Dancing in the Water of Life

by Thomas Merton

  With letters and additions to the “Black Revolution” (for the version to be in Blackfriars I hope!) I have typed about eight pages double spaced today and that is more than I have done since before going to the hospital–of course my arm is tired and sore, but it is evidently better. Letters to Dame Hildelith [Cumming, of Stanbrook Abbey] (lovely name) and Meg Randall of El Corno [Emplumado].

  Began [José María] Gironella’s One Million Dead.

  October 17, 1963

  Still the same bright, parched, brilliant day without rain. The whole countryside is tinder. A grey squirrel runs very lightly over the dried leaves.

  The last time I was in Louisville to see the Doctor I got two books on the Albigensians by Zoë Oldenbourg [Destiny of Fire and Massacre at Montsegur: A History of the Albigensian Crusade]. I have just finished Massacre at Montsegur–a deeply disturbing and moving book. One could find fault with it, in details, I suppose. But what would be the point? In general it is very honest and convincing and I think serious statement about the Church and the Inquisition, made without rancor, by someone whose real love for the Cathars makes her no doubt a bit partial.

  Is there any getting away from the fact that the Dominicans invented the methods of the modern police state? The secret trial, with secret evidence, making it profitable for the witness to save his life by accusing as many other people (secretly) as possible–retaining his anonymity, etc. The denunciations that remain anonymous–same complaint today against the Holy Office. The clear fact that some very sincere, courageous and holy people went to their death convinced that the Church was acting as an instrument of Satan. Did they have, subjectively, really serious reasons to think otherwise? Is it not true that this has affected the attitude of whole generations and whole regions toward the Church? And all this in “my” country, near where I was born.

  There are references to places near St. Antonin, Montauban, of course, one reference to Cordes, and one to the Penne that was near St. Antonin.

  The Abbot is sore with me over the fact that Bellarmine College is starting a “Merton Collection.” Today he is in town because Capt. Kinnarney died (aged 98).

  In the novitiate the Zen (sand and rock) garden is coming along quite well and I think it will be quite meaningful–replacing the idiot tangle of flowers, weeds and trellises at that end of the terrace. It is a wonder we took so long to clear that place. But I wonder what will happen to the fill when we get a lot of rain.

  October 22, 1963

  Dryer than ever. Though the sky is clear and cloudless, a blue haze was drifting through the valley, probably from half a dozen fires in some other county. How long can we go without one here?

  Zoë Oldenbourg’s passionate religion, her admiration of the Cathars, it is beautiful and alluring, because there is truth in it. There is truth in everything. And she has cast her course on the particular, cold, burning, religious beauty which for her is a kind of quintessential protestantism, names of some of the rather richer and stronger elements that must have been in Catharism. How much is this beauty really stolen from the Church herself, and justified by a disturbed view of the cruelty and dishonesty of Catholics? The book Destiny of Fire, a novel, is far more powerful and “bouleversant” [“upsetting”] than the history. A fantastic religious Eros is at work there: this is her genius. It is her own self that is in the book, the beauty and fascination of her own religious aspirations. Really, there is all this passion–and nothing much after all of God: this sounds like an invidious judgment. Yet what you have is the beauty of religious passion in people hunted to death for heresy. And I have the feeling that God is very remote from that whole war, from either side of it. What mattered were the different kinds of passion. God was gone from it. Or no? But I don’t want to have to fall into the usual Pharisaism that ends by saying–no matter how bad she looks, the Church is always right in the way the most corrupt of her clergy says she is, and so to obey them blindly is the only true test of love and faith! Sacrifice honor, desire, integrity, everything to plain orthodoxy!

  A Franciscan from Louisville has come as a postulant. He is from one of the towns where Leander Perez, an excommunicated oil-man and politician, has been fighting school integration. Father M. says the south is full of evil–the murder of a Negro is not regarded as a sin–nor arson, bombing, etc. etc.

  October 23, 1963

  The rumor goes around that Maritain has been made a Cardinal. John Howard Griffin even declares he has seen this in print. The other day I finished a short preface to Julie Kernan’s translation of Raïssa [Maritain]’s Notes sur le Pater [Notes on the Lord’s Prayer, 1964].

