid in a garden of flowers.

  …

  We ask nothing in these improvements,

  O Queen, than to keep under your commandments

  A faithfulness stronger than death.]

  November 24, 1964. St. John of the Cross

  In the Night, a rumpled thin skin of cloud over the sky, not totally darkening the moon. It has become thicker as the morning wears on. There is a feeling of snow in the air. Streaks of pale, lurid light over the dark hills in the south. The SAC plane sailed low over the valley just after the bell for consecration at the conventual Mass and an hour later another one went over even nearer, almost over the monastery. Enormous, perfect, ominous, great swooping weight, grey, full of Hiroshimas and the “key to peace.”

  This is my full day at the hermitage. No question whatever that this is the kind of schedule to live by. Went down to say Mass. Will go down again for dinner. The rest of the time here does not begin to be enough! How full the days are, full of slow and quiet, ordered, occupied (sawing wood, sweeping, reading, taking notes, meditating, praying, tending the fire, or just looking at the valley). Only here do I feel that my life is fully human. And only what is authentically human is fit to be offered to God. There is no question in my mind that the artificiality of life in the community is, in its own small way, something quite atrocious (saved by the fact that the artificiality of life in the “world” is totally monstrous and irrational).

  It is good to know how cold it is, and not by looking at a thermometer. And to wear heavy clothes, and cut logs for the fire. I like washing in the small basin with the warm water left over from making coffee. And then walking down in the moonlight to say Mass, with the leaves growling under my feet. Not pulled at, not tense, nor waiting for what is to descend on me next, but looking for a place quiet enough to read in…Life seems real, and in the community it is mental, forced. You can see some of them “thinking” (about what?) and others behind whose frowns there is no place for thought left, only the tension of being, and of forfeiture–all “offered up.” God is doubtless pleased with them, or full of compassion for them. But what a system!

  November 29, 1964

  Good rains in the last few days. This morning, with rain pounding down all over everything, looked out from the novitiate porch over the shining wet roof of the sheep barn. Gave a conference on Péguy’s Chartres poem.

  The Council session ended last week. I have not yet read the full report, but the whole thing seems to have been decidedly ambiguous and disturbing. The Pope overruled a majority of the bishops at the last moment–not only on the question of liberty of conscience (which has been put off again!) but on various others [Merton crossed out: especially to do with the collegiality of Bishops]. I am not sure exactly what took place, but there is anger in the air. Since I do not know exactly what happened I shall say nothing of it at the moment. At best there are rumors going around.

  Yesterday I was in Louisville. Skin on my hands is in bad shape. “Badly damaged” after the long siege of dermatitis. I was able to see the drawings as they now are on exhibit at Catherine Spalding. A very attractive exhibit. Also the Merton Room at Bellarmine is quite decent, quiet, pleasant (and overheated). All this is comforting in a way, but I don’t know why I should attach importance to it. I am grateful to the people who have taken so much trouble with these things. Especially Jim Wygal.

  November 30, 1964

  Woke up in the hermitage and walked out to see snow on the ground, with the wind blowing snowflakes around my bare ankles. Lit the fire and said Lauds. No trouble seeing the way down in the dark with snow on the ground!

  The Christian faith enables, or should enable, a man to stand back from society and its institutions and realize that they all stand under the inscrutable judgment of God and that therefore we can never give an unreserved assent to the policies, the programs and the organizations of men, or to “official” interpretations of the historic process. To do so is idolatry, the same kind of idolatry that was refused by the early martyrs who would not burn incense to the emperor. The apostles on the other hand (by reason of their renunciation and detachment from the world) could sit on twelve thrones (society, even sacred society, as they knew it). The Pharisees, identifying themselves with a secular order, carried out the judgment of God upon that order in the very acts by which they sought to defend it.

  The policies of men contain within themselves the judgment and doom of God upon their society, and when the Church identifies her policies with theirs, she too is judged with them–for she has in this been unfaithful and is not truly “the Church.” The power of “the Church” (who is not “the Church” if she is really rich and powerful) contains the judgment that “begins at the house of God.”

  Night. Zero cold. Frozen leaves crackling like glass under my feet on the path through the woods. The REA men must have been here today seeing about the electric line but I missed them, saw only their footprints in the snow. And so stay down in the monastery to see Father Matthew [Kelty] before None.

  Need discipline, and need to get my solitary life more organized. I can see this is the big battle–to stay centered on something and not float out into space. The need for seriousness. Yet it is serious, and constantly so. Suddenly hit hard by the lesson and promise of Isaias on the Kingdom of Peace. Where is that peace?

  The other day a letter from the General came to Dom James about the Japan project. “This is not from God.” No capacity to understand the meaning of it. No matter. Perhaps I shall still go someday, in spite of everything.

  The Constitution on the Church, promulgated at the end of the Third Session, is really beautiful and deeply moving. I think it is a great document. Now being read in the refectory.

