Dancing in the Water of Life

by Thomas Merton

  March 5, 1965

  Nishida Kitaro–just what I am looking for. For example I see my objection to the cliché about “meaningful experience” (as if it was “meaninglessness” that made experience somehow real and worth while. “Experience” is made “meaningful” by being referred to something else, a system, or perhaps a report of someone else’s experiences, and therefore its quality is diminished. So the ambiguity of meaningfulness is exposed. When experience is “meaningful” in this sense it is unreal–or less real. To live always outside of experience as if this were a fullness of experience: this is one of the basic ambiguities of written thought).

  Curious thing finishing Cabaud’s book on Simone Weil, I find it was Tom Bennett, my godfather and guardian, who tried to treat her in the Middlesex Hospital and had her transferred to Ashford because she refused to eat! Funny that she and I have this in common: we were both problems to this good man.

  March 9, 1965

  Several days of rain, mist, damp, cold. It is flu weather, and there is flu in the monastery. A postulant left, another one came–he has been a Carthusian for a few months at Parkminster, which does not mean that this is the best place for him. We had a meeting about him yesterday and decided to give him a try. Father Timothy is on retreat for diaconate so I spend more time in the novitiate and it was pleasant being there yesterday for Lenten reading. The place is very quiet and peaceful, almost a hermitage itself. It seems to me that since I have been more often in the hermitage the novices themselves have become much quieter and more serious. I have never done less work with them and never had them so good. My conclusion is that there is much too much anxiety on the part of superiors to interfere with and “direct” their subjects.

  Yesterday I sent off the review of the Simone Weil book to Peace News, finished some translations of a few poems of Nicanor Parra (who is excellent, sharp, hard, solid irony) one of the best South American poets, a no nonsense anti-poet, with a deep sense of the futility and corruption of social life–a sense which has now been taken over entirely by poets and writers since the Church has abandoned everything but optimism for the technological future. I sent the Pessoa poems to Suzuki. Dan [Walsh] said he had read some of them to his class at Bellarmine. He came back with a terrific black eye and a cut on his eyebrow, from falling in the icy street.

  The new Mass began Sunday and there are good things about it but it is obviously transitional. I will miss the Prologue of St. John, but am saying it in my thanksgiving (after all, that is what it was for anyway). Actually I did not realize how much this “Last Gospel” had drawn to itself and soaked up all the associations of all the joys of fourteen years of the Mass and of priesthood. All those simple, quiet masses–nine years and more of them in the novitiate chapel-summer mornings, saying the Last Gospel with the open window looking out toward the green woods of Vineyard Knob! The text itself is one of the most wonderful in the Bible–certainly ideal for contemplation.

  March 10, 1965

  There is no question now that Mass ends too abruptly, and one has to go more slowly and deliberately, perhaps with a few discreet pauses, or one is suddenly unvesting, as it were, in the middle of communion. Of course a whole new attitude toward the “shape” of the Mass is now required. This is contrived in the new rite, but one must feel it and bring it out. One needs to see the Mass celebrated by priests who have thought out the new implications and experienced their meaning. So far (after all, it is only four days!!) we here seem to be dutifully setting out the fragments in a new arrangement, without having grasped the organic significance of what is going on.

  After four or five grim wet days, cold and dark, suddenly bright spring–cold, clear blue sky with a few very clean, well-washed clouds. Thin and full of light. The wet earth is springy, green moss shows in the short grass under the pines. The frogs sang for a moment (but it is still cold). The buds are beginning to swell. A flycatcher was playing in the woods near the stile as I came up, and the pileated woodpecker, bright combed, darted out, swinging up and down over the field to the east.

