There is one thing I must do here at my woodshed hermitage... and that is to prepare for my death. But that means a preparation in gentleness...
-- Thomas MertonWhat a great leap — from death to gentleness! So different from Dylan Thomas’s famous advice:
“Do not go gentle into that good night...Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”When I was 35, raging seemed right. But at 77, it’s Thomas Merton, not Dylan Thomas, who speaks to me.
The prospect of death — heightened by winter’s dark and cold, by solitude, silence, and age — makes it clear that my calling is to be gentle with the many expressions of life, old and new, that must be handled with care if they are to survive and thrive.
Sometimes, of course, that means becoming fierce in confronting the enemies of gentleness. If that’s a contradiction, so be it! As Merton said in The Sign of Jonas:
I find myself traveling toward my destiny in the belly of a paradox.-- Parker Palmer
