Words and Pictures Poem, Thomas Merton
Paul Kiler
By Thomas Merton
It might be a good thing to open our eyes and see.
It is essential to experience all the times and moods of one good place.
It is God’s love that warms me in the sun
and God’s love that sends the cold rain.
It is God’s love that feeds me in the bread I eat
and God’s love that feeds me also by hunger and fasting…
It is God who breathes on me with light winds off the river
and in the breezes out of the wood.
As we go about the world everything we meet
and everything we see and hear and touch… plants in us…
something of heaven.
It is good and praiseworthy to look at some real created thing and
feel and appreciate its reality.
Just let the reality of what is real sink into you…
for through real things we can reach Him who is infinitely real.
A tree gives glory to God by being a tree. For in being what God means it to be
it is obeying Him… The more a tree is like itself it is like Him.
This particular tree will give God glory by spreading its branches into the air
and the light in a way that no other tree before or after it ever did
or ever will do.
There is in all things an inexhaustible sweetness and purity,
a silence that is a fount of action and joy. It rises up in wordless
gentleness
and flows out to me from the unseen roots of all created being,
welcoming me tenderly,
saluting me with indescribable humility.
If I am supposed to hoe a garden or make a table, then I will be
obeying God if I am true
to the task that I am performing. To do the work carefully and well,
with love and respect for the nature of my task and with due attention
to its purpose,
is to unite myself to God’s will in my work. In this way I become
His instrument.
He works through me.
The sun on the grass was beautiful.
Even the ground seemed alive.
