It is late January, so we are in the midst of what the Catholic Church calls Ordinary Time. I know that “ordinary” in this context comes from the ordinal numbers, and does not mean “normal” or “less significant,” and we’re not supposed to think of it as in less important than the penitential seasons of Advent and Lent, or the feasts of Christmas and Easter, but it is hard to think of it any other way. I find this to be particularly true in this initial stretch of Ordinary Time, the weeks between the Baptism of the Lord and Ash Wednesday, which coincide with the depths of winter, at least here in Michigan.
Because T. S. Eliot was wrong — the cruelest month is not April, but January. It begins in celebration, setting up a false expectation of hopeful new beginnings, but inevitably, a few weeks in, I remember that it is in fact endless. It is hard to know if I am projecting my interior state onto the exterior world, or if my interiority is being shaped by the cold and the darkness, but either way, I find this time of year difficult to get through. My late January journal entries are always filled with similar laments over the bitter cold, the pervasive darkness and the ceaseless shoveling.
Interestingly enough, these same journal entries also often make reference to one other common experience: re-reading the work of Thomas Merton. I am reasonably sure that this happens because every Christmas we get a new wall calendar, and I start the year by copying over all the birthdays and feast days from the previous year’s calendar. Merton’s birthday is January 31, so his name is at the front of my mind this month.
And in the darkness of January, I am always looking for something to light my way. There is a part of my midwinter being that yearns for hibernation — that wants nothing more than to just watch the football playoffs and European soccer and not think about anything more profound than what I need to make for dinner. But there is another part of me that resists this urge to hide away, and this is the part that leads me to pull my Merton off the shelf.
I always find Merton’s writing both challenging and invigorating, and reading him helps me resist, if not actually defeat, the winter doldrums. I am not a Merton specialist or completist (my father is a leading Merton scholar, and I always feel like I’m way out over my skis whenever I tread into this territory!), but there are certain texts, or even just passages, that I tend to revisit annually. My personal favorite is his 1966 book “Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander,” though I also dip back into shorter essays like “Is the World a Problem” and “Rain and the Rhinoceros.” I gravitate toward his writings on peace and justice and the ways that contemporary society has gone astray, because, particularly in the depths of winter, I want to hear people formulating a Catholic vision for resisting injustice and the alienation of modernity, and I find Merton’s articulation of these issues to be particularly insightful.
At this specific moment, when the literal darkness of winter is mirrored by a kind of pervasive national darkness, Merton’s political and social critiques feel all too relevant. But I also find that he gives voice to some of my own feelings regarding the seeming impossibility of responding adequately to the scale of the problems we are facing. In “Events and Pseudo-Events: Letter to a Southern Churchman,” a 1966 essay, he writes, “I am more and more impressed by the fact that it is largely futile to get up and make statements about current problems. At the same time, I know that silent acquiescence in evil is also out of the question. I know too that there are times when protest is inescapable, even when it seems as useless as beating your head up against a brick wall.”
T. S. Eliot was wrong — the cruelest month is not April, but January. It begins in celebration, setting up a false expectation of hopeful new beginnings, but inevitably, a few weeks in, I remember that it is in fact endless.
We are in the midst of an extraordinarily dark time, certainly unprecedented in my lifetime. There are so many battles to fight, on so many fronts, that it is overwhelming. The safety of our neighbors, the dignity of our immigrant communities, the sovereignty of other nations, the integrity of our elected offices, not to mention the basic functions of a just government — funding health care, the social safety net, science and research programs, international aid. Even beginning to list them here feels inadequate to the scope of the problem. And if we pick a few causes to fight for (as we must), to get out and protest over, to call our representatives about, to give money to, to spend our time on, there are 10 others we are not attending to. And to be honest, even the ones we choose to stand up for and make our own mostly feel like losing battles — not that they are not worth fighting for, but true hope feels distant.
So yes, it is winter, and it is cold and it is dark, and rereading Merton on the ever-persistent problems with America has only further clarified that there is, and has been, something deeply wrong here. But if I am being honest with myself, I didn’t need to revisit his work to confirm this. It just helped me to feel supported in my outrage, which is not really a step towards addressing the problems, either with the world or with myself.
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But I do not want to surrender to this mid-winter mindset. The fact that in the fallowness of winter I always feel called back to Merton’s writing led me to wonder what he had to say on the subject of time and the seasons. Since Merton seems to have had something to say about just about everything, I was not surprised to find a short essay titled “Time and the Liturgy.” The tone of the piece is not really my cup of tea — it’s from 1956, and most of the Merton writing that resonates with me is from the mid-60s, when he has put a bit more distance between himself and the sort of person who is obligated to speak authoritatively for the church — but the piece did still resonate with me.
