Tomb under an empty sky

Holy Saturday is the empty day — life lies in the tomb, with nothing much going on. The seed sleeps in the ground, and it takes considerable faith to believe such emptiness is, in fact, charged with life.

Thomas Merton:

The Sowing of Meanings

See the high birds!
Is theirs the song
That dies among the wood-light
Wounding the listener with such bright arrows?
Or do they play in wheeling silences
Defining in the perfect sky
The bounds of (here below) our solitude,

Where spring has generated lights of green
To glow in clouds upon the sombre branches?
Ponds full of sky and stillnesses
What heavy summer songs still sleep
Under the tawny rushes at your brim?

More than a season will be born here, nature,
In your world of gravid mirrors!
The quiet air awaits one note,
One light, one ray and it will be the angels' spring:
One flash, one glance upon the shiny pond, and then
Asperges me! sweet wilderness, and lo! we are redeemed!

For, like a grain of fire
Smouldering in the heart of every living essence
God plants His undivided power --
Buries His thought too vast for worlds
In seed and root and blade and flower,

Until, in the amazing light of April,
Surcharging the religious silence of the spring,
Creation finds the pressure of His everlasting secret
Too terrible to bear.

Then every way we look, lo! rocks and trees
Pastures and hills and streams and birds and firmament
And our own souls within us flash, and shower us with light,
While the wild countryside, unknown, unvisited of men,
Bears sheaves of clean, transforming fire.

And then, oh then the written image, schooled in sacrifice,
The deep united threeness printed in our being,
Shot by the brilliant syllable of such an intuition, turns within, And plants that light far down into the heart of darkness and oblivion,
Dives after, and discovers flame.

Thomas Merton 60 years on

On this day forty years ago, Thomas Merton, 53, stepped out of the shower in a hotel bedroom and accidentally touched a short-circuited electric fan — a random end to an extraordinary life. Also on this day, but sixty-seven years ago, Thomas Merton, 26, stepped out off the streets into the guesthouse of a monastery, seeking acceptance into the Cistercian order. His was a life of great stability and order, amidst great randomness.

December 10 is a key date, then. Merton lived a sensitive, wild, intellectual, passionate, reflective, pragmatic, holy, privileged, disordered, centred life. What makes him a man for all seasons is that you can select every second word from that list and construct a simple personality — the redeemed or the rake. To understand Merton, though, you have to stick the list back together again and give every word its due weight. Merton did not collapse the ordered into the sensory aspect of his life, but lived elements of both to the full simultaneously. Merton’s holiness is emergent, not statuesque. And that is where his power and engagement come from.

Merton is a gloriously broad both/and character. His imagination and honesty shine clearly through his stumbling attempts to find God, and be centred in him. I doubt the present management in the Roman Church would be interested in making him a saint, because he hits all the wrong institutional tickle buttons. But it is impossible to think of Merton as one long dead, because very few of us have yet caught up with him; and it is that capacity to gift oneself to the whole Church, the whole world, that constitutes sainthood.

Saints, in this technical sense, hold out to others, freely, sometimes unwittingly, some tangible actualization of holiness. Anglicans don't do the Borders Reward Card thing about sainthood — we just let it emerge and then celebrate it. Therefore I cannot pontificate about exactly where Thomas Merton is, but if you go looking for him in heaven, I bet you’ll find him in the jazz section.

Merton rode white waters of chaos, and the heightened sensitivity that comes with living on adrenaline and late nights never entirely deserted him. He found stillness, supremely in a toolshed just beyond the monastery enclosure. His sacred centre was a dancing point, and that is the great resource he offers us, as we try and drink enough water to stay alive under the incessant shower — the information and media shower, the globalization shower, the goods, services and marketing shower. Showers are dangerous places...

And Merton’s message to us? The thing he learnt that we haven’t caught up with yet? Try this:

Man begins in zoology.
He is the saddest animal.
He drives a big red car called anxiety.
He dreams at night
of riding all the elevators.
Lost in the halls
he never finds the right door.

Man is the saddest animal.
A flake-eater in the morning,
a milk-drinker.
He fills his skin with coffee
and loses patience with the rest of his species.

He draws his sin on the wall,
on all the ads in all the subways.
He draws moustaches on all the women
because he cannot find his joy,
except in zoology.
Whenever he goes to the phone to call Joy,
he gets the wrong number.

Therefore he likes weapons.
He knows all guns by their right name.
He drives a big black Cadillac called death.

Now he is putting anxiety into space.
He flies his worries all around Venus,
but it does him no good.
In space where for a long time there is only emptiness,
he drives a big white globe called death.

Now dear children
who have learned the first lesson about man,
answer your test.

Man is the saddest aimal.
He begins in zoology,
and gets lost
in his own bad news.