The Sign of Jonas

by Thomas Merton

The young monk who makes his vows at Gethsemani in this unusual moment of crisis and transition is therefore exposing himself to something far more than the ordinary vicissitudes of a Trappist monastery. He is walking into a furnace of ambivalence which nobody in the monastery can fully account for and which is designed, I think, to serve as a sign and a portent to modern America. The phenomenon which has suddenly happened at Gethsemani came about without anybody’s foreseeing it and without anyone making any logical attempt to control it. It was apparently beyond foreseeing and beyond control, and there is no one in the monastery who does not sometimes find himself fearful when he considers its possible issue.

The context of this book wonders that if the monastery becomes mechanized what will happen

I have a peculiar horror of one sin: the exaggeration of our trials and of our crosses.

By making a vow of stability the monk renounces the vain hope of wandering off to find a “perfect monastery.” This implies a deep act of faith: the recognition that it does not much matter where we are or whom we live with, provided we can devote ourselves to prayer, enjoy a certain amount of silence, poverty, and solitude, work with our hands, read and study the things of God, and above all love one another as Christ has loved us.

Comitmet

did not come here for myself but for God. God is my order and my cell. He is my religious life and my rule. He has disposed everything in my life in order to draw me inward, where I can see Him and rest in Him. He has put me in this place because He wants me in this place and if He ever wants to put me anywhere else He will do so in a way that will leave no doubt as to who is doing it.

the conclusion that I could not think straight about the problem anyway. Perhaps this is not the most perfect vocation in the Church, per se. Well, what about it? It seems to be my vocation. That is the thing that matters. What is the use of having some other vocation that is better in itself but is not your own vocation? But how can it be my vocation if I have such a strong desire for some other vocation? Don’t ask me. Our Lord wants that sacrifice.

the important thing is not to live for contemplation but to live for God. That is obvious, because, after all, that is the contemplative vocation.

The simplest and most effective way to sanctity is to disappear into the background of ordinary everyday routine.

Trappists believe that everything that costs them is God’s will Anything that makes you suffer is God’s will. If it makes you sweat, it is God’s will. But we have serious doubts about the things which demand no expense of physical energy. Are they really the will of God? Hardly! They require no steam. We seem to think that God will not be satisfied with a monastery that does not behave in every way like a munitions factory under wartime conditions of production.

If we want something, we easily persuade ourselves that what we want is God’s will just as long as it turns out to be difficult to obtain. What is easy is my own will: what is hard is God’s will. If I happen to desire something hard to get, it means that I want to sacrifice myself to do God’s will. No other standard applies. And because we make fetishes out of difficulties we sometimes work ourselves into the most fantastically stupid situations, and use ourselves up not for God but for ourselves. We think we have done great things because we are worn out. If we have rushed into the fields or into the woods and done a great deal of damage, we are satisfied. We do not mind ruining all our machinery, as long as we make a deafening noise and stir up a great cloud of dust. Something has been achieved.

Just like us we think God's will is the most difficukt one--but really it is asked in sslf-improvement and aggraindizement

questions: Just because a cross is a cross, does it follow that it is the cross God intends for you? Just because a job is a nuisance, is it therefore good for you? Is it an act of virtue for a contemplative to sit down and let himself be snowed under by activities? What am I doing in that room over there: piling up fuel for Purgatory? Does the fact that all this is obedience make it really pleasing to God? I wonder. I do not ask these questions in a spirit of rebellion. I would really like to know the answers.

Good reflective questions which examine our hurriedness, rush, and tasks.

The Exordium Parvum sums up the Cistercian ideal—or one aspect of that ideal—in terrifying language. “Let them go on struggling and sweating until their last breath.” The Latin is more direct: “usque ad exhalationem spiritus desudant.” In any case, that is what we are doing today.

I am not rich. I just sit in my little pawnshop of second-rate emotions and ideas, and most of the time they make me slightly sick.

To discover the Trinity is to discover a deeper solitude. The love of the Three Divine Persons holds your heart in its strength and builds about you a wall of quiet that the noise of exterior things can only penetrate with difficulty. You no longer have to strive to resist the world or escape it: material things affect you little. And thus you use and possess them as you should, for you dominate them, in making them serve the ends of prayer and charity, instead of letting them dominate you with the tyranny of your own selfishness and cupidity.

Trinitgy is joy

The more selfish you are, the more involved life becomes. As usual I have to check my appetite for books and work and keep close to God in prayer. Which is what He wants.

Involvement in life is self-eroticism

It seems to me the most absurd thing in the world to be upset because I am weak and distracted and blind and constantly make mistakes! What else do I expect! Does God love me any less because I can’t make myself a saint by my own power and in my own way? He loves me more because I am so clumsy and helpless without Him—and underneath what I am He sees me as I will one day be by His pure gift and that pleases Him—and therefore it pleases me and I attend to His great love which is my joy.

God talks in the trees.