  All day I have been uncomfortably aware of the wrong that is in me. The useless burden of pride I condemn myself to carry–and all that comes with carrying it. I know I deceive myself, as a monk and as a writer. But I do not see exactly where. Trying to do things that are beyond me, no doubt. Trying to have something to say about everything. Not enough mistrust of my own opinion. And beyond that, a rebellious and nasty dissatisfaction with things, with the country, the Church. (Not so much the monastery now–I am accepting it more peacefully, and see the silliness of rebelling against what is after all human and to be expected.) Impatience with the uniformly benign public pronouncements of Paul VI–as if he could be anything else, and he is certainly trying earnestly to do something about Viet Nam. Impatience with biographies of new cardinals in the refectory–at the root it is all a mean and childish impatience with myself and there is no way of dignifying it as a valid “protest.” It is just idiotic and self-seeking nonsense.

  March 14, 1965. Second Sunday of Lent

  The sense of wrong stays with me. I now see the negative and weak side of my intentions in writing Seeds of Destruction–the element that was invisible to me before–the thing that others have seen first–that is a kind of cry for recognition, as if I wanted to make sure that I too was part of the human race, and concerned in its concerns. And I am. There is nothing wrong with that. But for various reasons I do not understand, and because of all the usual ambiguities, I am too anguished and excited about it–especially being out of touch with what goes on. Because of this the book, or the part on race, fails to really make complete sense and is not useful in the current situation. The part on war has, I think, greater value. The letters may in some cases be all right but they show the foolishness and futility I have got into with all my mail. Yet I cannot honestly say I have wished this all on myself. The letters that come in impose a certain obligation by themselves. I have not asked for them!

  Yesterday Bishop Maloney16 was here to ordain Fathers Timothy and Barnabas to the diaconate. In his usual silly little talk at the end of the cloister afterward, he was lamenting the vagaries of the new liturgy. “But,” he said, “I always look at the bright side.” He did not say precisely what the bright side was for him, except that it was all “the will of God” or something. He is probably quite representative of a large part of the clergy and people in this country. Not too able to understand the issue.

  March 15, 1965

  Yesterday afternoon it was cold and rainy. Read a little of Eric Colledge’s essay on Mechtilde of Magdeburg under the tall pine trees behind the hermitage before going down to shave, give conference (last on Ephrem and first on Philoxenus) and sing Vespers. I love the Lenten hymns. What a loss it will be if they are thrown out!

  In the evening it cleared, was cold. I came up, sun setting, moon out. I looked out the bedroom window and saw two deer grazing quietly in the field, in dim dusk and moonlight, barely twenty yards from the cottage. Once in a while they would look up at the house with their big ears extended, and even a little movement would make them do this but eventually I walked quietly out on the porch and stayed there and they stayed peacefully until finally I began moving about and they lifted up the white flags of their tails and started off in a wonderful, silent, bounding flight down the field, only to stop a hundred yards away. I don’t know what became of them after that, for it was bed time and I had not read my bit of Genesis (Jacob’s dream).

  March 16, 1965

  On Sunday there was in Louisville a demonstration in protest of the murder of the Christian minister at Selma, Alabama, which has been the center of the biggest conflict since Birmingham–marches, police brutality, etc. Dan Walsh was in the demonstrations and so were many priests and nuns, and lots of ministers. Bishop Maloney spoke. About 3500 participated I understand. The issue of voter registration is coming to a head, a new law is being drafted, etc. [George] Wallace of Alabama was in Washington to confer with Pres
ident Johnson and some sour looking pictures of him were on the bulletin board in the cloister.

  Sister Luke was here yesterday and Sister Mary of Lourdes, General of a Congregation of Ursulines (motherhouse at Tours), discussing problems. They both feel that the lid is off and there is going to be quite a lot of unrest, trouble and confusion in religious life especially in America. I do too though I think that in this house the worst is over (unless Dom James dies suddenly and we have an abbatial election now–no one really being ready for such a job).

  March 19, 1965. St. Joseph

  Bright full moon, cold night. The moonlight is wonderful in the tall pines. Absolute silence of the moonlit valley. It is the twenty-first anniversary of my simple profession (eighteenth of my solemn profession)–today I am to concelebrate for the first time. (The second time concelebration has been held here).

