Dancing in the Water of Life

by Thomas Merton

  December 7, 1964

  In solitude everything has its weight for good or evil, and one must attend carefully to everything. If you apply yourself carefully to what you do, great springs of strength and truth are released in you. If you drift or go inattentively, automatic and obsessed, the strength is against you and becomes a storm of confusion, and dashes you on the rocks. And when the power, the energy of truth is well released, then everything becomes good and makes sense, and there is no contrast to be made between solitude and community or anything else, because all is good. It seems to me, though, that these springs do not get to run for me in the community, and that I simply go along in the heavy, secure, confused mentality of the community (though I know that for others the springs are running). And instead of everything being one, everything is merely confused. Though now, as a result of solitude, the psalms in choir and especially the hymns and antiphons (Advent!!) have all their old juice and much more too, a new mystery.

  Guerric [of Igny]’s beautiful Fourth Advent sermon on the consecration of the desert, and the grace placed in it by Christ, “preparing a new place for the new life” and overcoming evil not for Himself “but for those who were to be future dwellers in the wilderness.” Not just evil, the Evil One! The desert is given us to get the evil unnested from the crannies of our own hearts. Perhaps again my tendency to find this in solitude rather than community is simply subjective. After twenty-three years all the nests are well established. But in solitude and open air they are revealed and the wind blows on them and I know they must go!

  December 8, 1964

  A constant thumping and pummeling of guns at Fort Knox. It began last night when I was going to bed. Then there were big “whumps,” unlike cannon, more like some kind of missile. Now, it sounds like a new kind of rapid-fire artillery, not the old rolling kind of the last war.

  Undoubtedly there are many who are ready to go to war in the Congo, and once again repeat the madness of Viet Nam and bring in American power where the withdrawal of European colonialists seems to have left confusion and vacuum. Seems–because all are eager to have it that way, and make things be the way we need them to be. The horrible Mississippi story (recent arrest of the sheriffs, etc. who are thought to have murdered the civil rights workers last June–), the obsessions of Viet Nam, the madness of patriots all make this land seem possessed by a demonic illusion, driven to ruinous adventures by technological hubris.

  2:15. Bumps and punches at Fort Knox faster and faster. I am reading [Stephane] Lupano in the hermitage [Logique et contradiction, 1947].

  December 9, 1964

  Last night after a prayer vigil in the novitiate chapel (didn’t do a good job–was somewhat disorganized and distracted), went to bed late at the hermitage. All quiet. No lights at Boone’s or Newton’s. Cold. Lay in bed realizing that what I was, was happy. Said the strange word “happiness” and realized that it was there, not as an “it” or object. It simply was. And I was that. And this morning, coming down, seeing the multitude of stars above the bare branches of the wood, I was suddenly hit, as it were, with the whole package of meaning of everything: that the immense mercy of God was upon me, that the Lord in infinite kindness had looked down on me and given me this vocation out of love, and that he had always intended this, and how foolish and trivial had been all my fears and twistings and desperation. And no matter what anyone else might do or say about it, however they might judge or evaluate it, all is irrelevant in the reality of my vocation to solitude, even though I am not a typical hermit. Quite the contrary perhaps. It does not matter how I may or may not be classified. In the light of this simple fact of God’s love and the form it has taken, in the mystery of my life, classifications are ludicrous, and I have no further need to occupy my mind with them (if I ever did)–at least in this connection.

  The only response is to go out from yourself with all that one is, which is nothing, and pour out that nothingness in gratitude that God is who He is. All speech is impertinent, it destroys the simplicity of that nothingness before God by making it seem as if it had been “something.”