The first movement in all prayer, together with faith in His presence, ought to be the desire to know His will and to abandon oneself entirely to all His dispositions and intentions for us. Without that, the desire of contemplation will only lead you to beat your head against a blank wall. But with it—peace.

The greatest and necessary aid to contemplation is obedience not solitude.

I wonder if, after all, sanctity for me is tied up with that vault full of manuscripts, and writing, and poetry and Gregorian chant and liturgy. It seems absurd for a man to be sanctified by things he naturally likes.

The preacher is not an apologist, not a professor, nor a lecturer. He is a herald, an instrument announcing the salvation that God has decreed for men who accept it. The reaction of the Church to this is a thunder of apocalyptic Alleluias. The whole history of the world since Jesus ascended to His Father is simply marking time until the Gospel gets announced to all nations. Then the final purification and . . . Parousia!

On preaching

That which is most perfect and most individual in each man’s life is precisely the element in it which cannot be reduced to a common formula. It is the element which is nobody else’s but ours and God’s. It is our own, true, uncommunicable life, the life that has been planned for us and realized for us in the bosom of God.

Calling

God never does things by halves. He does not sanctify us patch upon patch. He does not make us priests or make us saints by superimposing an extraordinary existence upon our ordinary lives. He takes our whole life and our whole being and elevates it to a supernatural level, transforms it completely from within, and leaves it exteriorly what it is: ordinary.

Sancfification

Not that I haven’t made efforts to keep my head above water: but in the spiritual life it is not so hard to drown, when you still imagine you are swimming.

The rejection of Christ His own received Him not. The most terrible thing about the rejection of Jesus was that He was rejected by the holy and He was rejected because He was God! The Pharisees rejected God because He was not a Pharisee. The Pharisees would have nothing to do with God because God turned out to be not made in their own image.

Astounding insighg of holy people

One reason why we are less fervent than we ought to be is that we cripple our own spirit by taking ourselves too seriously. We expect too much from ourselves when we ought to expect everything from God on Whom we utterly depend.

Fillion, a Scripture scholar whom I am appointed to read, encourages young priests to study Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic, Itala, Arabic, Syriac, Assyrian, Ethiopian, Coptic, Armenian, Persian, Slavonic, Gothic, and the three main Egyptian dialects, namely Salidic (spoken at Thebes), Fayoumic (spoken at the oasis of Fayoum), and Memphitic (spoken at Memphis). Besides being grounded in oriental archeology and ethnography, the young priest should also possess a smattering of botany, zoology, geology, and have more than a nodding acquaintance with the Talmud. Also he says one ought to read a few Yiddish novels, by way of recreation. When you have mastered all this you will be able to elucidate the ivy passage in Jonas, for instance, and you will come to the conclusion that Jonas in Nineveh sat down under a castor oil plant (ivy) and became attached to its shade. On the whole, I think Saint Teresa’s interpretation of Jonas’s ivy is more interesting, and she didn’t know one word of Egyptian either.

Hilarious

The only books that move me deeply are the Bible, Saint John of the Cross, The Cloud of Unknowing, and a few others like that: Tauler, Saint Augustine, parts of Saint Bernard, Saint Gregory of Nyssa.

Ours is a comfortable world, without either science or wisdom.

The Christian life—and especially the contemplative life—is a continual discovery of Christ in new and unexpected places.

The Holy Ghost is the soul of the Church and it is to His presence in us that is attributed the sanctity of each one of the elect. He prays in us now as the Soul of the Church and now as the life of our own soul—but the distinction is only real in the external order of things. Interiorly, whether our prayer be private or public it is the same Spirit praying in us: He is really touching different strings of the same instrument.

The task of a priest is to spiritualize the world. He raises his consecrated hands and the grace of Christ’s resurrection goes out from him to enlighten the souls of the elect and of them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death. Through his blessing material creation is raised up and sanctified and dedicated to the glory of God. The priest prepares the coming of Christ by shedding upon the whole world the invisible light that enlightens every man that comes into the world. Through the priest the glory of Christ seeps out into creation until all things are saturated in prayer.

Priesthood

Know that there is in each man a deep will, potentially committed to freedom or captivity, ready to consent to life, born consenting to death, turned inside out, swallowed by its own self, prisoner of itself like Jonas in the whale.

The fire watch is an examination of conscience in which your task as watchman suddenly appears in its true light: a pretext devised by God to isolate you, and to search your soul with lamps and questions, in the heart of darkness.

You hit strange caverns in the monastery’s history, layers set down by the years, geological strata: you feel like an archeologist suddenly unearthing ancient civilizations. But the terrible thing is that you yourself have lived through those ancient civilizations. The house has changed so much that ten years have as many different meanings as ten Egyptian dynasties. The meanings are hidden in the walls. They mumble in the floor under the watchman’s rubber feet. The lowest layer is at once in the catacomb under the south wing and in the church tower. Every other level of history is found in between.