  Last evening I was called over to the guest house for a conversation with Father Coffield, on his way back from Selma to Chicago. He is the one who left Los Angeles in protest against Cardinal McIntyre. Told of the tensions and excitements of Selma, and being “on the line” facing the police at 3 a.m. There was a legal and official march in Montgomery, though everything is not yet over–there seems to have been a breakthrough, and the violence of the police and posse men seems to have had a great deal to do with bringing it about. The protest is national and articulate, and Congress is intent on getting something done. This is due in great part to the fact that everyone (except monks) sees everything on TV. From now on I will be more careful of what I say against TV! He spoke of John Griffin who has been very ill–and is in the hospital again.

  March 21, 1965. Third Sunday of Lent

  St. Benedict is put off until tomorrow–which gives me an extra day to prepare a sermon. Was busy last week, especially with finishing the paper on “The Council and Monasticism” for the Bellarmine Studies.17 Then on the afternoon of St. Joseph I went over to Edelin’s Knobs with some novices, and went to explore on my own a couple of thickly wooded hollows over the ridges south of Bell Hollow. They are both excellent snake pits and I would not want to go there in summer! Coming back over the ridge into Bell Hollow, in very thick brush, I got hit in the eye by a branch of a sapling, wounding the cornea, and for two days I have not been able to see properly out of that eye. It is only a little better today, though it hurts less (what with ointment and dark glasses). Could do very little work yesterday–except cooking, gathering wood, etc. Said office, tried to read a bit with the left eye, and wrote a letter to Nicanor Parra.

  March 23, 1965

  Hausherr remarks that in Patristic times the theology of Baptism–especially in Catechesis–was the theology also of Christian perfection–(“Spiritual Theology”). This is more profound than it seems at first sight. By Baptism a man becomes another Christ, and his life must be that of another Christ. The Theology of Baptism teaches him who he is. The consequences are easy to deduce. The Hagios [holy] is the one who is sanctified in the sense of sacrificed (John 17:19). (Martyrdom is the perfect response to the Baptismal vocation!!) At the same time Origen (in the true spirit of nonviolence) warns against the impure motive of self-love that leads one to court death without consideration of the sin of those who would destroy us. More properly: importance of considering the spiritual welfare of the persecutor himself. It has also to be taken into account. The experience of the Deep South shows that the death of the “martyr” does not automatically redeem and convert the persecutor.

  In any case–martyrdom is no improvisation: “Qui ne s’improvise pas martyr du Christ?” [“Who ever improvises on being a martyr for Christ?”] (In Laics et vie chrétienne parfaite, Rome 1963, p. 60). The only “preparation for martyrdom” is not some special training but–the Christian life itself. Thus eventually a truly Christian life, waiting to be consummated in martyrdom, is treated as almost equivalent to it, and you get the ideal of the confessor (and the monk). This is simply the life of their discipleship. The mark of such discipleship is perfect love of the Savior and of the Father’s will. He who does not live according to his baptism and discipleship is living as a potential renegade (from martyrdom).

  My eye gets better only slowly. Ointments, even a black patch, have been necessary for a couple of days. Am only today able to read with it again, and that makes it burn. But it has been a grace. I have been sobered by it. What was I doing charging through the woods on that God-forsaken knob? Trying to see if I would come out where I did. All right. But it was still useless. I would have been better off quietly praying (as I did yesterday afternoon in that lovely, mossy glen where I used to go twelve years ago). Preparing the sermon on St. Benedict (which people seem to have liked yesterday) I was much struck by the idea of the judicia Dei (judgments of God), and the thought took a deep hold on me that what matters in our life is not abstract ideals but profound love and surrender to the concrete “judgments of God.” They are our life and our light, inexhaustible sources of purity and strength. But we can ignore them. And that is the saddest thing of all.

