Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Lent, lenten journey, pilgrimage, prayer, Thomas Merton
A prayer of Thomas Merton:
My Lord God,
I have no idea where I am going
I do not see the road ahead of me.
I cannot know for certain where it will end.
Nor do I really know myself,
And the fact that I think I am following
your will does not mean
that I am actually doing so.
But I believe that the desire to please you
does in fact please you.
And I hope that I have that desire
in all that I am doing.
I hope that I will never do anything
apart from that desire.
And I know that if I do this, you will lead me
by the right road
though I may know nothing about it.
Therefore will I trust you always
though I may seem to be lost
and in the shadow of death,
I will not fear, for you are ever with me,
and you will never leave me
to face my perils alone.
I got muddled when I posted yesterday. The poem I meant to post was this one (which also goes with yesterday’s photo). Still, they are both good and give me the excuse for an extra Merton poem:
For I am present without warning one night only.
When sun rises on the brass valleys I become serpent.
Though I show my true self only in the dark and to no man
(For I appear by day as serpent)
I belong neither to night nor day.
Sun and city never see my deep white bell
Or know my timeless moment of void:
There is no reply to my munificence.
When I come I lift my sudden Eucharist
Out of the earth’s unfathomable joy
Clean and total I obey the world’s body
I am intricate and whole, not art but wrought passion
Excellent deep pleasure of essential waters
Holiness of form and mineral mirth:
I am the extreme purity of virginal thirst.
I neither show my truth nor conceal it
My innocence is described dimly
Only by divine gift
As a white cavern without explanation.
He who sees my purity
Dares not speak of it.
When I open once for all my impeccable bell
No one questions my silence:
The all-knowing bird of night flies out of my mouth.
Have you seen it? Then though my mirth has quickly ended
You live forever in its echo:
You will never be the same again.
(Light and spirit)
Sings by itself
For nobody.
A golden spirit
(Light and emptiness)
Sings without a word
By itself.
Let no one touch this gentle sun
In whose dark eye
Someone is awake.
(No light, no gold, no name, no color
And no thought:
O, wide awake!)
A golden heaven
Sings by itself
A song to nobody.
The American monk Thomas Merton recorded the following experience in his journal Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander:
In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness. … This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud. … I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun. … At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us. It is so to speak his name written in us … like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely. . . . I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere.
Into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for him at all, Christ has come uninvited. But because he cannot be at home in it – because he is out of place in it, and yet must be in it – his place is with those others who do not belong, who are rejected because they are regarded as weak; and with those who are discredited, who are denied the status of persons, and are tortured, exterminated. With those for whom there is no room, Christ is present in this world. He is mysteriously present in those for whom there seems to be nothing but the world at its worst.
This powerful Christmas quotation comes from Thomas Merton’s essay ‘The Time of the End is the Time of No Room’. I wonder if the birth of the Baby in Bethlehem might be a spur for us to work out how we can create room for God in this world, especially for those in whom he is most present, the least of his brothers and sisters (and to do this throughout the year and throughout our lives, not just at Christmas).
May Christ,
who by his incarnation gathered into one
things earthly and heavenly,
fill you with joy and peace.