  Dead dry weather! The leaves tinkle like flakes of copper when the breeze passes over them. Haze. Wrote a little article on the Shakers at Pleasant Hill (yesterday) maybe for Jubilee.6 Why were the Shakers first hated so much, then loved so much? Probably for their celibacy, or their mixture of celibacy and common life (both sexes in the same communities). And loved for their work? Not only that, for their angelic gentleness which, after all, was traced to their celibacy. Perhaps what underlay it all was the pioneers’ panic at the thought of a kind of loss of virility involved in a man’s living chastely with women and in a state of exaltation at that! “Unnatural!”

  October 24, 1963

  “To be a man means to be situated in God’s presence as Jesus is, that is, to be a bearer of the wrath of God.” Barth [from Dogmatics in Outline, 1949]. We need the shock of this sentence–which is of course immediately qualified by Barth himself. And the qualification is implicit, for Jesus bears that wrath and lives. But the wrath is on us!

  And the Calvinist catechism: “What understandest thou by the little word ‘suffered’?” “That He all the time of His life, but especially at the end thereof hath borne in body and soul the wrath of God against the whole human race.” How powerful and how serious!

  Catholic piety sees Christ suffering all His life, but in a different perspective. He is the bearer of all kinds of pains, but they are so to speak the pains of a person who has not been “struck,” who is not under the wrath. They are quantitative, detailed, exquisite, etc. But the full enormity of sin is perhaps not seen as well as here, for God seems to be pleased with this pain. No! It is His wrath!

  And Barth’s terrific chapter on Pilate. I think I will have to become a Christian. (“In this meeting of Jesus and Pilate everything is together that should be thought and said from the side of the Gospel regarding the realm of the ‘polis’ [‘city’].”)

  October 26, 1963

  “One thing still holds, and only this one thing is really serious, that Jesus is the victor. A seriousness that would look back past this, like Lot’s wife, is not Christian seriousness. It may be burning behind–and truly it is burning–but we have to look not at it but at the other fact, that we are visited and summoned to take seriously the victory of God’s glory in this man Jesus and to be joyful in Him.” Karl Barth

  This is appropriate to what I was thinking about the grim and fearful seriousness with which Julien Green takes evil [in Each in His Darkness, 1961]. The fear that one’s obsession with evil may be a sign of not being “of the elect.” And Graham Greene too: in him evil is more serious than good. Certainly we tend to experience evil more than good–that divine good which is present to us in hope. But there is always the false Christian optimism which tries to “experience” the Kingdom in what is not the Kingdom. Nevertheless, the victory of Christ makes all joy possible even in the midst of evil, for what we experience as evil is no longer serious unless we insist on making it so for ourselves.

  October 27, 1963

  There! That seriousness again. Barth admits it: in the great pictures of the Last Judgment “one’s glance remains fixed on those on the left!” But he also says that if we really want to understand the mystery of Christ’s second coming we have to “repress certain pictures of the world judgment.” And this is true (though “repress” is the wrong word). The real judgment is that our idea of left and right is
not the true view, and that our hopes and fears, on the human level, have proved deceptive. (The visual imagination in Barth–like the Cathedrals. The odd and the humorous appears at the right moment.) “We (Christians) must not sit among them (non-Christians) like melancholy owls” [Dogmatics in Outline] (p. 1.32). “He that comes is He that previously offered Himself to the judgment of God.” But this is what is not clear in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment.

  October 28, 1963. Saints Simon and Jude

  The falling leaves, crowds of them, flying across the narrow novitiate lawn and the Zen garden (still unfinished–it needs the big rock). Last evening the sky was dark and it looked like rain, but they were only the “clouds without water” of Jude’s epistle. There was, after supper, a momentary violent wind and a brief dust storm.

