Dancing in the Water of Life

by Thomas Merton

  July 23, 1964

  Jim Forest sent me clippings from Monday’s New York Times about the big riots in Harlem last weekend. It all took place in the section immediately below Butler Hall, from 116th to 130th and between 8th and Lenox. I can imagine the houses, the rooms, the streets now. And the racket! The police shot thousands of rounds into the air but also quite a few people were hit, and one man on a roof was killed. In the middle of all the racket and chaos and violence a police captain was shouting “Go home! Go home!” A Negro yelled back “We are home, baby!”

  The Burnt-Out Case is not much of a book, really. It is competent, but is itself a bit burned out and silly. Yet one reads it with interest. It is the same problem as in Honest to God but turned around. The priests who insist that Querry is not an atheist but is really in the Dark Night. All of a sudden one realizes that this approach has perhaps become usual. Indeed, it is Greene’s own mainspring. I mean that of most of his novels. Here it is very tired but still works.

  I am very impressed and deeply moved by Ramana Maharshi–not only his life (of which I know only the bare outline) but his doctrine–traditional Advaita–or rather his experience. Whatever may be the deficiencies of the doctrinal elaboration, and the misleading effect of some of the philosophical concepts, this is the basic experience: God as the ultimate “I” Who is the Self of every self! It is this that Christianity too expresses in and through the doctrines of grace, redemption, Incarnation, Trinity. Sons in the Son by grace, we recognize the father as Him with Whom we are one–not by nature but by His gift. But the impact of Maharshi’s experience awakens in us the real depth of this truth, and the love that springs from it. How powerless most Christian writing and teaching is today, in this respect! How lost, how far off the real target! The words are there, the doctrine is there, but the realization is absent. Maharshi has an inadequate doctrine, perhaps, but the real realization.

  July 28, 1964

  It is very hot and damp. We are getting our hot weather now. Last night, storm and rain in the middle of the night. I was awakened by a mosquito, then a jet went roaring over, low down, in the rain, and through the shutters I could see the lights swinging rapidly away eastward. Probably one of the SAC planes, for one has been going over regularly at that time (about 1:20 a.m.). Another in the afternoon around 4 (?) on and off.

  Interesting background to the Navigatio Brendani–its connection with the Lotharingian monastic reform in the tenth century. A few fine paragraphs from the life of Bruno, archbishop of Cologne, and his love of learning (Irish and Greek). The Navigatio is using Celtic myth as a hook on which to hang a manifesto of spiritual renewal in the monastic life, both eremitical and cenobitic.

  Children from the Christian Church of Carrolton here yesterday. Good, simple children, open, unspoiled–not frightfully interesting but I felt a kind of compassion for the simplicity they will probably lose. I think of their little town on the Ohio. Think what? I don’t know. Emptiness. These children are relevant only in emptiness. As soon as one begins to specify…

  August

  Letter in Commonweal by a crusty old man called Evelyn Waugh. I understand conservatism–he is one of the few genuine conservatives: he wishes to conserve not what might be lost but what is not even threatened because it vanished long ago…In supporting “conservatives” with Goldwater, one only lends a hand to the more rapid and efficacious destruction of what was sound and valid in the past.

  August 2, 1964. Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost

  Very hot, steamy, clammy. The tropics have nothing we don’t have here in summer except thicker vines and more spectacular snakes. (We are friends of the King snakes around the novitiate and at the hermitage.)

  The Commonweal intends to print my article on Honest to God–if the censors don’t stop it. Sent my article on race to Hervé Chaigne in Bordeaux (new article [“Religion and Race in the United States”]–he asked for one). There have been riots in Rochester. I finished [William] Stringfellow’s book on Harlem [My People Is the Enemy: An Autobiographical Polemic, 1964] and will write to Joe Cunneen about it. It is first rate–full especially of important information. How the rent system works, etc. It becomes clearer and clearer that this is an utterly sick system, but anonymous. If there were one sick King he would be deposed and replaced. Here “they” operate and get rich and it is not always clear who “they” are or how they get rich.

  Finished a piece on “Pilgrimage and Crusade.”2 Still have to go over it.