He captures why, exactly, winter feels so bleak: “For fallen man, the cycle of seasons, the wheel of time itself, is only a spiritual prison. Each new spring brings a temporary hope. Autumn and winter destroy that hope with her ever returning reminder of death. … The cycle of the seasons reminds us, by this perpetual renewal and perpetual death, that death is the end of all. The universe which came into being will someday grow cold, perhaps, and die. What will remain?” Now this is a midwinter mindset if ever there was one!
He goes on to contrast this understanding of time with the Christian one, in which the liturgical calendar aligns the movements of the seasons with Christ’s life: “The mysteries of the liturgical cycle … enlighten our minds with insight into the ways of God, ever ancient and ever new.”
The cycle of the seasons reminds us, by this perpetual renewal and perpetual death, that death is the end of all. The universe which came into being will someday grow cold, perhaps, and die. What will remain?
—Thomas Merton
While I believe this Christian conception of time is true, and it is one of things I love most about the way the church marks the various liturgical seasons, I have to admit that in this stretch of Ordinary Time, when I am walking my third grader to school in subzero temperatures, trudging through unshoveled sidewalks as snow blows off tree branches and finds its way down my neck despite both my scarf and my hood, I feel the destruction of hope much more profoundly than I do the enlightenment of insight.
Ironically, for most of the year I deal with anxiety and pessimism by going out and walking. I visit the woods; I spend time at our pond, seeking the resident muskrats; I loop the cemetery paths. Occasionally, on the days I feel most despairing, I walk until I am just about exhausted, and then I trudge back. There are times when it feels like perhaps I won’t have the energy to get home again, but I do, because I need to, which is both a metaphor and a reality.
But in winter the cold keeps me inside more often than not. I still walk — we have a standing desk with a treadmill, and I’m writing this as I power along at a steady 2.6 mph — but while the movement is good, it is not the same as being outside. There is nothing to look at, which means I end up scrolling my phone more, which in turn makes me feel worse. I have been trying to counteract this by reading actual books while walking, and here, too, I have found that Merton helps. If I can’t travel exteriorly, it is helpful to go on an interior journey, and Merton is an experienced guide for this sort of venture.
Inevitably, the more I read and honestly reflect, the more I feel my illusions about myself stripped away (at least a few of them!). In the “Time and the Liturgy” essay, Merton writes, “The modern pagan, the godless child of technology” lives in profound isolation: “No longer in contact with the created world or with himself, out of touch with the reality of nature, he lives in the world of falsity and illusion, the world of systems and fictions with which modern man has surrounded himself. In such a world, man’s life is no longer even a seasonal cycle. It’s a linear flight into nothingness, a flight from reality and from God, without purpose and without objective, except to keep moving, to keep from having to face reality.” I nod, increase the pace on the treadmill, and plunge deeper into the endless scroll of Instagram or Bluesky.
Ultimately, reading Merton reminds me that I should not just keep reading, and certainly not keep scrolling.
Ultimately, reading Merton reminds me that I should not just keep reading, and certainly not keep scrolling. Yes, it is (extremely!) cold out. Yes, there won’t be much to look at in the snow covered woods. And yes, it feels like the world is falling apart, and I want to know what is happening — in Minnesota and Maine and D.C. and Davos and wherever else the outrages are manifesting — and being online helps me feel informed and connected to it all.
But for the sake of our own souls there is also a need to distance ourselves from it. Not from the suffering of our neighbors — whether they are our literal neighbors who are being targeted by ICE, or our worldly neighbors in Greenland, or wherever else oppression and aggression are present — but from constant virtual exposure to it. I sometimes feel like there is an obligation to be online, to know what is happening in real time, as if exposing myself to the unending expressions of others’ suffering will in some way mitigate it, but this is not actually true. We don’t need to be constantly plugged into the frenzy and anxiety of the online world in order to be informed and to commit ourselves to the work of peace and justice.
We don’t need to be constantly plugged into the frenzy and anxiety of the online world in order to be informed and to commit ourselves to the work of peace and justice.
What we do need is to be connected to reality. In one of his winter journal entries, dated February 27, 1963, Merton writes:
“Perhaps we have a deep and legitimate need to know in our entire being what the day is like, to see it and feel it, to know how the sky is grey, paler in the south, with patches of blue in the southwest, with snow on the ground, the thermometer at 18, and cold wind making your ears ache. I have a real need to know these things because I myself am part of the weather and part of the climate and part of the place, and a day in which I have not shared truly in all this is no day at all. It is certainly part of my life of prayer.”
So, once again convicted, I find it is time to close the laptop, lace up my boots, and see how the muskrats are faring on this frigid afternoon. Odds are that I will not see them — I very rarely do — but rereading Merton reminds that it is still, always, good to venture forth and search.
Photo of Thomas Merton by Sibylle Akers. Used with permission of the Merton Legacy Trust and the Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine University.