  December 10, 1964

  “Les gens d’aujourd’hui ont une peur atroce de la liberté et de l’humour; ils ne savent pas qu’il n’y a pas de vie possible sans liberté et sans humour, que le moindre geste, le plus simple initiative, réclament le déploiement des forces imaginatives, qu’ils s’archarnent, bêtement, à vouloir enchaîner et empoisonner entre les murs aveugles du réalisme le plus étroit qui est la mort, et qu’ils appellent vie qui est la ténèbre et qu’ils appellent lumière.” [“But nowadays people are scared stiff both of freedom and of humor; they do not realize that life is impossible without freedom and humor, that the simplest gesture and the slightest effort require the full deployment of our powers of imagination; and like brutish beasts, they want to enchain and corrupt themselves inside the blind walls of the narrowest kind of realism, which is death, and which they call life, and which is darkness, and that is what they call light.”]

  Ionesco, Notes et contre-notes, p. 178

  Sister Luke came over from Loretto to talk to a dozen of us or so about the Council (she was the American woman auditor there this last session, one of the first group). Talking to her made the session very understandable, even the last couple of days, which were pretty ferocious. The great question is what was Pope Paul trying to do? Was he forcing the conservatives against the liberals? Is he proving himself a “transition pope” (whatever that means)? My guess is that he was simply trying, by means of curial politics, to keep things together as far as possible. But it also seems to me that he was much more acquiescent to the conservatives and their desires, than to the liberals.

  Scribners sent Daniel Callahan’s book Honesty in the Church in proof. I will not make a statement on it, as it would tend to mislead people if I did. (That is to say a lot of readers who lack the maturity and sophistication to understand such a book might get in trouble reading it.) However, it is a very outspoken, even indignant, criticism of all the doubletalk, maneuverings and pretenses that are too characteristic of the Church’s official acts sometimes.

  Celebrating my twenty-third anniversary of arrival at Gethsemani. Came straight up to the hermitage after Sister Luke left. Cooked myself some oatmeal (first supper I have cooked here) and ate alone, looking at the hills, in great peace. Long quiet evening, rain falling, candle, silence: it is incomparable!

  December 11, 1964

  Sister Luke said that Archbishop Roberts was not allowed to give his intervention in the Council on conscientious objection! Can this be true? Perhaps only that he was one of several whose interventions on nuclear war had to be submitted in writing! But I hate that Bishop Hannan’s intervention (the NATO line!) was not only permitted but received much publicity. His speech, and the similar one of Liverpool,7 was one of the few reported in full by the NCWC.8

  Heavy rain all night. Now the rain on the roof accentuates the silence, and surrounds the dryness and light of the hermitage as though with love and peace. The liberty and tranquillity of this place is indescribable–more than any merely bodily peace, this is a gift of God, marked with His simplicity and His purity. How one’s heart opens, and what hope arises in the core of my being! It is as if I had not really hoped in God for years, as if I had been living all this time in despair. Now all things seem reasonable and possible. A greater self-denial seems obvious and easy. (Though perhaps it may not be!) A whole new discussion of life is no longer a desperate dream, but completely and simply credible.

  December 16, 1964

  Yesterday for the first time was able to live a complete day’s schedule as it “ought to be” (at least in this transition period) at hermitage.9 Came down only for my own Mass and dinner. Cooked supper at the hermitage etc. In fact cooked too much rice, having miscalculated, and sat half an hour consuming it, with tea. But it was a splendid supper (looking out at the hills in the clear evening light). After that, washing dishes–the bowl, the pot, the cup, the knife
(for oleo), the spoon–looked up and saw a jet like a small rapid jewel travelling north between the moon and the evening star–the moon being nearly full. Then I went for a little walk down to my gate (about ioo yards) and looked out over the valley. Incredibly beautiful and peaceful. Blue hills, blue sky, woods, empty fields, lights going on in the Abbey, to the right, through the screen of trees, hidden from the hermitage. And out there, lights on the three farms I can see. One at Newton’s and two others out there in the hills behind Gethsemani station.

  Everything the Fathers say about the solitary life is exactly true. The temptations and the joys, above all the tears and the ineffable peace and happiness. The happiness that is so pure because it is simply not one’s own making, but sheer mercy and gift! And the sense of having arrived at last in the place destined for me by God, and for which I was brought here twenty-three years ago!

