"The monk is one who has to struggle in the depths of his being with the presence of doubt, and to go through what some religions call the Great Doubt, to break through beyond doubt into a certitude which is very, very deep because it is not his own personal certitude, it is the certitude of God Himself, in us.  The only ultimate reality is God, God lives and dwells in us.  We are not justified by any action of our own, but we are called by the voice of God, by the voice of that ultimate being, to pierce through the irrelevance of our life, while accepting and admitting that life is totally irrelevant, in order to find relevance in Him.   And this relevance in Him is not something we can grasp or possess.  It is something that can only be received as a gift.  Consequently, the kind of life that I represent is a life that is openness to gift; gift from God and gift from others.


It is not that we go out into the world with a capacity to love others greatly.  This too we know in ourselves, that our capacity for love is limited.  And it has to be completed with the capacity to be loved, to accept love from others, to want to be loved by others, to admit our loneliness and to live with our loneliness because everybody is lonely.

And so I stand among you as one who offers a small message of hope, that first, there are people who dare to seek on the margin of society, who are not dependent on social acceptance, not dependent on social routine, and prefer a kind of free-floating existence under a state of risk.

And among those people, if they are faithful to their own calling, to their own vocation, and to their own message from God, communication on the deepest level is possible.

And the deepest level of communication is not communication but communion.   It is wordless.  It is beyond words, and it is beyond speech, and it is beyond concept.

Not that we discover a new unity.  We discover an old unity.  My dear brothers we are already one.  But we imagine that we are not.  And what we have to recover is our original unity. 

What we have to be is what we are."

The Asian  Journals, Thomas Merton


Maybe I'm in the Great Doubt.
Not to be so bold as to step into line with monks...
 yet there is doubt in me.
but I  have certitude that you were among those few
who "dare to seek"   that you were not dependent on social routine, that you had communication on the deepest level.
You had communion with God, the Divine, to you it didn' t matter what name was given to God.
Your fatherhood was your vocation, you lived it well
I pray that communion with the Divine is yours eternally,
I pray that I may find communion with God, the Divine, beyond words, beyond speech, beyond concept.

Amen