God is using everything that happens to lead me into solitude. Every creature that enters my life, every instant of my days is designed to touch me with a sense of the world’s insufficiency. And that goes for every created thing, including monasteries, including even sensible graces, lights of the mind, ideas, fervor in the will. Everything I touch cauterizes me with a light and healing burn. I can hold on to nothing.
It is useless to get upset over these things that pain me. The pain is the token and the pledge of God’s love for me. It is the promise of his deep and perfect solitude.
Today I seem to be very much assured that this solitude is indeed his will for me, and that it is truly He who is calling me into the desert. Not necessarily a geographical one, but the solitude of his own heart in Which all created joys and light and satisfactions are annihilated and consumed.
Things that should have satisfied me, but did not.–Thomas Merton, June 13, 1947.