  December 20, 1964. Fourth Sunday of Advent

  This morning in Chapter Dom James finished a series of remarks (facts) about Scandinavia. He returned Wednesday from Norway and has been talking about it in the evening chapter. Was there for the consecration of Bishop John Gran. Everyone is wondering whether there will be a foundation–he says nothing definite about that, but presumably he is open to the idea.

  I had permission to go and see Victor Hammer in Lexington Wednesday. He was thin and drawn, marked by sickness, is unable to go out, but works on his painting of the resurrection. It was a pleasure to be in the beautiful little house on Market Street, and to talk with him and Carolyn. Some very special Pedro Domecq brandy came out for the occasion with their excellent espresso coffee.

  Two nights ago it turned very cold. Yesterday morning as I came down to the monastery in bright, frozen moonlight, with the hard diamonded leaves crackling under my feet, a deer sprang up in the deep bushes of the hollow. Perhaps two. I could see one in the moonlight. Finished article for Holiday10 and sent it yesterday. Apparently the REA men have been around as I can see stakes for poles–but just where I don’t want them!

  Am working on Philoxenus and Ephrem. Yesterday I finished Ionesco’s Le Piéton de l’air which is extraordinarily beautiful, though uneven. The basic idea is wonderful, and it is his best, deepest idea. Especially moved by Marthe.

  December 22, 1964

  Lax sent me from Greece (from his island, Kalymnos) a typewritten copy of the trial in Leningrad of the poet (“militant work-shy element”) [Joseph] Brodsky. Finally as a scene from Ionesco: Brodsky…“belongs to a group where the word ‘work’ is greeted with Satanic laughter…Brodsky has been defended by coarse rascals, work shy elements, loudmouths and Beatles.” In his diary Brodsky had called Marx “an old glutton framed by a wreath of pine cones.” (Santa Claus?). The only thing is–who is laughing? It was published in Encounter and of course Time, etc. picked it up. The question I ask is this: in what significant way does the mentality of Time readers differ from that of the people who condemned Brodsky? They are perhaps a little less crude, but are they any less square? Do they have any better ideas about poets and poetry? Of the value of work? (The value of work measured by the money one makes and the status one gets, not by the work one does!)

  Fortunately I am a success, have status, on thin blue paper, while eating breakfast in the hermitage.

  Epiphany antiphons are already running through my head. Also at chant practice yesterday I realized how much I had grown to love the antiphons of Christmas Eve and of Christmas Vespers, eloquence of the melody, in its simplicity, saturated with the mystery of the Virgin birth and with all mystery. Yet plain as the afternoon.

  Am finally reading Vladimir Lossky’s fine book La Vision de Dieu which reminds me that the best thing that has come out of the Council is the Declaration on Ecumenism, particularly the part on oriental theology. If it were a matter of choosing between “contemplation” and “eschatology” there is no question that I am, and would always be, committed entirely to the latter. Here in the hermitage, returning necessarily to beginnings, I know where my beginning was, having the Name and Godhead of Christ preached in Corpus Christi Church. I heard and believed. And I believe that He has called me freely, out of pure mercy, to His love and salvation, and that at the end (to which all is directed by Him) I shall see Him after I have put off my body in death and have risen together with Him. And that at the last day “videbit omnis caro saluteni Dei” [“all flesh shall see the salvation of God”]. What this means is that my faith is an eschatological faith, not merely a means of penetrating the mystery of the divine presence resting in Him now. Yet because my faith is eschatological it is also contemplative, for I am even now in the Kingdom and I can even now “see” something of the glory of the Kingdom and praise Him who is King. I would be foolish then if I lived blindly, putting all “seeing” off until some imagined fulfillment (for my present seeing is the beginning of a real and unimaginable fulfillment!). Thus contemplation and eschatology are one, in Christian faith and in surrender to Christ. They complete each other and intensify each other. It is by contemplation and love that I can best prepare myself for the eschatological vision–and best help all the Church, and all men, to journey toward it.

