the uncertainty of waiting

Was Merton 50 years ahead of himself, or is this something that is always with us - the uncertainty of waiting ... ?

"Ever increasing frenzy, tension, explosiveness of this country. You feel it in the monastery with people like Raymond. In the priesthood with so many upset, one way or another, and so many leaving. So many just cracking up, falling apart. People in Detroit buying guns. Groups of vigilantes being formed to shoot Negroes. Louisville is a violent place, too. Letters in U.S. Catholic about the war article -- some of the shrillest came from Louisville. This is really a mad country, and an explosion of the madness is inevitable. The only question -- can it somehow be less bad than one anticipates? Total chaos is quite possible, though I don't anticipate that. But the fears, frustrations, hatreds, irrationalities, hysterias, are all there, and all powerful enough to blow everything wide open. One feels that they want violence. It is preferable to the uncertainty of "waiting"." (March 12, 1968)

- Merton, The Other Side of the Mountain, pp. 66-67

time is not the devourer of all things

"Hence the Christian is not afraid of the clock, nor is he in cunning complicity with it. The Christian life is not really a “victory over time” because time is not and cannot be a real antagonist. Of course, the Christian life is a victory over death: but it is a victory which accepts death and accepts the lapse of time that inevitably leads to death. But it does this in a full consciousness that death is in no sense a “triumph of time.” For the Christian, time is no longer the devourer of all things. Christian worship is at peace with time because the lapse of time no longer concerns the Christian whose life is “hidden with Christ in God.”

Merton, Thomas (2010-04-01). Seasons of Celebration (p. 47). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.

time is the sphere of spontaneity

Photo of Thomas Merton by Eugene Meatyard

"… when the human being recovers, in Christ, the freedom of the Child of God, she lives in time without predetermination, because grace will always protect her freedom against the tyranny of evil. The Christian then knows that time does not murmur an implicit threat of enslavement and final destruction. Time on the contrary gives scope for her freedom and her love. Time gives free play to gratitude and to that sacrifice of praise which is the full expression of the Christian’s childship in the Spirit. In other words time does not limit freedom, but gives it scope for its exercise and for choice. Time for the Christian is then the sphere of her spontaneity, a sacramental gift in which she can allow her freedom to deploy itself in joy, in the creative virtuosity of choice that is always blessed with the full consciousness that God wants God's children to be free, that God is glorified by their freedom. For God takes pleasure not in dictating predetermined solutions to providential riddles, but in giving human beings the opportunity to choose and create for themselves solutions that are glorious in their very contingency."

Merton, Thomas (2010-04-01). Seasons of Celebration (p. 46). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.

time (2)

Photo of Merton by Eugene Meatyard.  Early winter 1967, by a favorite place at monks' sheep barn, many poems written here.

"… the Christian is at peace with time because she is at peace with God. She need no longer be fearful and distrustful of time, because now she understands that time is not being used by a hostile “fate” to determine her life in some sense which she himself can never know, and for which she cannot adequately be prepared. Time has now come to terms with human freedom."

- Merton, Thomas (2010-04-01). Seasons of Celebration (p. 45). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.

time (1)

Photo of Thomas Merton by Eugene Meatyard, 1967

"The Liturgy accepts our common, everyday experience of time: sunrise, noonday, sunset; spring, summer, autumn, winter. There is no reason for the Church in her prayer to do anything else “with time”, for the obvious reason that the Church has no quarrel with time. The Church is not fighting against time. The Christian does not, or at any rate need not, consider time an enemy. Time is not doing her any harm, time is not standing between her and anything she desires. Time is not robbing her of anything she treasures."

-Thomas Merton, Seasons of Celebration (FSG 1965)