Dancing in the Water of Life

by Thomas Merton

  Marco Pallis had Lord [Walter] Northbourne send me his really excellent book Religion in the Modern World. Among many fine things he says this about tradition in art, religion, politics, sport, etc. The traditional constraints impose a vital unity, a hierarchical order of like with unlike, so that there is a final universality and wholeness in society and in the expression of man’s spirit. Where this traditional principle is discarded, everything becomes individualized. But there has to be a semblance of unity nevertheless. This is sought by collectivization which, however, is not an order of like and unlike elements, but simply a grouping together of like with like. Or a seduction to superficial sameness, uniformity not unity. Within the superficial uniformity, civilization is segmented into “departments” out of contact with each other, but officially “interconnected.”

  April 17, 1965. Holy Saturday

  The great sin, the source of all other sins, is idolatry. And never has it been greater, more prevalent than now. It is almost completely unrecognized–precisely because it is so overwhelmingly total. It takes in everything. There is nothing else left. Fetishism of power, machines, possessions, medicine, sports, clothes, etc. all kept going by greed for money and power: the bomb is only one accidental aspect of the cult. Indeed, the bomb is not the worst. We should be thankful for it as a sign, a revelation of what all the rest of our civilization points to: the self-immolation of man to his own greed and his own despair. And behind it all are the principalities and powers whom man serves in his idolatry. Christians are as deeply involved in this as everyone else.

  Northbourne sees very well that the profane point of view is at the same time necessarily, in principle both agnostic and idolatrous to the highest degree. This combination is what makes it impossible for us to see what we are doing, and able to go to the limit in doing what we do not see: for we imagine that unbelief is also, first of all, a protection against idolatry. (We are unbelievers in the higher religions, a fortiori in the more primitive ones….) No, on the contrary: unbelief and idolatry are inseparable. Faith is the principle of liberation, and the only such principle. The other thing: idolatry has consequences. And the most terrible possible consequences. Man must take these consequences unless he renounces his idols.

  This is clearly one of the most important and inescapable messages of the Bible: that unless man turns from his idols to God, he will destroy himself, or rather his idolatry will prove itself to be his destruction. (The idolater is already self-destroyed.) The other thing: man as a whole will not change. He will destroy himself. The Bible sees no other end to the story. But Christ has come to save from this destruction all who seek to be saved. In and through them He will recreate the world. By no means are we to interpret this to mean that enlightened ethics and polite good intentions are going to make technological society safe for man, and that the new creation will be in fact the technological paradise (plus a renewed liturgy).

  The last pages of Northbourne’s book are remarkably good, and make clear the confusions that had given me trouble with the Schuon-Guinan line of thought. Northbourne is most insistent on not mixing up traditions, on not being syncretistic. On the great danger of pseudo-religious “nothingness” using a mélange of Eastern and Western elements–worse still, disciplines. “The effectiveness of any single religion as a means of grace and a way of salvation is impaired or neutralized by its supplementation or dilution with anything that is alien to it” p. 101. He sees clearly that these pseudo-religious, pseudo-mystical movements, while claiming to be a reaction against materialism, are in fact only the last convolution of the profane spiral, and complete the whole work. “Anything that purports to be initiation and spiritual disciplines that have authentic spiritual roots and thus retain some of their power.” Case of poor Joel Orent and his guru. Northbourne’s last chapter is invaluable.

  Viet Nam: all one’s thinking on this depends on the acceptation or rejection of this premise. “That America has a divine mission to destroy communism in Asia and everywhere else, or, failing that, at least to prevent its further spread.” Those who accept this (on faith!) are the ones convinced that we have now reached the point where we must fight. I do not accept this premise. It is too much like the basic principle behind Hitler’s thinking, that led to World War II. And as World War II led to the spread of Communism in Eastern Europe and above all in Asia, World War III will doubtless (if anyone survives at all) complete the job.