  Ulfert Wilke was out the other day and discussed some of the abstract drawings I have been doing; we talked about ways of mounting and framing them. I want to see his new paintings. He spoke a bit inarticulately of Ad Reinhardt, and of Japanese artists he knew.

  August 3, 1964

  Hottest day yet. Sweat all over everything. Difficult to get any work done. Someone has sent a book, African Genesis [by Robert Ardrey]. I had heard of discoveries of Leakey at Olduvai, prepared to accept hypothesis of Africa as the cradle of the human race. This book, however, takes scientific hypotheses and creates a myth of violence around them. Man’s ancestor is the meat-eating club-carrying, sinister “killer-ape” who fought his way up from vegetarianism in order to become a cannibal and a nationalist. These, say the myth, are the facts. And when a myth says that it means, of course, the only facts. Man is by essence a, predator, a killer, a property owner, a hater, a joiner, an agitator, perhaps even a Goldwaterite. This is the scientific-mythology of proto-fascism. With all that, I am not as willing to accept Leakey, who is a different story, less “romantic”–of anthropoids that used tools and weapons?? Already man?

  August 5, 1964

  It is difficult to read or hear the story of Port Royal without having a great deal of sympathy for the Jansenists. Wrong as they may have been, there was a rightness that the heart knew and clung to. Dangerous, no doubt. But were the others much less so? Daniel Rops on this, in the refectory.

  I have been sending out a mimeographed memorandum on monastic reform, and perhaps Dom James does not like it. He says nothing, but in his Chapter yesterday all was about heresy, intellectual pride, the downfall of “Dr. Martin Luther, Ph.D.” Not to mention Judas Iscariot. If that was prompted by my paper–and letter to Dom Leclercq?–then it must be an indication that he fears I may be right. Yet does it matter so much? I am not going to get into controversies, and even the whole question of “monastic reform” seems to me to be full of illusions. The time of a real and serious reform is not, it seems, vows or not, here now. Doubtless something may begin elsewhere. There are places like Erlach. My article “Monk in Diaspora” is making more noise–and perhaps trouble–than I anticipated. I am not a reformer. I am glad that I have certain relaxations in diet, etc. I am disqualified from the start as an ascetic baroque, a new Rancé!!

  I hear the bodies of the three civil rights workers murdered in Mississippi in June have been strangely found–in an earth dam which leaked because of them. Significant!

  Today in Chapter Father Abbot announced that there was trouble with the Pacific fleet off Viet Nam. Those big bullies (Viet Nam) had attacked the Pacific fleet with PT boats which had to be destroyed. Now “the nests” from which the bullies are sending these boats to attack and persecute us, must also be destroyed. Mao Tse Tung is interested in this. In an election year, it almost seems inevitable that the politicians and generals will have the war they want! Sheer waste, nonsense, and criminal stupidity! What can one do about it?

  August 9, 1964

  I said Mass for Maritain this morning. J. H. Griffin wrote of being with him at Kolbsheim–and he was thin but in good spirits.

  The trouble in the Gulf of Tonkin has blown over, so it seems. This is fortunate, and Johnson is the gainer. North Vietnam is missing a few PT boats and an oil dump, and the U.S. lost a couple of planes. All is settling down again to “normal”–guerrilla warfare, napalm bombs, helicopters, etc.

  The other day in Louisville picked up [W. H.] Auden’s “Enchafed Flood” at the l
ibrary. It is good background for Brendan. I must finally reread Melville–but when does one get time for such things? It all depends upon how badly I want to read Melville, and how guilty I will feel about doing so. Actually, there is no need of guilt. Moby Dick has a lot to do with the spiritual life, perhaps a great deal more than some of the professedly “spiritual” books in the novitiate library.

  Perhaps unwisely I have consented to do an article on “Art and Morality” for the New Catholic Encyclopedia. (I thought the work on that would have been done long ago.) One reason why I consented was that I thought the editor of the section was Ned O’Gorman’s friend, the Benedictine artist [Ronan Verostico, O.S.B.] (but am not sure).

