elegy for a trappist

[poem Merton wrote after Father Stephen's burial]

ELEGY FOR A TRAPPIST

Maybe the martyrology until today
Has found not fitting word to describe you
Confessor of exotic roses
Martyr of unbelievable gardens

Whom we will always remember
As a tender-hearted careworn
Generous unsteady cliff
Lurching in the cloister
Like a friendly freight train
To some uncertain station

Master of the sudden enthusiastic gift
In an avalanche
Of flower catalogues
And boundless love.

Sometimes a little dangerous at corners
Vainly trying to smuggle
Some enormous and perfect bouquet
To a side altar
In the sleeves of your cowl

In the dark before dawn
On the day of your burial
A big truck with lights
Moved like a battle cruiser
Toward the gate
Past your abandoned and silent garden

The brief glare
Lit up the grottos, pyramids and presences
One by one
Then the gate swung red
And clattered shut in the giant lights
And everything was gone

As if Leviathan
Hot on the scent of some other blood
Had passed you by
And never saw you hiding in the flowers.

Thomas Merton. The Collected Poem of Thomas Merton. New York: New Directions, Inc., 1977: 631- 632.

father stephen

[Transcribed from an oral presentation:]

There was an old Father at Gethsemani-one of those people you get in every large community, who was regarded as sort of a funny fellow. Really he was a saint. He died a beautiful death and, after he died, everyone realized how much they loved him and admired him, even though he had consistently done all the wrong things throughout his life. He was absolutely obsessed with gardening, but he had an abbot for a long time who insisted he should do anything but gardening, on principle; it was self-will to do what you liked to do. Father Stephen, however, could not keep from gardening. He was forbidden to garden, but you would see him surreptitiously planting things. Finally, when the old abbot died and the new abbot came in, it was tacitly understood that Father Stephen was never going to do anything except gardening, and so they put him on the list of appointments as gardener, and he just gardened from morning to night. He never came to Office, never came to anything, he just dug in his garden. He put his whole life into this and everybody sort of laughed at it. But he would do very good things-for instance, your parents might come down to see you, and you would hear a rustle in the bushes as though a moose were coming down, and Father Stephen would come rushing up with a big bouquet of flowers.

On the feast of St. Francis three years ago, he was coming in from his garden about dinner time and he went into another little garden and lay down on the ground under a tree, near a statue of Our Lady, and someone walked by and thought, "Whatever is he doing now?" and Father Stephen looked up at him and waved and lay down and died. The next day was his funeral and the birds were singing and the sun was bright and it was as though the whole of nature was right in there with Father Stephen. He didn't have to be unusual in that way: that was the way it panned out. This was a development that was frustrated, diverted into a funny little channel, but the real meaning of our life is to develop people who really love God and who radiate love, not in a sense that they feel a great deal of love, but that they simply are people full of love who keep the fire of love burning in the world. For that they have to be fully unified and fully themselves-real people.

Thomas Merton. "The Life that Unifies" in Thomas Merton in Alaska. New York: New Directions Publishing Corp., 1988:148-149.

louie, louie is still on sabbatical for awhile.

"God cannot be found by weighing the present against the future or the past, but only by sinking into the heart of the present as it is."
- Entering the Silence, page 460 excerpted

jubilee jells

The following article about Jubilee, a Catholic publication founded by Ed Rice and co-edited with Merton and Lax, appeared in TIME magazine on February 22, 1954. The magazine was meant to be, among other things, a “bridge between the religious and the secular”.

According to Jim Forest, "Jubilee was not a voice of opposition so much as a journal searching for what was most vital in Catholic Christianity".

Monday, Feb. 22, 1954

Jubilee Jells

From a bare Manhattan loft last spring, a young magazine writer and his friends, working nights, sent out the first copies of a new religious magazine to 8,000 venturesome subscribers.