  Warm bright spring day. Saw a palm warbler in the small ash tree behind the hermitage, with his red-brown cap and bobbing tail. He is on his way to the North of Canada! Why do they call him palm warbler?

  April 18, 1965. Easter Sunday

  Peace and beauty of Easter morning: sunrise, deep green grass, soft winds, the woods turning green on the hills across the valley (and here too). I got up and said the old office of Lauds, and there was a wood thrush singing fourth-tone mysteries in the deep ringing pine wood (the “unconscious” wood) behind the hermitage. (The “unconscious” wood has a long moment of perfect clarity at dawn, and from being dark and confused, lit from the east it is all clarity, all distinct, seen to be a place of silence and peace with its own order in disorder–the fallen trees don’t matter, they are all part of it!)

  Last night went down to the offices of the Easter Vigil by full moonlight and came back also by full moonlight, the woods being perfectly silent, and the moon so strong one could hardly see any stars. I sat on the porch to make my thanksgiving, after communion. (I did not concelebrate.)

  I wonder if I have not said ill-considered things about Christian tradition–things that will only add to the present confusion, and motivated by some obscure desire to protect my own heart against wounds by inflicting them myself–(i.e. the wounds of loss and separation: as if I were saying since the Middle Ages are no longer relevant to us I may as well be the first to admit it and get it over. But are the Middle Ages irrelevant? Of course not, and I have not begun to believe it! And it is part of my vocation to make observations that preserve a living continuity with the past, and with what is good in the past!).

  I think now is the time finally to read Sartre’s Erigena.

  April 19, 1965. Easter Monday

  “Fiducia Christianorum resurrectio mortuorum–illam credentes hoc sumus.” [“The confidence of Christians is in the resurrection of the dead–we are those who believe this to be so.”] (Tertullian, De Res, 1.1)

  (Study of Medieval exegesis–is a way of entering into the Christian experience of that age, an experience most relevant to us, for if we neglect it we neglect part of our own totality in De Lubac, Von Balthasar, etc.). But it must not be studied from the outside. Same idea in Nishida on Japanese culture and the Japanese view of life. I have a real sense this Easter, that my own vocation demands a deepened and experiential study, from within (by connaturality) of the Medieval tradition as well as of, to some extent, Asian tradition and experiences, particularly Japanese, particularly Zen: i.e., in an awareness of a common need and aspiration with these past generations.

  April 23, 1965. Friday in Easter week

  It is already hot as summer. Everything is breaking into leaf and the pine saw fly worms are all over the young pines. There is no visitation this year (Dom Columban [from the Motherhouse at Melleray in France] usually comes on Easter Friday) because the General Chapter opens next week and Dom James is to leave Sunday after Brother Dunstan’s profession.

  This morning I sat in the dentist’s chair having my teeth cleaned and ex-rayed while the students banged and walloped next door demolishing the old library.

  Early mornings are now completely beautiful–with the Easter moon in its last quarter high in the blue sky, and the light of dawn spreading triumphantly over the wide, cool, green valley. It is the paradise season!

  And I was deeply moved by Tertullian. What magnificent Latin and what a concept of the dignity of man and of the body (De Resurrectione, esp. 6, 7).

  Then yesterday Flannery O’Connor’s new book [Everything T
hat Rises Must Converge, 1965] arrived and I am already well into it, grueling and powerful! A relentlessly perfect writer, full of tragedy and irony. But what a writer! And she knows every aspect of the American meanness, and violence, and frustration. And the Southern struggle of will against inertia.

  A pine warbler was caught in the novitiate scriptorium, beating against the window and I got a good look at him, letting him out. A couple of Towhees are all around the hermitage.

