Thomas Merton’s Journals

31 January 1950 - "Hesychasm - is that the English word for it? - has been my latest discovery."

23 January 1950 - "This morning I persuaded Frater Francis de Sales to play me some of the hymns on the organ in Church. I could not follow the Greek words. But for the rest of the morning I had the flavor of the hymns in my mind."

20 January 1950 "O small St Agnes dressed in gold With fire in rainbows round about your face, Sing with the seven virgins in my Canon. I am your priest, My feet upon forget-me-nots"

18 January 1950 - "God will prepare for me His own hermitage for my last days, and meanwhile my work is my hermitage because it is writing that helps me most of all to be a solitary and a contemplative here at Gethsemani."

12 January 1950 - "Solitude and society are formed and perfected in the Sacrifice of the Mass."

11 January 1950 - "For the first time in my life I am finding you, O solitude. I can count on the fingers of one hand the few short moments of purity, of neutrality, in which I have found you."

9 January 1950 - “Why do I tremble when I teach?”

8 January 1950 - “A priest lives in silence - or should have much silence in his life - for the sake of the Mass. The Canon of the Mass should emerge from that silence with infinite power and significance. Mass is the only thing we really say.”

7 January 1950 - “[A hunter] sat on top of the [enclosure] wall, hunting, & I sat on a board reading. I don’t know who he was. I am not quite sure I knew who I was...Not a shot was fired. I did not turn a page of the book I had with me. Not a drop of rain fell. Not a bird sang.”

4 January 1950 - “I quickly found my way into the gully that leads through the heart of the hills to Hanekamp’s house. Hanekamp is the hermit who comes down to Mass in the secular church...Our woods are beautiful. The peace of our woods steals over me when I am at prayer.”

3 January 1950 - "The fact that the Holy Father has proclaimed this a Holy Year means that he has turned it over to Our Lady & that she will make her influence felt in many ways that will make us glad, & with her near us, we will run in the ways of God's commandments."

2 January 1950 - "I have entered the new & holy year with the feeling that I have somehow, secretly, been granted a new life & a new hope."

31 December 1949 - "Evelyn Waugh got Burns, of Hollis & Carter, to send me a copy of Ward Fowler's Modern English Usage as an incentive to clean up my prose style, if I can be said to possess a prose style."

30 December 1949 - "There is only one thing - and that is better than anything else I have done in my life. For six months I have been saying Mass. That one fact is teaching me to live in such a way that I do not care whether I live or die."

27 December 1949 - "Yesterday Fr Cellarer lent me the jeep. I had never driven a car before. Thank heaven I am still alive. [one paragraph later] Fr Cellarer just made me a sign that I must never, never, under any circumstances, take the Jeep out again."

24 December 1949 - "It is clear to me that solitude is my vocation, not as a flight from the world, but as my place in the world, because for me to find solitude is only to separate myself from all the forces that destroy me and destroy history."

23 December 1949 - "It is very quiet now in the vault where I pause in my work on the City of God. I am supposed to be doing a preface for Random House."

22 December 1949 - "It is terror that is driving me into solitude. Love has put drops of terror in my veins & they grow cold in me, suddenly, & make me faint with fear because my heart & my imagination wander away from God into their own private idolatry."

20 December 1949 - "Teaching wears me out."

17 December 1949 - "I have been elevated to a position on the monastery fire dept. A man was here from Louisville today. He told us that fire fighting was serious business, & that our equipment was hopeless, & that in the city they would lock people up for being so careless."