The Sign of Jonas

by Thomas Merton

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

Let me be content with whatever darkness surrounds me, finding Him always by me, in His mercy.

Last night it snowed again and there is a fairly thick blanket of snow on the ground and on the trees. The sky looks like lead and seems to promise more. It is about as dark as my own mind. I see nothing, I understand nothing. I am sorry for complaining and making a disturbance. All I want is to please God and to do His will.

If it does not grow out of humility, our contemplation will necessarily be superficial. We need to be emptied.

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

Insomnia can become a form of contemplation. You just lie there, inert, helpless, alone, in the dark, and let yourself be crushed by the inscrutable tyranny of time. The plank bed becomes an altar and you lie there without trying to understand any longer in what sense you can be called a sacrifice. Outside in the world, where it is night, perhaps there is someone who suddenly sees that something he has done is horrible. He is most unexpectedly sorry and finds himself able to pray. . . .

Art and asceticism. The artist must be free, otherwise he will be dominated by his material instead of dominating it. Hence, art demands asceticism. Religious ascetics have something to learn from the natural asceticism of the artist: it is un-selfcon-scious, organic, integrated in his art. It does not run the risk of becoming an end in itself. But the artist also has something to gain from religious asceticism. It not only raises him above his subject and his material but above his art itself. He can now control everything, even his art, which usually controls him. Asceticism may involve a total sacrifice of art. The happiest consummation for the artist as such: his art may be integrated into an organic spiritual whole and become the most vital expression of a life of praise and worship.

I ought to know, by now, that God uses everything that happens as a means to lead me into solitude. Every creature that enters my life, every instant of my days, will be designed to wound me with the realization of the world’s insufficiency, until I become so detached that I will be able to find God alone in everything. Only then will all things bring me joy.

Laughlin is a fundamentally simple person. He is basically religious because he is mundo corde, clean of heart. I suppose that the last thing in the world that would occur to the superficial observer would be that the publisher of Henry Miller and others was “pure of heart.” But there are many different aspects of integrity and some of them escape the attention of religious people who ought to know better. And though I don’t remember having liked Henry Miller, there is a kind of integrity about him too. He insists on saying exactly how he feels about things; namely that there is evil in the world and that he is unhappy. He is to-some extent more honest than the people who think things are better than they are, or believe that all is well with the world for the wrong reason. But I still remember having been revolted by Henry Miller even in the days when I thought I could not be revolted by anything The first chapter of Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Romans has a great deal to teach us about the world we live in and it remains the only explanation for writers like Miller.

An appreciation explanation. (4 myself)

We who say we love God: why are we not as anxious to be perfect in our art as we pretend we want to be in our service of God? If we do not try to be perfect in what we write, perhaps it is because we are not writing for God after all. In any case it is depressing that those who serve God and love Him sometimes write so badly, when those who do not believe in Him take pains to write so well. I am not talking about grammar and syntax, but about having something to say and saying it in sentences that are not half dead. Saint Paul and Saint Ignatius Martyr did not bother about grammar but they certainly knew how to write.

Even when I cannot think straight, God straightens me out as soon as I get a minute alone in church. It is good to go and pray even when you feel washed out. The mere effort makes you feel better. You are giving something of your silly self away, and that always nourishes you.

Perhaps there is no greater glory than to be reduced to insignificance by an unjust and stupid temporal power, in order that God may triumph over evil through our insignificance.

One of the big problems for an architect in our time is that for a hundred and fifty years men have been building churches as if a church could not belong to our time. A church has to look as if it were left over from some other age. I think that such an assumption is based on an implicit confession of atheism—as if God did not belong to all ages and as if religion were really only a pleasant, necessary social formality, preserved from past times in order to give our society an air of respectability.

Perhaps the things I had resented about the world when I left it were defects of my own that I had projected upon it. Now, on the contrary, I found that everything stirred me with a deep and mute sense of compassion.

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.

the desire to love God, the desire for perfect union with God means nothing at all and is without any value or merit whatever in the sight of God unless it is inspired and guided by grace and in conformity with God’s will.

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.