  I have suddenly grasped the magnificent Chapter I.9 of Cur Deus Homo? [by St. Anselm]. Read it in the hospital and marked some of the right lines, but they had not struck deep. Here again, as in the Proslogion, Anselm’s argument means little without an inner light that is spiritual rather than dialectical. Here it is a question of realizing that the Father did not drive the Son to death. Jesus was not “commanded to die” or “condemned to death” by the Father. He came into the world, was made man in order to love as man, to do all that was right. And to save His brothers. In doing “all justice,” he comes to be condemned unjustly. He could justly have used His power to save Himself and to save man in some other way. He preferred quite spontaneously this way of saving man by the renunciation of power and undergoing death. The Father willed the salvation of man but left Jesus entirely free to specify the means. What is pleasing to the Father is not that the Son dies, but that He uses His will fully to choose what he deems best in saving man. Hence the Father’s will is not that the Son suffer, but that He use His freedom as He pleases in order to save man. And Jesus, out of love for the Father, chooses the way of total renunciation of power. At the same time, the “will of the Father” is in fact the will of God, i.e., of the three divine Persons and so of the Word. Thus it is Christ’s own will in so far as He is a divine Person. The will of God is then that the human will of Christ be free to specify by what means man is to be saved. And Christ, as man, elects to save man by the renunciation of power, by total poverty, annihilation and death since in this glory of the Father is manifest–the glory that leaves man free to choose, within the limits of truth. It is anything but blind and desperate subjection to an irreversible decree of death. And yet, nevertheless, Calvin’s idea of Christ bearing all the “wrath of God” is also true. But that is another aspect.

  Barth–believing in the Holy Ghost means, in fact, believing in man as “freely and actively participating in the work of God.” “That this actually takes place is the work of the Holy Spirit, the work of God on earth which has its analogue in that hidden work of God, the outgoing of the Spirit from the Father and the Son…to take confidence in men for Christ’s sake.”

  How can the idea of “Church” make any sense without this trust in man as capable of grace, capable of cooperation? Here’s the real beginning of the idea of community. Individualism: the man hopes for himself alone, doubts or despairs of all others, or is indifferent to all others. “Few are chosen.” Individualism is faith that there are a few individuals to be rescued from the general wreck. True community: hope in man. “All-Man.” One in Christ with the dread that some may be lost, that individuals will fall out of the saved community, for whom there is hope because the Holy Spirit is powerful [enough] to work for all through all. The Christian way “is to hope for myself and for all others.” And Barth is supposed to be one of those “Protestant individualists”? (Note hoping in all men is not by any means “hope in the human spirit,” yet as for that spirit too “we must cherish it a little.”)

  October 29, 1963

  A Baptist group from the seminary in Louisville were here yesterday.

  Got a wonderful letter from Dame Hildelith at Stanbrook–about the little Guigo pamphlet7 and other projects, but also the Swedish folk dances of the novices, and the strange moth they found, etc. Ruth Hollisey has entered that Benedictine convent at Ryde.

  A meeting with the Junior choir monks yesterday, about their program and what is to be done. Father Flavian [Burns] is itching to put them into philosophy.

  Again. Barth’s bestiary. This time the Church is not a snail. “The Church runs like a herald to deliver the message. It’s not a snail with a little house on its back and is so well off in it, that only now and then it sticks out its feelers and then thinks that ‘the claim of publicity’ has been satisfied…” Dogmatics in Outline, p. 147. Of the dog. Pilate is a dog. “How does Pilate come into the creed?…Like a dog into a nice room!” but the meanness is not toward Pilate but toward politics–the dog in the room is politics in the Church! Sometimes the Christian in the Church is like a bird in a cage, beating against the bars (trying to make the whole Gospel reduce itself to our own rite or our own preachments). “If you do not know this oppression, you have certainly not seen the real dynamic in this matter!!” (p. 147). But this invitation is to be patiently endured. We wait for the Kingdom “recognizing each other in longing and humility in the light of the divine humor” (148).

  It is clear and cool as if it had rained. But there has been no rain.

  Ramparts [Vol. 2, Christmas 1963] came with my Black Revolution and Griffin’s very moving dialogue with Father August Thompson–Negro pastor in a small Louisiana town (I met him here late one evening coming in from Louisville). New light on the South, again, and how impossible the situation really is. Actually it is quite a unique one for which new formulas must be sought and are being sought. But what will it avail? Whatever will happen if [Barry] Goldwater manages to get himself elected President in 1964!