  April 24, 1965

  Tertullian. Certainly I am reading in perfect circumstances (viz., chapter 12 De Resurrectione at the time of this spring dawn!!) but I have to admit that his prose is more powerful and more captivating than any other I have ever read. I know no one who has such authority, by the beauty and strength of his language, to command complete attention. Everything becomes delightful, admirable and absorbing, and there is a real excitement in the compression and charge of his syntax, the precision and personal signature of his vocabulary. You feel that here is a man who is fully and expertly working in language making prose!

  April 25, 1965. Low Sunday

  I wonder if the singular power of Flannery O’Connor’s work, the horror and fascination of it, is not basically religious in a completely tacit way. There is no positive and overt expression of Catholicism (with optimism, hope, etc.) but perhaps a negative, direct, brutal confrontation with God in the terrible, the cruel. (The bull in “Greenleaf” [short story] as the lover and destroyer.) This is an affirmation of what popular Christianity always struggles to avoid: the dark face of God. But now, and above all in the South, it is the dark and terrible face of God that looks at America (the crazy religious characters are to be taken seriously precisely because their religion is inadequate).

  Yesterday Clayton Eshelman and his wife came over from Indiana University in a borrowed Volkswagen. It was nice to meet them, good, alive young people. He spoke of his translations of Vallejo, and how the widow Vallejo will not let anybody publish anything of Vallejo’s. (She is a terror!) Talked of Japan, and of poets: v.g., Corman, Jonathan Williams, Creely, and many I do not know. And of the difficulties of El Corno Emplumado. One of the things that impresses me about this generation of poets and artists is their gentleness, their goodness. I felt they were far more gentle than I could ever be, and felt too that I was rather a violent and angry person as compared with them. We had sandwiches and beer together in the evening at the lake by the Bardstown road, and it came on to rain, with lightning behind Vineyard Knob, and I sheltered in the sheep barn while they drove off in the Volkswagen. The rain soon stopped but at night there was a long downpour with much lightning. While waiting in the car for them to get the sandwiches at the Blue Jay, I read Sartre’s statements in the Nation about why he cannot come to this country, when it is doing what it is doing in Viet Nam.

  5:40 a.m. Thunder over the valley, forked lightning and very black rain out there beyond the monastery, and all the birds sing, especially a woodthrush in the cedar tree. And rain begins to come down on the hermitage.

  April 27, 1965

  Father Abbot took off for the General Chapter early Sunday. Brother Clement will meet him in Paris after the Chapter and they will go to Norway and select one of three properties that have been offered by the Foundation. Meanwhile I have been thinking about the ideas which Dom James may or may not have about Edelin’s Valley. He refuses to say anything explicit. I know he wants to start something there, but more and more I feel repugnance and misgivings about the way it seems to be planned. Living in trailers, for instance, with compact comforts and modern conveniences. Certainly this is practical and he is thinking of his own desire to live there himself. But that is simply not what I need or seek, and all in all I become more and more convinced I am much better off at St. Mary of Carmel where I am.

  Today for the first time since Passion week–i.e., for exactly three weeks, I have news of what has been going on in and about Vietnam. Things are incomparably worse. Though there was a big demonstration of students in Washington on Holy Saturday; though the State Department, evidently at Johnson’s request, wrote a conciliatory note to the Fellowship of Reconciliation about their big protest ad, though the South Vietnamese and especially the Buddhists are desperately trying to get a government that will be independent of the Pentagon and work for peace, and though the antiaircraft defenses of North Vietnam are being much strengthened, not only does the bombing get heavier, but all kinds of indications show that thousands of American troops are to be sent in for a land invasion of North Vietnam. Not only is this disastrously absurd–(and with it goes the absurd demand for unconditional cessation of all resistance!!) but it makes one suddenly see in a ghastly light the moral picture of this country.

  What with the South (picture of the fat grinning sheriffs of Philadelphia, Mississippi, known to be the murderers of the civil rights workers), what with the grave doubts about the Kennedy murder (still as grave as ever because of certain vital questions about the Warren report!), what with the Klan and the Birchites and all the Kooks and right wingers and all the self-deluded well-meaning liberals–this whole country suddenly appears as a moral landscape of damnation! And there seems to be nothing on earth that anyone can do about it.

