Is the whole thing just a fantastic private comedy?
I question myself and my whole life very seriously.
The real absurdity of it all!
In a word, what I see is this: that, while I imagined I was functioning fairly successfully, I was living a sort of patched-up, crazy existence, a series of rather hopeless improvisations, a life of unreality in many ways.
Always underlain by a certain solid silence and presence, a faith, a clinging to the Invisible God. This clinging (perhaps rather His holding on to me) has been in the end the only thing that has made sense.
The rest has been absurdity.
What is more, there is no essential change in sight.
I’ll probably go on like this for the rest of my life.
Here “I” am: this patchwork, this bundle of questions and doubts and obsessions, this gravitation to silence and to the woods and to love.
This incoherence!
There is no longer anything to pride myself in, least of all…being anything…a writer…or anything.
(Merton, Journals, September 5, 1966, VI. 125)
Comments
6 responses to “Merton Mondays #9 – A Patched Up, Crazy Existence”
Since retirement, I look back over the fact that “patching” was my world a lot! I was given so MANY opportunities to be promoted on my jobs, but I wouldn’t accept them, because I would hit the “patching comfort zone” as long as I could serve the Client and do the tremendous job I was doing…just stay there. And I didn’t want to be compared to the staff member’s position I would have been taking. I like this Merton journal today, Anne. Thanks!
For me, i always thought that was a “normal” way of life for being involved in the ministry. :)
I live here right now. Sounds a lot like King Solomon.
Ecclesiastes 1:14
I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind.
What I love about this is it is so unlike mist of Merton’s writings. It’s almost like he had a smidge too much wine, and just was laughing the whole time he wrote it.
Kinda like the SNL skit “Really?!?!!”. Really, God, really? I think I’m successful and pious and a monk for Pete’s sake. Really?! My life is absurd!!
Absolutely love it!
Good stuff….thankful he holds on to us, even as we barely cling to him.