  December 1, 1964

  (“Resolve to die rather than abandon this lifegiving search.”) Read slowly, in the lamplight, early cold morning, Simeon the New Theologian is a man of burning words indeed. In the comfort of the monastery it is easier to neglect him as an extremist. “To have no thought of oneself for any earthly end, but to have one’s whole mind centered on Christ. What measure, think you, will this procure of heavenly good, and of angelic condition?” (Catechism, II)

  How clearly I see and experience this morning, the difference and distance between my ow
n inertia, weakness, sensitivity, stupidity, and the love of Christ which instantly pulls all things in me together so that there is no longer any uncertainty or misdirection or lassitude. What a shame and dishonor to Christ if I let my life be such a mess of trivialities and silly concerns (that are in reality only a mask for despair)!

  Will not easily forget the thin sickle of the old moon rising this morning just before dawn, when I went down to say Mass. Cold sky, hard brightness of stars through the pines, snow and frost, exaltation on the bright darkness of morning. In the cold of Advent I recapture the lostness and wonder of the first days when I came here twenty-three years ago, abandoned to God, with everything left behind. I have not felt this for a long time here. The monastery is too warm, too busy, too sociable for that! But breaking off and living (to a great extent) in the woods brings me back face to face with the loneliness and poverty of the cold hills and the Kentucky winter–incomparable, and the reality of my own life!

  Finished the Martin Marty book Varieties of Unbelief I am supposed to be reviewing for the Commonweal.

  Now snow clouds are coming up in the west, and the bones of the hills in the south have snow on them and the trees are picked out sharply like iron bristles against a streak of pale, indifferent green sky. The alfalfa field in the bottoms is as green as watercress, streaked with snow. The evening is very silent. The bell for Vespers rang early–there must be office of the dead. I will go down and check the Ordo and say it before Collation. Then I see Dan Walsh (who is full of all the rumors that go around among the brothers, about hermits that are to live in trailers in Edelin’s valley, etc.). Dan hears everything and, when he tells it, improves it beyond measure.

  December 2, 1964

  Hurray for Ionesco! He has some very good ideas, and here is one of them (against those obsessed with ideologies and with theories of history.)

  “Nous sommes pris tons dans une sorte de complexe historique et nous appartenons à un certain moment de l’histoire–qui cependent est loin de nous absorber entièrement et qui au contraire n ‘exprime et ne contient que le part la moins essentielle de nous mêmes.” [“We are all of us caught in a kind of historical complex and belong to one special moment in history–which is, however, far from absorbing us entirely but rather expresses and contains only the least essential part of us.”] (Notes et contre-notes [1962], p. 16)

  December 3, 1964

  Evening: The heart is deceitful above all things

  The heart is deep and full of windings.

  The old man is covered up in a thousand wrappings.

  (Lancelot Andrewes, Preces)

  True sad words, and I would not have felt the truth of them so much if I had not had so much solitude, these days, with rain coming down on the roof, and hiding the valley. Rain in the night, the nuisance of water in the buckets. Or cutting wood behind the house, and a faint smell of hickory smoke from the chimney–while I taste and see that I am deceitful and that most of my troubles are rooted in my own bitterness. Is this what solitude is for? Then it is good, but I must pray for the strength to bear it! (The heart is deceitful and does not want this–But God is greater than my heart!)

  I will acknowledge my faults O Lord

  O who will give scourges to my mind

  That they spare not my sins?

  December 4, 1964

  It rained all night and is still raining.

  How often in the last years I have thought of death. It has been present to me and I have “understood” it, and known that I must die. Yet last night, only for a moment, in passing, and so to speak without grimness or drama, I momentarily experienced the fact that I, this self, will soon simply not exist. A flash of the “not-thereness” of being dead. Without fear or grief, without anything. Just not there. And this I suppose is one of the first tastes of the fruits of solitude. So if the angel passed along thinking aloud, to himself, doing his business, and barely taking note of me. But taking note of me nevertheless. We recognized one another. And of course the other thing is that this “I” is not “I,” and I am not this body, this “self,” and I am not just my individual nature. But yet I might as well be, so firmly am I rooted in it and identified with it–with this which will cease utterly to exist, in its natural individuality.

  In the hermitage–I see how quickly one can fall apart. I talk to myself, I dance around the hermitage, I sing. This is all very well, but it is not serious, it is a manifestation of weakness, of dizziness. And again I feel within this individual self the nearness of disintegration. (Yet I also realize that this exterior self can fall apart and be reintegrated too. This is like losing dry skin that peels off while the new skin forms underneath.)