  The union of contemplation and eschatology is clear in the gift of the Holy Spirit. In Him we are awakened to know the Father because in Him we are refashioned in the likeness of the Son. And it is in this likeness that the Spirit will bring us at last to the clear vision of the invisible Father in the Son’s glory, which will also be our glory. Meanwhile it is the Spirit who awakens in our heart the faith and hope in which we cry for the eschatological fulfillment and vision. And in this hope there is already a beginning, an “arrha” [“earnest”], of the fulfillment. This is our contemplation: the realization and “experience” of the lifegiving Spirit in Whom the Father is present to us through the Son, our way, truth, and life. The realization that we are on our way, that because we are on our way we are in that Truth which is the end and by which we are already fully and eternally alive. Contemplation is the loving sense of this life and this presence and this eternity.

  In the afternoon (this is my whole day in the hermitage) the guns were pounding at Fort Knox while I was making my afternoon meditation, and I thought that after all this is no mere “distraction,” and that I am here because they are there so that, indeed, I am supposed to hear them. They form part of an ever renewed “decision” and commitment for peace. But what peace? I am once again faced with the deepest ambiguities of political and social action. One thing clear is that there is a will and intention of God bearing upon me (and to let it bear fully on me is to be free!) and my life has no meaning except as a conscious and total self-dedication to the fulfillment of His intention (which in its details remains a complete mystery). As far as I know it, I must seek to be a man wholly given to prayer here in this place where I am, in which He has put me. But I am far from being “totally” a man of prayer. Obviously, even writing is not excluded.

  My will, however, cannot simply lose itself in this or that, in meditation, or writing, or study, or “tranquillity” or work, but simply must surrender in all this to the mysterious and dominant intention of the Lord, the Master whom I have come here to serve. I am not here to be this or that, but to obey Him in everything, Gleichheit [likeness] (Eckhart). And to learn slowly, patiently, the tempo of such obedience. If I had been a better cenobite I perhaps would be more familiar with it!

  The REA men were here in the morning (cold and misty). The hermitage will tie in to a line that will eventually go to a sewage disposal plant to be built in the bottom, by the creek.

  December 23, 1964

  For Eusebius, the Roman empire had resolved the problem of the conflicting nations, and conflicting “angels” (of nations) against the one Lord. The angels and nations were subdued in one empire where the religion of the true God had taken over. Hence the pax romana was in effect the peace of the messianic kingdom. Hence the emperor represented Christ on earth, the prince of peace, etc. We are still stuck with th
is ideology which put the power (angel) of the empire at the right hand of God (see Peterson in Dieu vivant, 22).

  For Origen a man’s “adversary” is his bad angel deputed to keep him firmly in subjection to the angelic prince of his nation or tribe, so that he will not free himself and belong only to God, in Christ (who is above all nations and has vanquished all the powers). (Hom[ilies] in Luc, 35.)

  [Jean] Daniélou has said: “Material civilization in its demiurgic character seems to be one of the places where demonic action is most intense. Judeo-Christian tradition maintains the positive significance of political and cultural values. In this, it is opposed to the Gnostic doctrine of the cosmocratores [worldly powers] but it recognizes that, in fact, these domains are invaded and dominated by demonic powers.” Daniélou, Dieu vivant, 22, pp. 102–103

  December 25, 1964

  First Christmas at the hermitage, very peaceful, no trouble sleeping through. There was of all things a thunderstorm! For two days the weather had been damp, windy and warm as it sometimes is in spring and at one moment I even heard the frogs singing, Christmas Eve. The day before that the novices were cutting down poplars and cedars in the field, where the REA line needs to get through, and I finished some digging I thought I had to do to keep water from accumulating next to the cottage. I got up and said my night office in the hermitage (all that is said about night, silence, shepherds, etc. sounds much better here!), went down for midnight Mass. The novices were happy around the Christmas tree and I was happy with them over the “spiritual gifts.” (Bible texts printed out and distributed blindly.) The midnight Mass was simpler than it has ever been.