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.
“Every minute life begins all over again.” (Moses 88) We are only ever beginners. There is no point in thinking you have won; you have already lost. These and similar recurrent sentiments tell of Merton’s Christian understanding of human limitation. They also retell his awareness of being always a student, someone open to learning new things, and getting others to get studying.
Merton studied in the forties at Oxford and Columbia. He lived a fairly typical wild existence in those places, combined with an intense study of things that interested him. He and his friends engaged in competitions. For example, they challenged each other to write a novel in a week. He edited the university magazine. These games of meeting crazy deadlines and entertaining others are training for what Merton did the rest of his life in a very different setting from a university.
The ultimate result of the crazy language games he played with his friend Robert Lax and others are the book-length poems written towards the end of his life, ‘The Geography of Lograire’ and ‘Cables to the Ace.’ The cables of that title are 88 poems about the relationship we have with God, who is the ace. It is a work of theopoetics. Here are four of those 88 poems.
8 shows its age with the verb ‘to dig’, a sign Merton was listening to the Beats, while questioning the world of artificial intelligence and the computer at large, a world we now live with in ways Merton could only have imagined. The poem hints at the ever-present danger of turning manmade things into idols. It is saying that prayer is human and will have a human voice; our relationship with God can never be other than personal. 53 seems to be saying that poetry, like prayer, is always available. Yet he repeats the need that it must be available. He uses a favourite image of the cellar, a word we will meet again today, as the source of all this activity. We don’t always think of a dark night of the soul happening in a cellar. The influence of Saint John of the Cross is evident throughout these poems and we hear this in 80. Although Christ is present in the whole sequence, this is the first time we meet him by name, close to the end. The places where we meet him are reminiscent of those gardens of the Spanish mystic, though we may meet him in any place. We smile at “the lost disciple … too literate to believe words,” with its implication of language being a trap that can separate us from God, as well as knowledge that can hinder rather than enhance growth. Learning how and when to use silence and language is an issue that tests everyone, whether or not they are poets. 84 opens with a German word for serenity. The words set up Taoist conundrums. That which we name God cannot be the true God. The words to-and-fro in an attempt to reduce preconceptions, our ‘baggage’, to the place where only God may be.
8
Write a prayer to a computer? But first of all you have to find out how It thinks. Does It dig prayer? More important still, does It dig me, and father, mother, etc., etc.? How does one begin: “O Thou great unalarmed and humorless electric sense…”? Start out wrong and you give instant offense. You may find yourself shipped off to the camps in a freight car. Prayer is a virtue. But don’t begin with the wrong number.
53
I think poetry must
I think it must
Stay open all night
In beautiful cellars
80
Slowly slowly
Comes Christ through the
garden
Speaking to the sacred trees
Their branches bear his light
Without harm
Slowly slowly
Comes Christ through the
ruins
Seeking the lost disciple
A timid one
Too literate
To believe words
So he hides
Slowly slowly
Christ rises on the cornfields
It is only the harvest moon
The disciple
Turns over in his sleep
And murmurs:
“My regret!”
The disciple will awaken
When he knows history
But slowly slowly
The Lord of History
Weeps into the fire.
84
Gelassenheit:
Desert and void. The Uncreated is waste and emptiness to the creature. Not even sand. Not even stone. Not even darkness and night. A burning wilderness would at least be “something.” It burns and is wild. But the Uncreated is no something. Waste. Emptiness. Total poverty of the Creator: yet from this poverty springs everything. The waste is inexhaustible. Infinite Zero. Everything comes from this desert Nothing. Everything wants to return to it and cannot. For who can return “nowhere”? But for each of us there is a point of nowhereness in the middle of movement; a point of nothingness in the midst of being; the incomparable point, not to be discovered by insight. If you seek it you do not find it. If you stop seeking, it is there. But you must not turn to it. Once you become aware of yourself as seeker, you are lost. But if you are content to be lost you will be found without knowing it, precisely because you are lost, for you are, at last, nowhere.
Sources
Edward Rice. The man in the
sycamore tree : the good times and hard life of Thomas Merton. Image Books,
1972
Thomas Merton. The collected
poems of Thomas Merton . New Directions, 1977
Thomas Merton & John
Moses (editor). The art of Thomas Merton : a divine passion in word and vision.
Franciscan Media, 2017
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