The fire of love for the souls of men loved by God consumes you like the fire of God’s love, and it is the same love. It burns you up with a hunger for the supernatural happiness, first of people that you know, then of people you have barely heard of and finally of everybody. This fire consumes you with a desire that is not directed immediately to action, but to God. And in the swift, peaceful, burning tide of that desire you are carried to prayer rather than to action; or rather action seems to flow along with prayer and with desire, as if of its own accord—you do not think so much of what you are to do and write and say for souls: you are carried away to God by hunger and desire. And this hunger is exactly the same as the hunger for your own personal union with God, but now it includes someone else; and it is for God’s own sake above all, though you do not reason and separate. Here is a great hunger, and it has a direct reference to persons, to individuals rather than to abstract groups. Or if it is for groups, it is for groups concretized in a typical representative who is individual, real. In this hunger there is pain and emptiness and there is joy and it is irresistible—and somehow it is full of the strong assurance that God wants to hear all your prayers. Sometimes you get the feeling that when you are carried away by this desire of love for souls, God is beginning to pour out everything upon you, to deluge you with all that you need, to overwhelm you with spiritual ...

The purity of heart needed to connect with people in songs of praise and devotion

God has taught me to find myself more in Him or lose myself more: it comes to the same thing.

Christ recognizes Himself when the souls that possess His likeness in them by charity, recognize one another by some actual expression of His love in one another, and begin to praise Him and thank Him and move one another to greater love, in His joy.

Desire always what is beyond and all around you, you poor sap! Want to progress and escape and expand and be emptied and vanish into God.

There is really no sense in seeking or desiring anything but His will. But when you have found that, you have everything, not because His will is just arbitrary and you love it blindly for its own sake: but His will is the expression of His wisdom and His infinite truth and it springs from truth and brings us all truth, and catches us up into itself and sweeps us away with the inexorable tide of truth. To have His will in your heart and in your mind and in your love is to have sanctity and happiness. It is the foundation of all vision. Without it, even what you know to be true is no use to your soul because you are divided from the truth and armed against it.

How much I need to go out of myself!

One of Merton's main themes...and a point well taken!

What does God want me to ask Him? He will tell me, and when I find out, He will also give me what I ask.

What a beautiful dependence on the promises echoed in so much scripture. (Psalms 37:4, Luke 12:31, James 1:5, Isaiah 55:3)

God makes us ask ourselves questions most often when He intends to resolve them. He gives us needs that He alone can satisfy, and awakens capacities that He means to fulfill. Any perplexity is liable to be a spiritual gestation, leading to a new birth and a mystical regeneration.

We quite often decide on good things which are not good enough because they are only our own idea. When God sees fit, He lets us know that He ignores them in favor of what is obviously much better.

everyone who loves Truth is, in this world, called upon in some measure to defend it.

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.

I am consoled to realize how often Jesus was abrupt in His words and movements. He never bothered to be diplomatic.

Yet He was never impatient or impulsive. He did things without hesitation because He was the Truth.

How true it is that our knowledge and sense and experience of God is sometimes so much sharper and cleaner when we are uncomfortable and hot and physically cramped and suffering than when we are cool and at rest.

I know well the burnt faces of the Prophets and the Evangelists, transformed by the white-hot dangerous presence of inspiration, for they looked at God as into a furnace and the Seraphim flew down and purified their lips with fire.

My soul is united to the soul of Christ in the priestly character impressed upon me and in the Mass His soul and my soul act together as closely and as inseparably as two rays of light shining together. That is why I am not aware of a foreign “Stranger Presence.” Rather it seems to me as if, without ceasing to be who I am, I had become Somebody else—as if I had been raised to a higher and much simpler and cleaner level of being.

the only way you can talk about God is to “confess”—confessio Laudis—either that or else confession of your shame.

If Christ is merely interesting to you, or merely admirable—what will become of your miserable soul? That is why I am more and more thankful for the Office and for the Psalms. Their praise of Him is perfect as well as neutral, and God gives it to me to utter as more my own than any language I could think up for myself.

When I have the whole Church crying out with me, there is some chance of finding peace, in the feeling that God is somehow, after all, receiving praise from my lips.

