Posts tagged in

What do I have a GIVENNESS NOW to?

Not drink the light that is in the water.


“You flowers and trees, you hills and streams, you fields, flocks, and wild birds, you books, you poems, and you people, I am unutterably alone in the midst of you.

The irrational hunger that sometimes gets into the depth of my will tries to swing my deepest self away from God and direct it to your love.  

I try to touch you with the deep fire that is in the center of my heart, but I cannot touch you without defiling both you and myself, and I am abashed, solitary, and helpless, surrounded by a beauty that can never belong to me.


But this sadness generates within me an unspeakable reverence for the holiness of created things, for they are pure and perfect and they belong to God and are mirrors of His beauty.

He is mirrored in all things like sunlight in clean water: but if I try to drink the light that is in the water, I only shatter the reflection.



And so I live alone and chaste in the midst of the holy beauty of all created things, knowing that nothing I can see or hear or touch will ever belong to me, ashamed of my absurd need to give myself away to one of them or all of them.

The silly, hopeless passion to give myself away to any beauty eats out my heart.

It is an unworthy desire, but I cannot avoid it.  It is in the hearts of us all, and we have to bear with it, suffer its demands with patience, until we die and go to heaven, where all things will belong to us in their highest causes.”                                              Thomas Merton, Journal II, September 14, 368-69

…surrounded by a beauty that can never belong to me.

I have a GIVENNESS NOW to not drink the light that is in the water.

What do I have a GIVENNESS NOW to?

Sitting here in the straw.


“The grip the present has on me.

That is the one things that has grown most noticeably in the spiritual life - nothing much else has.  


The rest dims as it should.  

I am getting older.  

The reality of now - the unreality of the rest.


The unreality of ideas and explanations and formulas.  

I am.  

The unreality of all the rest.


The pigs shriek.  Butterflies dance together against the blue sky at the end of the woodshed.  The buzz saw stands outside there, half covered with dirty and tattered canvas.  The trees are fresh and green in the sun (more rain yesterday).  Small clouds, inexpressibly beautiful and silent and eloquent, over the silent woodlands.  

What a celebration of light, quietness, and glory!
 

This is my feast sitting here in the straw!”                                                                                                  Thomas Merton, August 25, 1958, Journal III, 214-15

…the unreality of all the rest.

I have a GIVENNESS NOW to sitting here in the straw.