Wonder: The Lives of Anna and Harlan Hubbard

A film by Morgan Atkinson.

Mary

Probably the finest Mary prayer I've ever come across.  From the Visitor Center at the Abby of Gethsemani.

Gethsemani

Earlier this month I was able to spend a couple of days at Gethsemani.  I'll be adding some photos and impressions of that visit over the next few days.

more on the Merton movie ...

[from the Orange County Register by Cathleen Falsani]

Don't sing love songs, you'll wake my mother
She's sleeping here right by my side
And in her right hand a silver dagger,
She says that I can't be your bride.
— from “Silver Dagger” by Joan Baez

It was their song — the young, winsome brunette and her silver-pated lover with the sparkly eyes.

“All the love and all the death in me are at the moment wound up in Joan Baez’s ‘Silver Dagger,’” the man wrote to his lady love in 1966. “I can’t get it out of my head, day or night. I am obsessed with it. My whole being is saturated with it. The song is myself — and yourself for me, in a way.”

He yearned for her. He was heartbroken. And he was Thomas Merton — the Trappist monk, celebrated author, and perhaps most influential American Catholic of the 20th century.

It’s a chapter of the thoroughly modern mystic’s life that is no secret to his legions of fans, detractors, and scholars of his prolific work, including the best-selling autobiography (written when he was just 31), “The Seven-Storey Mountain.”

Now Merton’s complex love life (divine or otherwise) is also the subject of a forthcoming feature film, “The Divine Comedy of Thomas Merton.”

Not long before his death in1968 at the age of 53 — he reportedly was electrocuted when he stepped out of a hotel shower and touched an electric fan during a monastic convention in Bangkok — the thoroughly modern mystic (known to fellow monks at the Abbey of Gethsemani in rural Kentucky as “Brother Louis”) fell in love with a nursing student half his age. She is referred to, simply, as “M” in his memoir and letters collected in the volume “A Midsummer Diary for M,” published posthumously in 1997.

“I will never really understand on earth what relation this love has to my solitude,” Merton wrote to M in a letter dated June 21, 1966. “I cannot help placing it at the very heart of my aloneness, and not just on the periphery somewhere.”

I recently had the pleasure of reading the screenplay for “The Divine Comedy of Thomas Merton,” written by Ben Eisner and Kevin Miller, the filmmakers behind last year’s feature-length Canadian documentary “Hellbound?.” That film explored popular notions of hell and what those ideas say about our collective understanding of God.

The duo’s Merton film, while factually-based (carefully so, they emphasize), is not a documentary. Rather it is an epic tale of spiritual, emotional, and cultural transformation in the 1960s. And, yes, it is a love story.

“I chose to build this film around Merton's love affair in 1966 for every reason other than the fact that sex sells,” Eisner told me earlier this week.
“A lot of Merton fans are revolting against what I am doing because they want to hold on to him and sanitize him. Merton doesn't fit into any mold, and that's why I love the man.”

Merton was “a fully spiritual person and fully human person who openly shared his deepest fears and failures with anyone who cared to listen,” Eisner added.

“He tosses formulas out the window. We all want something spelled out for us to follow so we know we are safe, secure, and on the right path. But Merton doesn't let us off the hook that easy.”

The middle-age monk’s love for M was an “agonizing, and at other times liberating, crucible he has been forged in,” that “crystallized his vocational vision and cemented him more firmly in his message for the world. And oh how relevant that message is for us today amid the clamor of social media and the 'me, me, me' mentality we pretend doesn't exist,” Eisner said.

I first read Merton as a graduate seminarian 20 years ago and fell head-over-heels in love with him, too. His voice was, to me at the time, unique in the way he lived in the awkward no-man’s-land between holiness and humanity (where, frankly, each of us dwells.) It is a delicious dichotomy, one he navigated with grace and brutal honesty.

Merton was a man’s man, handsome and strapping, like a rugged Spencer Tracy with a tonsure and cassock. “Tom” had been around the block a few times, both before he moved behind Gethsemani’s cloistered walls and after. That made him, to me and many others, more accessible and authentic than many other giants of the faith.

Merton was saintly and serious. He also was sexy and a little bit dangerous. It’s a combination that tends to make people nervous, not unlike C.S. Lewis’ Aslan. Not safe, but good.

“He is so human, real, and relatable to me,” Eisner said. “I am convinced that what he so eloquently and vulnerably wrote about is perhaps more relevant today than it was in his own day... I just can't wait to introduce this beautiful person to a whole new mass of people who have yet to be smitten by his wit and wisdom.”

The way Eisner and Miller have written the romance between Merton and his M is lovely. It’s not tawdry or voyeuristic, and it leaves to the audience the (highly debated) question of whether their relationship was ever fully consummated physically. I was grateful for that as the details of what happened between the sheets are the least compelling part of their unlikely coupling.

“Dear, I have a terrible desire for fidelity to what has been far greater than either of us,” Merton wrote to M in the “Midsummer” collection. “And not a choice of fidelities to this or that, love or vows. But a fidelity beyond and above that to both of them in one, to God; to the Christ who is absolutely alone and not apart from us, but is the dreadful deep hole in the midst of us, waiting for no explanation.”

Eisner and Miller are in the midst of development and fundraising, with principal shooting set to begin next March and a (hopeful) 2015 release date to coincide with what would have been Merton’s 100th birthday.