  Yesterday morning I said Mass in the middle of a thunderstorm, and then it got cooler. The afternoon was bright and serene. Got back to meditation which had not been working well in the heat. I found that in an hour’s meditation I am somnolent for the first twenty minutes or so, not asleep, but “out”–in a kind of total blackout–then after that everything is very clear. So yesterday. The blackout seems to be necessary as a passage from confusion to truth, as a recovery from pressure and motion, a return to balance. Before it I am not awake, only moving around.

  The Aylesburg Review was in the University of Louisville periodical room. I was quite astonished. There was a good poem of Stevie Smith, also two dark and good ones by a girl whose name I don’t remember. And an article on J. C. Powys. Henry Miller recommended reading him. Where can I ever read all the novels one is supposed to read? I am, however, finishing La Peste (Camus). It is a precise, well-built, inexorable piece of reflection. Picture of our society as it really is when undefended by distraction. I can accept Camus’ ideas of nobility–and certainly agree with him about the Jesuit sermon. Yet the nobility of the Doctor is still not enough–though it may be enough for the doctor, and it may be all that most men can do. There is a nobility in the simplification of reasons in the renunciation of religious explanations. But to live without ideology is not to live without faith. The doctor would not be possible without the Gospel or without some cryptic compassion that is more than simply humanistic. Has Camus got far beyond Kant?

  Raïssa Maritain in her book on [Marc] Chagall [Chagall: Où l’orage enchante, 1948] speaks of the light of New York (the best for seeing Chagall’s paintings). I agree: I was struck by that light above all in June. So much clearer, braver, more uncompromising than Louisville: a vague town.

  La Peste–understandable in the light of Bonhoeffer’s admirable prison letters. In connection with Camus and people like him–see this line of Bonhoeffer: “I often ask myself why a Christian instinct frequently draws one more to the religionless than to the religious, by which I mean not with any intention of evangelizing them but rather, I might almost say, in ‘brotherhood.’” (p. 165)

  August 10, 1964

  Sister Emmanuel [de Souza y Silva, O.S.B.], in one of her usual letters on twenty bits and scraps of thin paper, included two poems by that wonderful Dom Basilio Penido, the Abbot at Olinda. One was written to the Superior of the primitive reformed monastery at Serra Clara, and I was deeply moved to read it–it is about St. Brendan’s isle–the monastic paradise! I was moved to see how spontaneously this Brendan theme came to one concerned with monastic reform–and aware of its limitations.

  August 12, 1964

  For St. Clare, after days of heat, a cool grey day, with a lovely wind blowing through the dark novitiate chapel before dawn and dark clouds most of the morning. It was almost cold in the garden. Instead of writing letters, began some conference notes on art for the novices, somewhat against my own better judgment. Yet they seem to be needed. Also I already have material and ideas for the Catholic Encyclopedia article but no time to write it. Maybe next week. (I wonder if the editor of that section will take seriously my plea to wait until October or November!)

  Last night I dreamed that Dom James suddenly announced that we would have funeral and quasi-military “parades for the dead” along with every office of the dead now. Monks would march in spaced ranks, slowly, through the Church, for a long time. I saw this begin and saw that the sick were all forced to participate, and indeed even the dead were in it, for Father Alphonsus was there, albeit stumbling. The Abbot was absolutely insistent on this preposterous new observance, as a firm manifestation of his will. I tried to reason with him, on the grounds of “simplicity” and even tried to find a copy of the Spirit of Simplicity for him to read but could find none anywhere. I have a suspicion that this is more than a dream and that we are in for arbitrary measures–more and more as he gets older. For instance, although everyone is now tired of Daniel Rops, having finished one book of his we immediately take up another, and a third is waiting after that! No use asking for anything else. I tried to get some essays from [David] Knowles’ Historian and Character read, but no use!!

  My hands have been afflicted with poison ivy for two weeks, in the last week the little lumps have swollen into blisters and boils and have burst, and the skin has flaked off, then new blisters have begun again underneath. At High Mass I sit in the infirm benches, my hands covered with ointment. At that time I can dispense myself from touching anything. Then the mass is over and I go for the mail and everything is confusion. Typing is difficult.

  August 16, 1964. Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost

  Yesterday, Assumption, two postulants entered and little Brother Martin of Berryville came. The day before that spoke with two Moslems of the (heretical) Ahmadiyyah sect, one old and tough, the other young and eager (Dr. [Abdul] Aziz). They were from Pakistan and are “missionaries” here with headquarters in Dayton. And on Thursday Father Irenaeus [Herscher, O.F.M.] of St. Bonaventure [University] was here with a group of Franciscans and Capuchins. I had not seen him in twenty-three years.