In the tempest, I have discovered once again, but this time with a peculiarly piercing sharpness, that I cannot possess created things, I cannot touch them, I cannot get into them. They are not my end, I cannot find any rest in them. We who are supposed to be Christians know that well enough, abstractly. Or rather, we say we believe it. Actually we have to discover it over and over again. We have to experience this truth, with deeper and deeper intensity, as we go on in life. We renounce the pursuit of creatures as ends on certain sacramental occasions. And we return, bit by bit, to our familiarity with them, living as if we had in this world a lasting city. . . .

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 depths 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.

Saint John emphasizes more and more the loneliness, the moral isolation, of Christ before His Passion. He is alone from the beginning because He is God and all the rest are men. He is alone because nobody can understand Him. Already in the sixth chapter a whole crowd of disciples has abandoned Him because His doctrine of the Eucharist is so far beyond them. He is isolated by the increasing hatred of the Pharisees, who form a stronger and stronger front against Him, forcing others to separate themselves from Him. He is isolated by His own greatness, which elevates Him further and further above His enemies. Now He is alone among men who either hate Him or do not know how to love Him, because they are unable to know Him as He really is. Yet there are some who want to come to the true knowledge and love of Him. If they want to be with Him, He must pass through death and take them with Him into life.

It is not much fun to live the spiritual life with the spiritual equipment of an artist.

It is in deep solitude that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brothers. The more solitary I am, the more affection I have for them. It is pure affection, and filled with reverence for the solitude of others. Solitude and silence teach me to love my brothers for what they are, not for what they say. Now it is no longer a question of dishonoring them by accepting their fictions, believing in their image of themselves which their weakness obliges them to compose, in the wan work of communication.

those who cannot be alone cannot find their true being and they are always something less than themselves.

The false doctors preach their own sanctity and the holiness of Christ is not seen or heard in them. But the true preach the sanctity of Christ, and He shines through them. He it is whose Truth has made them holy.

Lord, give us liberty from all the things that are in this world, from the preoccupations of earth and of time,

The Pharisees had so hardened their hearts that when the Messiah came they accused Him of “having a devil.” They who were the custodians of the Law and the interpreters of the Word of God crucified the Word of God in the name of His own Law. It was the ones who had most thoroughly searched the Scriptures who were unable to recognize Him whom the Scriptures promised. And it happened that the twenty-eighth chapter of Deuteronomy was read in the refectory today. I wonder when I ever heard anything so moving as those curses, in the light of today’s Office. “But if thou dost refuse to listen to Him . . .” Hodie si vocem ejus audieritis! And yet the Scribes and Pharisees, and the Doctors of the Law, thought they were listening. Perhaps the one thing that made it impossible for them to hear the voice of God when He spoke to them, was their conviction that they were the only ones capable of hearing it!

Our only true greatness is in the humility of living faith and the simpler and purer our faith is, the closer it brings us to God, Who is infinitely great. That is why everyone who humbleth himself shall be exalted and everyone who exalteth himself, in the appetite for great lights and extraordinary experiences and feelings and mystical consolations, shall be humbled. Because the richer he desires to be in these things the poorer he will be in the sight of God, in whose eyes all greatness is as nothing.

There are times when ten pages of some book fall under your eye just at the moment when your very life, it seems, depends on your reading those ten pages. You recognize in them immediately the answer to all your most pressing questions. They open a new road.

Silence not a virtue, noise not a sin. True. But the turmoil and confusion and constant noise of modern society are the expression of the ambiance of its greatest sins—its godlessness, its despair. A world of propaganda, of endless argument, vituperation, criticism, or simply of chatter, is a world without anything to live for. Advertising—radio, television, etc.

Confusion and fog pile up in your life, and then by the power of the Cross things once again are clear, and you know more about your wretchedness and you are grateful for another miracle.

When your tongue is silent, you can rest in the silence of the forest. When your imagination is silent, the forest speaks to you, tells you of its unreality and of the Reality of God. But when your mind is silent, then the forest suddenly becomes magnificently real and blazes transparently with the Reality of God: for now I know that the Creation which first seems to reveal Him, in concepts, then seems to hide Him, by the same concepts, finally is revealed in Him, in the Holy Spirit: and we who are in God find ourselves united, in Him, with all that springs from Him. This is prayer, and this is glory!