Entering the Silence

Thomas Merton

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061741722
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

The second volume of Thomas Merton's "gusty, passionate journals" (Thomas Moore) chronicles Merton's advancements to priesthood and emergence as a bestselling author with the surprise success of his autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain. Spanning an eleven-year period, Entering the Silence reflects Merton's struggle to balance his vocation to solitude with the budding literary career that would soon established him as one of the most important spiritual writers of our century.

PART I

The Novitiate Journal

December 1941-April 1942

Our Lady of Gethsemani

Entered as Postulant, St. Lucy’s Day, December 13, 1941

POEM FOR MY FRIENDS, DEC 12-13

This holy house of God,

(Nazareth, where Christ lived as a boy)

These sheds & cloisters,

The very stones & beams are all befriended

By cleaner sun, by rarer birds, by humbler flowers.

Lost in the tigers’ & the lions’ wilderness,

More than we fear, we love these holy stones,

These thorns, the phoenix’s sweet & spikey tree.

More than we fear, we love the holy desert

Where separate strangers, hid in their disguise,

Have come to meet by night the quiet Christ.

We who have some time wandered in the crowded ruins,

(Farewell, you woebegone, sad towns)

We who have wandered like (the ones I hear) the moaning trains,

(Begone, sad towns!)

We’ll live it over for you here.

Here are your ruins all rebuilt as fast as you destroyed them

In your unlucky wisdom!

Here in the Holy House of God

And on the Holy Hill

Fields are the friends of plenteous heaven,

While falling starlight feeds, as bright as manna,

All our rough earth with wakeful grace.

And look, the ruins have become Jerusalems,

And the sick cities re-arise like shining Zions.

Jerusalems! These walls & roofs,

These flowers & fragrant sheds!

Our desert’s wooden door,

The arches, & the windows, & the tower!

December 18, 1941

Not one word is lost, not one action is lost, not one prayer is lost, not one mis-sung note in choir is lost.

Nothing is lost.

What in the world would be wasted is here all God’s, all for love.

I shiver in the night (not now that I have the postulants’ white, wool habit) [but] for love—and I never hated less the world, scorned it less or understood it better.

Because nothing is lost—(and therefore everything is in proportion)—every act is seen in its context, and everything in the monastery is significant.

Because everything here is in a harmonious and totally significant context (every face is turned to God—every gesture and movement is His). Thus, everything in the world outside is also significant, when brought into relation with this!

How long we wait, with minds as quiet as time,

Like sentries on a tower!

How long we watch, by night, like the astronomers!

O Earth! O Earth! When will we hear you sing,

Arising from our grassy hills?

And say: “The dark is gone, and Day

Laughs like a bridegroom in His tent, the lovely sun!

His tent the sun! His tent the smiling sky!”

How long we wait, with minds as dim as ponds,

While stars swim slowly homeward in the waters of our west?

O Earth! When will we hear you sing?

How long we listened to your silence in our vineyards,

And heard no bird stir in the rising barley.

The stars go home behind the shaggy trees:

Our minds are grey as rivers.

O Earth, when will you wake in the green wheat,

And all our oaks and Trappist cedars sing:

“Bright land! Lift up your leafy gates!

You Abbey steeple, sing with bells,

For look, our Sun rejoices like a dancer

On the rim of our hills!”

In the blue west, the moon is uttered like the word

“Farewell.”

JMJT [Jesus, Mary, Joseph, Thérèse]

Feast of the Epiphany [January 6], 1942

January 9, 1942

How will I ever do this?

Not by any power of my own, but by two things (God may be soon to fill me with such love that my presence in the world will be not my presence but His presence, and I may be forgotten, and all around in the world, evil give place to good): these two things are prayer and penance.

“Child! First love Me with all your desire, and cast out all other loves—for your body, for your name, for your work, for your health, for your own consolation, for your own idea of Me—sacrifice everything. Love my will.”

“O Lord! How joyful and happy must they be who, when they come to consider their own selves, find in themselves nothing remarkable whatever. Not only do they attract no attention outside themselves, but now they no longer have any desires or selfish interests to attract their own attention. They remark no virtues, they are saddened by no huge sins, they see only their own unremarkable weakness and nothingness, but a nothingness which is filled obscurely, not with themselves but with your love, O God! They are the poor in spirit, who possess within themselves the kingdom of heaven because they are no longer remarkable even to themselves, but in them shines God’s light, and they themselves and all who see it glorify you, O God! JMJT

CANA

“This beginning of miracles did Jesus in Cana of Galilee”

Once when our eyes were clean as noon, our rooms

Filled with the joys of Cana’s feast:

For Jesus came, and His disciples, & His mother,

And, after them, the singers

And the men with violins.

Once when our minds were Galilees,

And clear as skies our faces,

Our simple rooms were charmed with sun!

Our thoughts went in and out in whiter coats than God’s disciples’,

In Cana’s crowded doors, at Cana’s tables.

Nor did we seem to fear the wine would fail:

For, ready in a row to fill with water and a miracle,

We saw our earthen vessels empty.

What wine those humble waterjars foretell!

Wine for the ones who, bended to the dirty earth,

Have feared, since lovely Eden, the sun’s fire,

Yet hardly mumble, in their dusty mouths, a prayer.

Wine for old Adam, digging in the briars.

JMJT

January 25, 1942. Conversion of St. Paul

Ne magnitude revelationu extollat me, datus est mihi stimulus carnis meae, angelus satanae, qui me colapbizet. Propter quod ter Dominum rogavi ut discederet a me, et dixit mihi Dominus: Sufficit tibi, Paule, gratia mea! [And lest the greatness of the revelations should puff me up, there was given me a sting of my flesh, an angel of Satan, to buffet me. For which thing I thrice besought the Lord, that it might depart from me: And he said to me: My grace is sufficient for thee, Paul (2 Corinthians 12:7-9, Merton adds “Paul”)!]

ST. PAUL ACTS IX 1-22

When I was Saul, and walked among the blazing rocks,

My road was quiet as a trap.

I feared what Word would split high noon with light;

And lock my sight, and drive me mad:

And thus I saw the Voice that struck me dead!

Tie up my life and wind me in my sheets of fear

And lay my reason in a three days’ sepulchre,

’Till Jesus shows me Easter in a dream!

When I was Saul, and sat among the cloaks,

My eyes were stones. I saw no sight of heaven

Open to take the spirit of the twisting Stephen.

When I was Saul, and sat among the rocks,

I locked my eyes, my mind I made a tomb,

Sealed with what boulders rolled across my reason!

O Jesus, show me Easter in a dream!

O Cross Damascus, where poor Ananias in some other room,

(Who knows my locks, to let me out!)

Waits ...