Sirius – the brightest star

Most of the trees are still looking pretty green at the moment. In the UK we’ve had a cool and at times quite wet summer, but the horse chestnuts already have conkers, and their leaves are turning brown. Before the summer ends, I’m going to post some accounts to remind us how lovely it can sometimes be, and how sometimes less so. The first post is from Thomas Merton, who first comments on the beauty of the summer, but then turns to reflect on his own too human waywardness, and his sense of turning away from the grace that surrounds him especially when dealing with social visits.

August 16 1963 from Thomas Merton’s journal ‘Dancing in the Water of Life’:

A lovely cool, dazzling bright afternoon yesterday. Blue sky, clouds, silence, and the immense sunlit sweep of St Malachy’s field. I found a mossy turf under pines in that little island of woods, along which the Lespedeza hedge we planted ten or fifteen years ago is still growing. And yesterday it was blooming with delicate, heather-like purple blossoms and bees were busy in them.

An entirely beautiful, transfigured moment of love for God and the need for complete confidence in Him in everything, without reserve, even when almost nothing can be understood. A sense of the continuity of grace in my life and an equal sense of the stupidity and baseness of the infidelities which have threatened to break that continuity. How can I be so cheap and foolish as to trifle with anything so precious? The answer is that I grow dull and stupid and turn in false directions, without light, very often without interest and without real desire, out of a kind of boredom and animal folly, caught in some idiot social situation. It is usually a matter of senseless talking, senseless conduct and vain behaviour, coming from my shyness and desperation at being in a bind I cannot cope with – and if there is drink handy, I drink it, and talk more foolishly. This is of course rare – I was thinking of visits of Father John of the Cross’s people (other side of the field) when I was not true to myself.

Two weeks on and Merton writes how August had ended beautifully, with bright days that were relatively cool.

September 2 1963

After the Night Office – cool and dark – mists on the low bottoms, a glow of red in the east, still a long way from dawn and small, clear purple clouds in the glow. Sirius shining through the girders of the water tower and high over the building a star travels east – no sound of a plane, perhaps it is some spaceship.