  On Friday I finished a first draft of the “Art and Morality” article. Yesterday (cloudy and cool, quiet afternoon) I went out to the little wood by St. Malachy’s field (carefully avoiding poison ivy). Meditated a bit and read some Pessoa–whom I like less than I did at first. I think his “Zen” characteristics are genuine up to a point, but are they really a manifestation of his life, or only a tour deforce? Hard to say.

  Some question whether Brother Alcuin (Grimes) should leave. Last evening we talked of Peace Corps, Little Brothers of Jesus, etc. There is something lacking in this life here, not essentially perhaps, but the way we are living it in practice. Not that it is not strict, or fervent, but do the strictness and fervor have any meaning–beyond satisfying the religious compulsions of a certain type of person that thrives here? After twenty-three years I can say that I have never seen any serious evidence that the strictness of the life as we interpret it was anything to really deepen the spiritual life of the monks. It keeps them in line, but there is no development. The life is static, if you like it is safe, it gets nowhere, but in reaction against this there is now a lot of rather sterile and worried agitation over liturgical gimmicks, new ways of singing, conferences (mine!), etc. These are expected to produce life!!

  August 17, 1964

  Ecclesiam suam, Pope Paul’s first Encyclical, is being read in the refectory. All encyclicals used to sound alike, one listened dutifully. There were no surprises. Pope John came along, Mater et Magistra, Pacem in Terris, so good, so open, one could hardly believe it. Now in this one we are back to the safe course, precise notes of condemnation (for existentialism), prime duty to “guard the deposit,” the “structure” of the Church must be left untouched (the curia of course!), what matters now is reform in the sense of returning to what we have always had, etc. Danger of paying too much attention to “the world”–danger of rash experiments, dangers of placing false hope in a charismatic renewal. In a word the danger of change. Something has frightened him badly, so badly that he is now solidly and permanently (?) with the conservatives and we can all get back into our shelters. And watch what we say! Probably the affair of Father [William] DuBay had a great deal to do with it. And so many others
like that. But when one has lived through the pontificate of a John XXIII, one cannot go back to the old positions again. One has to see things forever in a new light. I know now that there are forces awake in the Church that will refuse to go back to sleep. I don’t know what will come, but there may be momentous stresses and pressures. Still, I expect little from the next Council session. Perhaps now that the Pope is behaving, the conservatives will let the Council go on for several more sessions.

  I was prepared for this encyclical by a speech the other day (read the other day) on the importance of pomp and grandeur in St. Peter’s, affirmation of Papal Primacy, etc. The old image of the See of Peter: Gregory VII, Pius V, etc. etc. Tene quod habes. [Hold on to what you have.] Don’t let go at any price. They have seen the danger of letting go, even a little. The whole thing may get away from them if they relax their grip. For my part: well, under John XXIII I began to pay attention. I began to realize certain things. If doors are shut now, they are shut upon the way back, not upon the way forward.

  August 18, 1964

  “Vana sunt opera, et risu digna: in tempore visitationis suae peribunt. Non sicut haec pars Jacob: quia qui fecit omnia, ipse est, et Israel sceptrum hereditatis eius: Dominus exercituum nomen eius.” [“They are worthless, a work of delusion; at the time of their punishment, they shall perish. Not like these is the Lord, the portion of Jacob, for he is the one who formed all things, and Israel is the tribe of his inheritance; the Lord of hosts is his name.”] Jeremiah 51:18–19

  The incomparable sound of the Vulgate. I have been reading about the Scriptorium of St. Gall. What a spiritual discipline must have been the copying of such texts. “Ecce ego ad te mons pestifer, ait Dominus, qui corrumpis universam terram: et extendam manum meam super te, et evolvam te depetris, et dabo te in montem combustionis.” [“I am against you, O destroying mountain, says the Lord, that destroys the whole earth; I will stretch out my hand against you, and roll you down from the crags and make you a burned-out mountain.”] Jeremiah 51:18–19