Of course, the million-dollar question remains: Who will portray Merton on the big screen?

When I posed the question online via Twitter and Facebook, people responded with definite (and passionate) ideas including Patrick Stewart (probably a little too old, though), Sir Anthony Hopkins (ditto), Paul Giamatti (hmm...), Daniel Day-Lewis (too skinny), Campbell Scott (the eyes are close and he’s 52), and Philip Seymour Hoffman (well, everything he does is art.)

I’d like to see Jeremy Sisto — whose middle name is Merton and whose jazz musician father knew Brother Louis (a longtime jazz fan) personally — cast in the film.

Sisto already has played Jesus in a film and he’s got a glimmer in his eyes and brooding energy that reminds me of Merton. If not the protagonist himself, Sisto, perhaps best known for his recurring role on "Six Feet Under," might do well as Merton’s final abbot, Flavian Burns, or his friend, the Chilean poet Nicanor Parra.

But if Eisner has his way, he knows exactly who the lead roles will go to: “I wrote the script with Stanley Tucci and Zooey Deschanel in mind.”
Sounds like a match made in heaven to me.

Learn more about “The Divine Comedy of Thomas Merton” at mertonmovie.com.

Hiroshima

Today is the 68th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima.

August 6 - Sixty-eight years ago on August 6th, the U.S. unleashed the atomic bomb over the city of Hiroshima. Hundreds of thousands of people died from the blast itself and radiation sickness over the next years.

This is also the Christian feast day of the Transfiguration of Christ - when our Lord appeared in His divine glory before the Apostles Peter, James, and John. His face shone like the sun, and His garments became glistening white.

Points for meditation to be scratched on the walls of a cave. 

Poet-monk, Thomas Merton, wrote a poem, “Original Child Bomb,” the title being an exact translation of the Japanese word for the bomb that dropped on Hiroshima onAugust 6, 1945. 

The poem is a short history written in numbered, laconic sentences about the development and first use of nuclear weapons, despite the appeal of some of the bomb’s makers that it not be used without prior warning. Nonetheless, the bomb was dropped on a city considered of minor military importance. 

“The people who were near the center became nothing. The whole city was blown to bits and the ruins caught fire instantly everywhere, burning briskly. 70,000 people were killed right away or died within a few hours. Those who did not die at once suffered great pain. Few of them were soldiers.” 

Merton noted the odd way that religious terms had been used by those associated with the bomb. Its first test was called Trinity. The mission to drop the Hiroshima bomb returned to Papacy, the code name for Tinian.

"The bombing of Hiroshima and the Feast of the Transfiguration"

The bomb

Original Child Bomb, poem by Thomas Merton

contemplative identity - a certain cast of soul

Abby of Gethsemani, None - August 3, 2013 

Any contemplative identity comes not so much from an individual endowment as from the melding that follows on a common search.  In the familiar terms of psychology, we would probably be safe in assuming most monks to be introvert and intuitive.  It is not the practical aspect of the life that attracts them, but the inner experience born of dwelling on the mysteries of faith.  Against a backdrop of psalmody, work, reading, and the celebration of the Christian mysteries of faith, and a participation in the drama by way of one’s life, is the power that unites.  Even a group as restrained and unobtrusive as ours reveals a love that cannot be hidden and is obvious to all who are sensitive and responsive.  And it is a quest not through ministry and service of the people of God but a quest within.  By some instinct, as it were, men so endowed come here.

The challenge, of course, is one’s response to the call and fidelity to it.  When these weaken or fail, the love of all will soon wither, for there is nothing to sustain it.  Such a one will walk out on the monks without difficulty.  We do not love one another because we choose one another as friends.  No more than soldiers choose their buddies in the corps, or players their team mates.  It is the pursuit that creates love, nurtures and develops it.  Call it a contemplative identity if you will, a certain cast of soul that prefers inner to outer, pondering to preaching, quiet to action.  In a context of beauty and peace, barren of noise and strife, contention and confrontation, such people thrive.  And it is the whole that matters: church, chapter, refectory, work, prayer, study, silence, and solitude.

Matthew Kelty

Monk of Gethsemani

from My Song is of Mercy 

The Mystery of Death

(Photo taken of a photo at the visitor center at the Abby of Gethsemane)

It is when faced with death that the enigma of the human condition is most evident.  People are tormented not only by pain and the gradual diminution of their bodily powers,but also, and even more, by the dread of forever ceasing to be.  But a deep instinct leads them rightly to shrink from, and to reject, the utter ruin and total loss of their personality.  Because they bear in themselves the seed of eternity, which cannot be reduced to mere matter, they rebel against death.  All the helps made available by technology, however useful they may be, cannot set their anguished minds at rest.  They may prolong their life-span; but this does not satisfy their heartfelt longing, one that can never be stifled, for an after-life. 

While the imagination is lost before the mystery of death, the church, taught by divine revelation, declares that God has created people in view of a blessed destiny that lies beyond the boundaries of earthly misery.  Moreover, the Christian faith teaches that bodily death, from which people would have been immune had humanity not sinned, will be overcome when that wholeness which they lost through their own fault will be given once again to them by the almighty and merciful Savior.  For God has called men and women, and still calls them, to attach themselves with all their being to him in sharing for ever a life that is divine and free from all decay. 

from the Second Vatican Council's Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et Spes 18 & 22)