God's work (Merton)

On August 21st, 1965, Thomas Merton wrote in his journal:

This morning-grey, cool, peace. The unquestionable realization of the rightness of this, because it is from God and it is His work. So much could be said! What is immediately perceptible is the immense relief, the burden of ambiguity is lifted, and I am without care - no anxiety about being pulled between my job and my vocation. I feel as if my whole being were an act of thankfulness - even the gut is relaxed and at peace after good meditation and long study of Irenaeus. The woods all around crackle with guerilla warfare - the hunters are out for squirrel season (as if there were a squirrel left!). Even this idiot ritual does not make me impatient. In their mad way they love the woods too: but I wish their way were less destructive and less of a lie.

Thomas Merton: Dancing in the Water of Life. Journals, Volume 5. Robert E. Daggy, editor. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1997: p. 283

Whatever the very real difficulties of living in community, one of the enormous blessings must be this sense of rightness, of freedom to be wholehearted: "the burden of ambiguity... lifted." My heart sings just to read the words. Of course those of us who have made a retreat of any length know a little of this feeling - but the real deal, permanence, must be remarkably close to Heaven; or at least to the sense I always have thinking about Heaven, that the first, totally conscious, sensation must surely be a truly immeasurable relief, an incalculable lightness of the spirit, not unlike the first day of the school summer holidays, to the nth degree: "At last!"