The Sign of Jonas

by Thomas Merton

“Above all things have charity, which is the bond of perfection and may the peace of Christ exult in your hearts in which you are called unto one Body. And be grateful.”† It seems to me that all mystical theology is contained in those two lines. Super omnia: this love is above all things because it is the end for which we were created.

I am content that these pages show me to be what I am—noisy, full of the racket of my imperfections and passions, and the wide open wounds left by my sins. Full of my own emptiness. Yet, ruined as my house is, You live there!

Yesterday morning I woke up about one with the conviction that I had been singing the Veni Creator Spiritus very loudly in my sleep.

But love laughs at the end of the world because love is the door to eternity and he who loves God is playing on the doorstep of eternity, and before anything can happen love will have drawn him over the sill and closed the door and he won’t bother about the world burning because he will know nothing but love.

When I first came to Gethsemani, the Abbot himself read all the mail. Dom James had renounced the quixotic ambition of holding all the offices in the monastery at once, and had handed this one over to Father Macarius, who was now Prior. But the Prior had other things to do, and with grim humor gave me the job of opening and reading my own mail. It was one of the biggest penances I have ever had.

You cannot say, of a chapter in the Gospel, “This is terrific.” It is indecent to call the Bible wonderful. It would be indecent too to say “My mother is a wonderful person.” And so you cannot praise Christ the way you would praise a mere human being. You have to fall on your face and cry out for mercy: 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?

There are different kinds of fear. One of the most terrible is the sensation that you are likely to become, at any moment, the protagonist in a Graham Greene novel: the man who tries to be virtuous and who is, in a certain sense, holy, and yet who is overwhelmed by sin as if there were a kind of fatality about it.

It is when we are angry at our own mistakes that we tend most of all to deny ourselves for love of ourselves. We want to shake off the hateful thing that has humbled us. In our rush to escape the humiliation of our own mistakes, we run head first into the opposite error, seeking comfort and compensation. And so we spend our lives running back and forth from one attachment to another.

If we don’t talk to the angels (until the prayers after Mass) at least we talk to God about the angels who are present as His ministers and play an active part in the Sacrifice. And we talk to Him of the saints and of the holy souls in Purgatory and of the Pope and the Bishop and of all our friends. Nothing could be less private than the Mass. And yet it is also a perfect solitude.

This is the holy cellar of my mortal existence, which opens into the sky.

Here is where love burns with an innocent flame, the clean desire for death: death without sweetness, without sickness, without commentary, without reference and without shame. Clean death by the sword of the spirit in which is intelligence. And everything in order. Emergence and deliverance. I think this also is the meaning of Ash Wednesday: mourn man because you are not yet dust. Receive your ashes and rejoice.

O children of men! Don’t you know that God refuses to be seen? If you only could see how unlike our glory is His glory, you would die for love of Him. But how can we believe who seek glory one from another? If we only knew that God seeks glory by giving glory. He does not ask us to give Him any glory we have not received from Him. . . . And where can we find Him to give Him back what we have received from Him? The moment we have found Him, He is already gone!

O God, my God, the night has values that day has never dreamed of. All things stir by night, waking or sleeping, conscious of the nearness of their ruin. Only man makes himself illuminations he conceives to be solid and eternal. But while we ask our questions and come to our decisions, God blows our decisions out, the roofs of our houses cave in upon us, the tall towers are undermined by ants, the walls crack and cave in, and the holiest buildings burn to ashes while the watchman is composing a theory of duration.