On the 17th of March Philip Harvey conducted a Spiritual Reading Group on Thomas Merton. Pursuing a biographical line, poems were read and discussed that identified nine different aspects of Merton’s life, self, and work. Each aspect was illustrated by one of his photographs. Here is the text, with comments from the group about the poetry.
Today we are going to read some poems by a man whose parents were artists. People, indeed, who met in Paris and lived a bohemian life in France, often with little money and moving about from place to place. They were intellectuals from different parts of the world. His mother was American and his father was a New Zealander. They were creative individuals with an outward looking attitude to the world. “Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time,” he was going to say many years later.
These things had a lifelong effect on the child. French culture is found everywhere in his writing: experimental poetry, interest in new storytelling techniques, and a prolific production of theology that looks and sounds like French ressourcement, only from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. All of the early moving about may well have created in him a need to live securely in the one place, for example in a monastery. And it is not hard to imagine this child, full of curiosity about the world and his own place in it, relating to the story he retells in our first poem today. It is a story he will have read, very possibly in French translation, of the fourth-century Egyptian desert father of the early church, Saint Macarius.
In zoom discussion there was attention paid to the crucial moment in the story when the saint blesses the child. This is different from magic or illusion, it is the confirmation of the human reality of the child. The story confronts the false projections we place on others, whether due to our own limited perception of them, or because we want to see in others our own problems. The saint affirms the intrinsic humanity of the girl, which even her parents are incapable of seeing. The parents have a superstitious belief that the holy man can change their child back into someone, indeed something, they recognise. He turns the whole encounter around. It is they who cannot recognise their own child. It is they who must change, not their daughter.
Macarius and the Pony
People in a village
At the desert’s edge
Had a daughter
Who was changed (they
thought)
By magic arts
Into a pony.
At first they berated her
“Why do you have to be a
horse?”
She could think of no reply.
So they led her out with a
halter
Into the hot waste land
Where there was a saint
Called Macarius
Living in a cell.
“Father” they said
“This young mare here
Is, or was, our daughter.
Enemies, wicked men,
Magicians, have made her
The animal you see.
Now by your prayers to God
Change her back
Into the girl she used to
be.”
“My prayers” said Macarius,
“Will change nothing,
For I see no mare.
Why do you call this good
child
An animal?”
But he led her into his cell
With her parents:
There he spoke to God
Anointing the girl with oil;
And when they saw with what
love
He placed his hand upon her
head
They realized, at once.
She was no animal.
She had never changed.
She had been a girl from the
beginning.
“Your own eyes
(Said Macarius)
Are your enemies.
Your own crooked thoughts
(Said the anchorite)
Change people around you
Into birds and animals.
Your own ill-will
(Said the clear-eyed one)
Peoples the world with
specters.”
Sources
Thomas Merton. The collected
poems of Thomas Merton . New Directions, 1977
Thomas Merton and John Moses (editor). The art of Thomas Merton
: a divine passion in word and vision. Franciscan Media, 2017
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