  I received a copy of Jacques Maritain’s Notebooks, from Paris, and have already read the interesting (and sometimes funny) chapter on La Salette and his attempts to get his manuscript on it approved in Rome in 1918. Some very fine pages on the nature of prophetic language, the language of heavenly revelations. What comes out most of all of course is the simplicity and probity of Jacques himself and his evident loyalty to the Church. It is very edifying. I love the pictures of Raïssa and Vera [Oumansoff ]. Though I never actually met them, I know they are two people who loved me–and whom I have loved-through our writings and the warmth and closeness that has somehow bound me to Jacques and to them. It is really a kind of family affection, which also reaches out to good Dom Pierre (Van der Meer) who wrote (through Dame Christine [Van der Meer]) about the article concerning [Georgio] La Pira’s visit to America–and his (somewhat over enthusiastic account of Gethsemani).

  PART IV

  Day of a Stranger

  Sometime in May 1965

  The hills are blue and hot.1 There is a brown, dusty field in the bottom of the valley. I hear a machine, a bird, a clock. The clouds are high and enormous. In them, the inevitable jet plane passes: this time probably full of fat passengers from Miami to Chicago, but presently it will be a plane with the bomb in it. I have seen the plane with the bomb in it fly low over me and I have looked up out of the woods directly at the closed bay. Like everyone else I live under the bomb. But unlike most people I live in the woods. Do not ask me to explain this. I am embarrassed to describe it. I live in the woods out of necessity. I am both a prisoner and an escaped prisoner. I cannot tell you why, born in France, my journey ended here. I have tried to go further but I cannot. It makes no difference. When you are beginning to be old, and I am beginning to be old, for I am fifty, both times and places no longer take on the same meaning. Do I have a “day”? Do I spend my “day” in a “place”? I know there are trees here. I know there are birds here. I know the birds in fact very well, for there are exactly fifteen pairs of birds living in the immediate area of my cabin and I share this particular place with them: we form an ecological balance. This harmony gives “place” a different configuration.

  As to crows, they form part of a different pattern. They are vociferous and self-justifying, like humans.

  But there is a mental ecology too, a living balance of spirits in this corner of woods. There is a place for many other songs besides those of birds. Of Vallejo for instance. Or the dry, disconcerting voice of Nicanor Parra (who certainly does not waste his time justifying anything). Sometimes at four o’clock on a very dark cold morning I have sat alone in the house with the rain beating down on it, with a big cup of hot black coffee, translating some poems of Nicanor Parra. Or there is also Chuang Tzu, whose climate is perhaps
most the climate of this hot corner of the woods. A climate in which there is no need for explanations. There is also a Syrian hermit called Philoxenus. There is the clanging prose of Tertullian. There is the deep vegetation of that more ancient forest than mine: the deep forest in which the great birds Isaias and Jeremias sing. When I am most sickened by the things that are done by the country that surrounds this place I will take out the prophets and sing them in loud Latin across the hills and send their fiery words sailing south over the mountains to the place where they split atoms for the bombs in Tennessee.

  There is also the non-ecology, the destructive unbalance of nature, poisoned and unsettled by bombs, by fallout, by exploitation: the land ruined, the waters contaminated, the soil charged with chemicals, ravaged with machinery, the houses of farmers falling apart because everybody goes to the city and stays there…There is no poverty so great as that of the prosperous, no wretchedness so dismal as affluence. Wealth is poison. There is no misery to compare with that which exists where technology has been a total success. I know these are hard sayings, and that they are unbearable when they are said in other countries where so many lack everything. But do you imagine that if you become as prosperous as the United States you will no longer have needs? Here the needs are even greater. Full bellies have not brought peace and satisfaction but dementia, and in any case not all the bellies are full either. But the dementia is the same for all.