  Maniac letters from Joel Orent, the rabbi who went in for Tantrism, and whose most recent exploit is to have gone to receive communion at a New York Church–in a sort of dazed good faith! He is insane!

  October 30, 1963

  Parable of the Wedding Feast–an idea that some are called to the banquet, refuse and are replaced by others is given a cosmological significance by the Patristic idea of the fall of the angels and the replacement of the fallen angels by men. But the idea of the invitation to the wedding feast enters into the very structure of the universe, when looked at from this viewpoint!

  New liturgies in the Juniorate. Dialogue Mass with parts sung in English, including now the Introit and Father [John] Eudes [Bamberger] preaches a Homily, etc.

  Old Liturgies: in the Infirmary–Father Stephen, his own private rite, leaning on the altar, hanging on it, grappling with it, leaning sideways, ganging up on the book, and Brother Leo in strange places coming out with high-pitched “amens” and other responses in a language entirely his own (he is stone deaf). And the plebs sancta [congregation]. Brother John in a wheelchair with a red blanket over his shoulders and glasses on the end of his nose. Brother Jerome, leaning far forward. Brother Dominic, head bowed low. Brother Gerard solemn and slow…in the middle of it all the great aquiline powerful business frame of Brother Clement the Cellarer, at Mass there early so as to take the road on a big, mysterious errand in one of the cities. This early Mass in the Infirmary is unforgettable! And in many ways more moving than all the new improvements. (Father Raymond [Flanagan], facing the people at the new high altar, sings Mass angrily, and puts his fist in his stomach.–)

  Finally getting into Zaehner’s Hindu and Muslim Mysticism, a remarkable book. And convincing.

  November 3, 1963

  One of [Armand-Jean Le Bouthillier de] Rancé’s arguments against study in the monastic life: it leads to wrangling–“contestation.” Experience of twenty years of theological conferences in this monastery convinces me that the most intemperate, unreasonable and indeed uncharitable arguers in chapter are those who most vehemently support Rancé or live most explicitly according to his principles. Those, on the contrary, who have grown up with more intellectual interes
ts not only are better informed and able to make sounder judgments, but are also more temperate, as well as more intelligible, and more objective, in their speech.

  November 5, 1963

  Please to remember the fifth of November! The Gunpowder treason and plot!

  And St. Martin de Porres, and today’s elections, and the southern priest who was beaten up by his parishioners because he had the white and Negro children go to the communion rail at the same time for first communion.

  Rain was falling when we got up the other day for All Saints (I am still saying vigils privately though) and that night it began again at bedtime. This morning, still night, warmer, cloudy, wind, pale night over the Zen garden, cold in the chapel.

  There is a wonderful therapeutic atmosphere about Eadmer’s life of Anselm [The Life of St. Anselm, ed. R. W. Southern, 1962] because of the healing, tender, “motherly” quality of Anselm’s concern. The dying monk who hated him found himself “in the arms of two wolves with their teeth at his throat.” It is a grotesque medieval manuscript illumination! The two human wolves are dispelled by Anselm who is called from the cloister where he was correcting books while others were at their siesta.

  November 7, 1963

  The, whole afternoon of the sixth it rained. I got over to New Haven to vote, before dinner–just made it in time for the last available ride. Voted the straight Democratic ticket, with the usual misgivings and sense of futility. The main thing was to vote against [Louie] Nunn [for governor of Kentucky], who has been playing on the racism and other prejudices of the people in the rural areas and small towns–big towns too! As far as I know [Edward] Breathitt got in, but by a very small margin.

  Am getting far behind in correspondence. My mind seems to work more slowly and bogs down when I get close to that pile of letters. Especially when there are so many people, relatively, that just hang on to me for support–dead weight. I try not to carry on a correspondence with any such, as it is useless, even for them. What point is there in deluding them that they are “getting something” which their need imagines? Yet there are some in such trouble and danger that one has to give them at least a token encouragement, even if it is meaningless. On the other hand there is an equal meaninglessness in the business of getting myself published, or responding to people who ask for manuscripts and now (abstract) drawings.