prayer

The real home

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I sit in the cool back room, where words cease to resound, where all mornings are absorbed in the consonantia of heat, fragrant pine, quiet wind, birdsong, and one central tonic note that is unheard and unuttered. Not the meditation of books, or of pieties, or of systematic trifles. In the silence of the afternoon all is present and all is inscrutable. One central tonic note to which every other sound ascends or descends, to which every other meaning aspires, in order to find its true fulfillment. To ask when the note will sound is to lose the afternoon: it has sounded, and all things now hum with the resonance of its sounding.    – Thomas Merton, journal entry, May 1965

The country that is nowhere is the real home.   – journal entry, May 30, 1968

Wake up and be vigilant

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“The Lord has plucked up proud men by their roots, and planted the lowly peoples.” “He has put down the mighty.”
If I were more attentive to the word of God I would be much less troubled and disturbed by events of our time: not that I would be indifferent or passive, but I could gain strength of union with the deepest currents of history, the sacred currents, which run opposite to those on the surface a great deal of the time!
“Do not quarrel about a matter that does not concern you; and when sinners judge, do not sit in council with them.” (Ecclesiastes).
This especially strikes me: “Be wary, take very great care, because you are walking with your own downfall; when you hear such things, wake up and be vigilant.” It seems to me that at the moment I very much need this kind of “attention” and “listening,” for I have come to the most serious moments of my life.
– Thomas Merton, journal entry, May 11, 1965

What have I to fear…

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Carlo Carretto – The thought that the affairs of the world, like those of the stars, are in God’s hands – and therefore in good hands – apart from being actually true – is something that should give great satisfaction to anyone who looks to the future with hope. It should be a source of faith, joyful hope, and, above all, of deep peace. What have I to fear if everything is guided and sustained by God? Why get so worried, as if the world were in the hands of me and my fellow human beings?
And yet it is so difficult to have genuine faith in God’s actions in the world. To refuse to believe it is one of the gravest temptations to which we are subjected on this earth.

Hang on to the clear light!

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Not that I must undertake a special project of self-transformation or that I must “work on myself.” In that regard, it would be better to forget it. Just go for walks, live in peace, let change come quietly and invisibly on the inside.
But I do have a past to break, with an accumulation of inertia, waste, wrong, foolishness, rot, junk, a great need of clarification, of mindfulness, or rather of no mind – a return to genuine practice, right effort, need to push on to the great doubt. Need for the spirit.
Hang on to the clear light!
– Thomas Merton, Journal entry, May 30, 1968

The vanity of our best efforts

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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 in 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.
So, through effort that may seem to be wasted, we must patiently go towards a good that is to be given to the patient and the disillusioned.
– Thomas Merton, Journal entry, May 29/30. 1962
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Evangelization of Peace: The Radical Life of Father Louis Vitale

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“Along the way things get clogged up. If you have children, you constantly have to watch out for them and tell them, ‘Don’t go down that alleyway… don’t do this or that,’” Vitale says. “We should go out with love and care for people as Jesus cares for us.”

Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour – Wallace Stevens

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Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.

This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous. 
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:

Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth, 
A light, a power, the miraculous influence.

Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole, 
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one... 
How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind, 
We make a dwelling in the evening air, 
In which being there together is enough.