Category: Merton Mondays

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)

The measure of our identity, of our being (the two are the same), is the amount of our love for God.

The more we love earthly things – reputation, importance, pleasure, easy and success – the less we love God.

Our identity is dissipated among things that have no value, and we are drowned and die in trying to live in the material things we would like to possess, or in the projects we would like to complete to objectify the work of our own wills.

Then, we we come to die, we find we have squandered all our love (that is, our being) on things of nothingness, and that we are nothing, we are death…

Let me then withdraw all my love from scattered, vain things – the desire to be read and praised as a writer, or to be a successful teacher…or to live in ease in some beautiful place…

My life is measured by my love of God, and that, in turn, is measured by my love for the least of His children.

And that love is not an abstract benevolence: it must mean sharing their tribulation.

(Merton, Journals, September 3, 1941, I.398-99)

For the “old man,” everything is old: he has seen everything or thinks he has.

He has lost hope in anything new.

What pleases him is the “old” he clings to, fearing to lose it, but he is certainly not happy with it.

And so he keeps himself “old” and cannot change: he is not open to any newness.

His life is stagnant and futile.

And yet there may be much movement – but change that leads to no change…

The old man lives without life.

He lives in death, and clings to what has died precisely because he clings to it.

And yet he is crazy for change, as if struggling with the bonds of death.

His struggle is miserable, and cannot be a substitute for life…

..I suddenly realized that I had, and for how long, deeply lost hope of “anything new.”

How foolish, when in fact the newness is there all the time.

(Merton, Journals, March 18, 1959, III269)

(From Irenaeus)

“If you are the work of God, wait patiently for the hand of your artist who makes all things at an opportune time…

Give to Him a pure and supple heart and watch over the form which the artist shapes you in…lest, in hardness, you lose the traces of his fingers.

By guarding this conformity, you will ascend to perfection…To do this is proper to the kindness of God, to have done is becoming human nature. If therefore, you hand over to Him what is yours, namely, faith in Him and submission, you will see his Skill and be a perfect work of God.”

(Merton, Journals, August 25-26, 1965, V284-85)

I need to be led by you.

I need my heart to be moved by you.

I need my soul to be made clean by your prayer.

I need my will to be made strong by you.

I need the world to be saved by you and changed by you.

I need you for all those who suffer, who are in prison, in danger, in sorrow.

I need you for all the crazy people.

I need your healing hands to work always in my life.

I need you to make me, as your Son, a healer, a comforter, a savior.

I need you to name the dead.

I need you to help the dying cross their particular river.

I need you for myself, whether I live or die.

I need to be your monk and your son.

It is necessary.

Amen.

(Merton, Journals, July 17, 1956, III46-47)

What am I heading for?

Where am I going?

The answer to that one is:

I don’t need to know.

All these troubles come from mistrusting the love of God. Shall I start asking myself all those same questions all over again? God knows what He wants to do with me.

Rest in his tremendous love – to know the savor and sweetness of God’s love expressed from moment to moment in all the contacts between Him and your soul – from outside in events in His signified will and will of good pleasure, from within myself by the flow of actual graces.

Rest in that union.

It will feed you, fill you with life.

There is nothing else you need.

He will show you the way to increase it, and, if necessary, He will lead you into perfect solitude in His own good time.

Leave it all to him.

Live in the present.

(Merton, Journals, July 3 and 4, 1947, II.89-90)

From Tertullian:

Malim nullum bonum quam vanum:

“I would rather have nothing than have vanity.”

When we face the vanity of our best efforts,

their triviality,

their involvement with illusion,

we become desperate.

And then we are tempted to do anything as long as it seems to be good.

We may abandon a better good with which we have become disillusioned, and embrace a lesser good with a frenzy that prevents us from seeing the greater illusion.

(Merton, Journals, May 29-30, 1962, IV.221-22)

—

Sometimes I seek something good- anything good – to make me feel

worthy,

productive,

(well known),

(well liked),

when in fact, there should be nothing at all.

There should always be an emptiness inside of us that allows God and faith to move, to create, to cultivate, to change us.

Sometimes I just shove out God with the vanity of all the good things I try to

do,

(be),

(am).

When all he really needs is for me to be empty.

(And paradoxically…the emptier we become, the more fullness we find).

Lord, have mercy.

Have mercy on my darkness,

my weakness,

my confusion.

Have mercy on my infidelity,

my cowardice,

my turning about in circles,

my wandering,

my evasions.

I do not ask for anything but such mercy, always, in everything,

mercy.

My life here – a little solidity and very much ashes.

Almost everything is ashes. What I have prized most is ashes.

What I have attended to least is, perhaps…

a little solid.

Lord, have mercy.

Guide me,

make me want again to be holy,

to be a man of God, even though in desperateness and confusion.

I do not necessarily ask for clarity, a plain way, but only to go according to your love,

to follow your mercy, to trust your mercy.

I want to seek nothing at all, if this is possible.

But only to be led without looking and without seeking.

For thus to seek is to find.

(Merton, Journals, August 2, 1960, IV.28)