Karl Barth,Thomas Merton, R.I.P December 10,1968

Yes, these two extraordinary men, both members of that very rare club,genius, each enriching their century with some of the most beautiful words celebrating God yet written.Barth died peacefully of his years in Basel, his home town.Merton,of course was electrocuted by touching an exposed wire on a fan in Bangkok ,Thailand at a conference on monasticism . Each of these men have contributed mightily to my journey,each were honest men, each spoke truth to power,each wrote divinely .Both are heroes to me,and I literally cannot imagine where I would be without their writings, which point me to the Lord.And that,I believe, is what they are; signposts on the road.The mistake is often to give any illuminated soul such attention that we ,I ,forget where they are pointing!Neither Merton nor Barth had any illusions nor delusions in this regard.I will continue to speak with them through the communion of saints, and use them for guidance...Here is Barth on Advent: "then it behoves us all, especially if we happen to be theologians, to keep our mouths shut and first to consider that the Christmas message is not a philosophy, nor an ideology, nor a moral system or anything like that". The Christmas word is "the Word of God to which no one has the key and whose real meaning for us, now as in former ages, is God’s secret. Hidden is the point where the Christmas message concerns each one of us and our whole generation, where its grace and judgement, its promise and command affect us".
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If God had wanted to deal with us as He is free to do, and as we well deserved it, according to His principle, He would never have become man. But He was and is merciful, and therefore in Christ He has come together with us (with us!), though His holiness and our weakness and wickedness should really exclude any coming together on His part and any thought of cooperation on our part. But God did and does just this, the impossible or – should we say? – that which is practical only for Him the Merciful One, which must happen so that His free and merciful will be done. The fact that also in this respect human beings can believe the eternal Light, means that we do perhaps have the will to do that which concerns us most, and which under any circumstance must be done in common with others. – Karl Barth, Christmas (trans. Bernhard Citron; Edinburgh/London: Oliver and Boyd, 1959), 47.
And here is Merton on Advent taken from
Thomas Merton: A Life in Letters, (Harper One, 2008)
“Here I come with a noise out of the woods, something to say for Christmas…the wise men are on the way, and the shepherds, and our own childhood. And it will be Christmas again, with all the invisible grace of His coming, His revolution. We do not understand that this business about the crib is the real revolution that once for all turned everything upside-down so that nothing has ever been, or can ever be, the same again. But we try hard to sing the ‘old song’ instead of the new one: the song of war, of money, of power, of success, of having a good time: when it is really all much simpler than that. Life is much more fun when you don’t have to have a good time or force anybody to do anything or put anything across.” (Dec. 20, 1962)
Amen