On Wednesday, during the vigil of the Epiphany, we went to Louisville. In winter, the striped landscape of Nelson County looks terribly poor and shabby. It is us who are supposed to be poor: I am thinking now of the people in the shack by the Brandeis factory on Brook Street in Louisville. We had to wait there until the honorable father bought some spare parts for the tractors. The woman who lived there stood outside the shack, shivering in some rags while a suspiciously looking anonymous truck unloaded some smuggled coal in her yard. I doubted she had warmed up at all this winter. And I thought of our monastery in Gethsemani, where we are all warm and receive our food, whatever it is, when it is time to eat, and where I live locked in that room with manuscripts and old prints that you wouldn’t find in a millionaire’s house! Will I ever stop being so comfortable, prosperous, and polished? The world is dreadful, people are starving to death and freezing … and here I sit with a silver spoon in my mouth, writing books, and everyone sends me fan letters telling me how admirable I am for giving up so “much.” I would like to ask them what exactly I have given up, aside from headaches and responsibilities?
(Thomas Merton /1915–1968/, diary entry from January 8, 1949)