  And I suddenly remember absurd things: The song Pop had on the record forty-five years ago! “The Whistler and His Dog.” Crazy! I went out to the jakes [outhouse] in the rain with this idiot song rocking my whole being. Its utterly inane confidence! Its gaiety. And it is in its own way joyful–the joy of people who had not seen World War II and Auschwitz and the Bomb. Silly as it was it had life and juice in it too. Confidence of people walking up and down Broadway in derbies in 1910! Kings of the earth! Sousa’s whole mad band blasting out this idiot and confident song! The strong, shrill whistle of the whistler! (O fabulous day, calao, calay!) and the bark at the end (that I liked best). Brave whistler! Brave Dog! (As a child I had this Whistler confused with the one who painted his mother!)

  December 5, 1964

  Today we say the Mass of St. Francis Xavier, in whom I am much more interested than I used to be (more as a symbol of aspirations than as a model). I think of Father Dumoulin, Father Enomiya Lasalle, Father [William] Johnston at Sophia University. I wish I could have gone there, as they suggested, but perhaps someday I still may get to Japan and see a Zen monastery. Meanwhile a little book [All Else Is Bondage: Non-Volitional Living, 1964] by Terence Gray (Wei Wu Wei) is in the hermitage and I find it clear and right on target. Using a jumble of western terms, but o.k. One must improvise!

  In the hermitage, one must pray or go to seed. The pretense of prayer will not suffice. Just sitting will not suffice. It has to be real–yet what can one do? Solitude puts you with your back to the wall (or your face to it!) and this is good. One prays to pray. And the reality of death. Donne’s poems and Lancelot Andrewes.

  Then it becomes very important to remember that the quality of one’s night depends on the thoughts of the day. I had a somewhat fearsome night after reading The Lord of the Flies. This a hangover from my cenobitic after-dinner flight into light reading (which is all right, I do not despise it). So many good books around and in the woodshed after dinner. Pasternak once. Lately Ellul, and Felix Green’s Curtain of Ignorance (good information on the bad reporting about China), Stevie Smith, Françoise Henri on Irish art, Auden “The Enchafed Flood,” and last summer Kenneth Jackson’s Early Celtic Nature Poetry. Also Nora Chadwick, etc., etc. (I got a charming letter from the Carmelites of Waterbeach, her friends). And of course recently Ionesco–Rhinoceros, The Future Is in Eggs, etc. I am still busy with his Notes et contre-notes.

  Still, the quality of one’s nights depends on the sanity of the day. I bring there the sins of the day into the light and darkness of truth to be adored without disguise–then I want to fly back to the disguises. Who ever said that the solitary life is one of pretense and deception? As if pretense were easy in solitude!!! It is easy in the community, for one can have the support of a common illusion or a common agreement in forms that take the place of truth. One can pretend in the solitude of an afternoon walk, but the night destroys all pretenses, one is reduced to nothing, and compelled to begin laboriously the long return to truth.

  Evening: Yet after all that, this afternoon I made myself a cup of coffee (after dinner) strong enough to blow the roof off the hermitage, and then as a result got into an orgy of abstract drawings. Most of the drawings were awful-some were even disturbing. So that now I see that I cannot afford to play with this either, in solitude. But perhaps I will do so
me careful and sane drawings, based perhaps on Romanesque sculpture, until I get some better ideas. Not now, anyway. Went down to the monastery feeling confused and ashamed, but singing Vespers and the Advent hymn was a comfort. I will continue to need some Liturgy–certainly the Conventual Mass for a long time, and Vespers generally, and the other hours when I am in the monastery anyway.

  Tonight it is cold again and as I came up in the dark, a few small snowflakes were flying in the beam of the flashlight. The end of an oak log was still burning with small flames in the fireplace. On the way up I had been thinking of the letter from ex-Brother Alcuin (Grimes) and how he visited the Little Sisters in Chicago, and thought maybe of sending them some cheese for Christmas. One of the sisters, he says, seems lonely for her home in Burgundy. Came up with candles, and sugar for coffee, and a jar to urinate in so that I won’t have to go out in the snow in the middle of the night. What greater comforts could a man want? Well, of course I will be glad to get electric light. The question of light is an important one. Not that I have anything against Sister Lamp here–chaste and quiet and faithful. But a bit dim for serious reading. And yet for centuries, who had more than this? St. Thomas may have had much less good a light than my lamp here!

  December 6, 1964. Second Sunday of Advent

  Thank God I have been purged of Sartre by Ionesco. I don’t think Ionesco is a great artist but he is healthy and alive and free. Sartre is not free, for all his academic mumblings about freedom and “engagement.” Nor is his refusal of the Nobel Prize to me a convincing proof of anything except perhaps that he is clever enough to know how much he needs to fight his own bad faith. And so now, sure enough, he is in Life with a sly little smile–and essentially he is a clever, mild little bourgeois. An honest modest man. But he has to be a dragon and that is his trouble. Hence–“misguided direction,” arrogance, pontifical ceremonies, declarations, etc. But who is without guilt? Ionesco carries it off better than Sartre. He is more truly a child, and independent.