Ambitiously, they billed it as "the first national picture magazine for a Catholic audience." This week Editor Edward Rice, 35, and a full-time staff, busy setting up copy for next month's issue, had reason to feel their optimism justified. With a press run of 38,000 and a steady stream of subscriptions, the magazine was on course. Its name: Jubilee, from the Latin of the Psalm, Jubilate Deo, omnis terra (Sing joyfully to God, all the earth).

Jubilee is something new in Roman Catholic publishing in the U.S.—a good upper-middlebrow monthly that cuts a path of its own between the intellectual themes of such small-circulation magazines as Commonweal and the Catholic World and the folksy but heavy-handed news-plus-doctrine of the average diocesan weekly. In its neat packages of pictures and text, Jubilee can equally well explain the dogma of the Assumption, illustrate the life and work of modern Catholic artists like the late Eric Gill, discuss historical figures like the Venerable Bede, or give its readers a handy briefing (by a Catholic psychiatrist) on the dangers of too-severe toilet training for
children.

The magazine was planned four years ago by Editor Rice and Roving Editor Robert Lax, 35. Rice and Lax, a convert to Catholicism, had been talking religion since their student days at Columbia—where Rice was the godfather of another Manhattan convert, Thomas (The Seven Storey Mountain) Merton. Working with Peter J. McDonnell, a printing salesman and now Jubilee's advertising manager, they financed their project by offering one share of stock with each $5-a-year subscription. When they had a slim $60,000 to go on, they put out their first issue. Now Jubilee has Editor Rice and eight others working full time, with four more part-time assistants. In the February issue, the editors felt fat enough to make their first standard introductory offer (six months for $2).

To fill their current issue, Jubilee's editors characteristically let their cameras run over a singular combination of everyday Catholic problems and the Church's backgrounding in history and the liturgy.

Included: a mass baptism at Harlem's Church of the Resurrection, the day-today life of a Pittsburgh steelworker. The leading article is a suggested plan for a first reading of the Bible, written by a French Dominican nun, Sister Jeanne d'Arc, for Catholics who want to go through their Bibles cover to cover without getting bogged down in the "arid passages" of the Old Testament.*

Editorially, Jubilee has a calmness that other religious publications might envy, but the editors' religious premises are nonetheless uncompromising. Said Editor Rice: "[The people] we cover are the heroic, the altruistic, the honest, the holy —instead of the glorified confidence man and the lovable fraud who get so much space these days."

Sister Jeanne d'Arc's formula: begin with the Gospels and the Psalms, following with the books of the Old Testament arranged by chronology, e.g., Ruth with Judges, and ending with Machabees and Wisdom; close with the New Testament Epistles and The Apocalypse.

louie, louie is on sabbatical for awhile.

solitude in community

Photo by Thomas Merton

“Indeed there is a special irony about solitude in community: that if you are called to solitude by God, even if you live in a community your solitude will be inescapable. Even if you are surrounded by the comfort and the assistance of others, the bonds that unite you with them on a trivial level break one by one so that you are no longer supported by them, that is, no longer sustained by the instinctive, automatic mechanisms of collective life. Their words, their enthusiasms become meaningless. Yet you do not despise them, or reject them. You try to find if there is not still some way to comprehend them and live by them. And you find that words have no value in such a situation. The only thing that can help you is the deep, wordless communion of genuine love.”

- from the essay, “Philosophy of Solitude”, Disputed Questions, p. 205

one has to be born into solitude ...

Photo by John Howard Griffin

“The terror of the lonely life is the mystery and uncertainty with which the will of God presses upon our soul. It is much easier, and gentler, and more secure to have the will of God filtered to us quietly through society, through the decrees of men, through the orders of others. To take this will straight in all its incomprehensible, baffling mystery, is not possible to one who is not secretly protected and guided by the Holy Spirit and no one should try it unless he has some assurance that he really has been called to it by God. And this call, of course, should be made clear by Directors and Superiors. One has to be born into solitude carefully, patiently and after long delay, out of the womb of society. One cannot rashly presume to become a solitary merely by his own will. This is no security outside the guidance of the Church.”

- from the essay, “Philosophy of Solitude”, Disputed Questions, p. 204