Today's Lenten reading comes from Thomas Merton's The Sign of Jonas, from an entry written on Holy Thursday, April 3, 1947, just two weeks after making his profession of solemn vows:
Meanwhile I have been thinking about my own interior life.
Once again, it seems to me that I ought to give up all desire for the lights and satisfactions that make me too pleased with myself at prayer. I should want nothing but to do all the ordinary things a monk has to do, regularly and properly, without any special thought of satisfaction in them.
I am thinking especially of Holy Communion. Today is a good day to think about it. Everything I came here to find seems to me to be concentrated in the twenty or thirty minutes of silent and happy absorption that follows Communion when I get a chance to make a thanksgiving that seems to me to be a thanksgiving. I like to remain alone and quiet and my will drowns in the attraction of a Love beyond understanding, beyond definite ideas. However, Dom Gildas insists that when I serve Mass at the second round I must receive Communion at the Mass I serve. This means I must go directly to the choir for Lauds and Prime. As soon as I get to choir I am overwhelmed by distractions. No sense of the presence of God. No sense of anything except difficulty and struggle and pain. Objectively speaking I suppose it is more perfect to thank God through the liturgy. The choral office should be the best way of continuing one's Communion. For me it is the worst. No doubt Dom Gildas thinks I ought to be detached from the pleasures of the other way of prayer. I am content to sacrifice those pleasures and go to choir, but I cannot honestly maintain that it is much fun.
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