  (Evening.) My eye is slightly better, not healed. High wind all day. It is my day to be at the hermitage all day. In the middle of the afternoon a knock came on the door and it was my neighbor Andy Boone. Wanted to talk about the fence line he is working on and the deal about the three big white oaks he wants to cut down, offered me $25 a month for two months to pasture his cows in the field next to the hermitage, and I said no, on account of the locust seedlings we put in there last spring. And so on. But one very good thing came out of it. He told me there was an excellent spring that had got filled in and buried some years ago, and it is only fifty yards or so behind the hermitage, through thick brush. I know the place and did not realize there was a spring there, though water is running there now. We will have to clear it and pump it perhaps to the hermitage. Anyway clear it. Then also I saw a dozen places in the thick brush where deer had been sleeping. They are my nearest dormitory neighbors–thirty or forty yards from my own bed, or even less! How wonderful!

  Andy was full of all kinds of information and stories.

  The water from all these springs comes from the Lake Knob a geologist told him. (He had a geologist here looking for uranium.)

  How he chased out people from E’town [Elizabethtown] who came to have wild parties at night by the old lake.

  How hunters who were too lazy to get out of their cars sat in them by the roadside shooting woodchucks in the field, and how he was going one day to sit in the window of his house and smash up their motor with a bullet, just to show them. He showed me a wicked-looking bullet that goes three miles.

  Story of how Brother Pius found there the last rock they needed to build the old bridge by the mill (now gone). And how Brother Pius threw the rock over the fence to them–and it took two mules for them to move it.

  How Daniel Boone first came to Kentucky and spread his people all around wherever there was water, then went himself to Indiana. In Indiana he had a hole he hid in when the Indians were after him. He withdrew into it and pulled a stone over it and they never found it. The hole was eight miles long and twelve feet high and nine feet wide and had a stream in it. And when some powder plant was being built, on which Andy worked before World War II, a bulldozer disappeared into this hole and so it was discovered.

  March 26, 1965

  Vile rain and fog. Came up last night in very heavy rain with a cold beginning. As long as I stay in the hermitage and keep the fire going the cold is not too bad. It was a bit bothersome in the community where there is ‘flu, where the choir is overheated, where you sweat and then get chilled, etc., etc. I wish I could simply stay up here and say Mass here! I have grapefruit juice in the icebox and that is a big help. Decided to take some bread with coffee this morning instead of fasting (on coffee only) until dinner. The rye bread was good, so was the coffee. And I read Ruysbroeck, thinking of him in terms of Zen. His “essential union” is quite like Prajna [wisdom], and “Suchness.” Theological differences great–but the pheno
menology is close.

  Dan Walsh is giving his momentous talk at Catholic University today and I promised I would say a Mass of the Holy Spirit for the canonization of Duns Scotus. His talk is ostensibly about Scotus and Anselm but also and above all consists in the development of his own ideas on the metaphysic of faith. I shall be very interested to hear it when he gets back.

  Buchanan, the postulant from the Polaris submarine, arrived yesterday lugging a huge bag. I saw him when I was in with Reverend Father. Buchanan has certainly planned a long time to come–even since before his graduation from Annapolis.

  (Evening.) The weather continued to be very foul all day. Plague weather. Have not been able to see across the valley all day long. My cold is a little worse but not much. On the whole I do better at the hermitage. Came up after dinner, and a morning’s work in the novitiate. Sat out the Conventual Mass alone in the back of the Brothers’ choir, and could see a few look back disapprovingly from the choir–as if there were a divine commandment to sit in the transepts when you have a cold. Actually it was quite impressive to follow the Mass from back there–a thing I had never done. Chiefly I was there to be completely alone.

  After I got back to the hermitage Andy Boone came by with a check for $125 dollars for the trees he cut down on the fence line. And he talked some more–am I going to be in perpetual conversations with him? About the connection of Dogwoods with the Passion of Christ, the sex of cedar trees (one of his favorite topics; “only the she-trees make good Christmas trees”), and the fact that our planting loblolly seedlings brought in the beetles which are killing cedars and Virginia Pine. This I believe!