Today my usual was interrupted by mother nature. We awoke to a blanket of five inches of snow and then freezing rain on top of that. I was to travel to Mt. Irenaeus for Mass and then a meeting our Secular Franciscan fraternity. I called Fr. Lou and then a couple of our members and decided it best to call off the meeting. Mt. Irenaeus is located at the top of 2200 foot hill in rural Allegany County. It sits astride a dirt road that can be treacherous with a coating of ice. Continue reading “Beautiful Solitude”
Happy is the man
I had the day off for Veterans Day. I drove some country roads I hadn’t been on in years. Eventually my driving brought me to a familiar stop. I arrived at Abbey of the Genesee and the first person to greet me was the familiar, Brother Christian. He said, “you haven’t been here in a while.” I said, “yes, it’s been a month or more since my last visit.” Continue reading “Happy is the man”
Father Stephen
This story came in today’s mail. I thought it was too good not to share.
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.
Sanity
This is poignant and timely. Every time I hear pundits and politicians speak of war in Iraq or war with Iran I hear the same sort of self-justification for destruction as is described here. There is always some reason why this all makes sense to them.
One of the most disturbing facts that came out in the [Adolf] Eichmann trial was that a psychiatrist examined him and pronounced him perfectly sane. I do not doubt it at all, and that is precisely why I find it disturbing. . . . .
The sanity of Eichmann is disturbing. We equate sanity with a sense of justice, with humaneness, with prudence, with the capacity to love and understand other people. We rely on the sane people of the world to preserve it from barbarism, madness, destruction. And now it begins to dawn on us that it is precisely the sane ones who are the most dangerous.
It is the sane ones, the well-adapted ones, who can without qualms and without nausea aim the missiles and press the buttons that will initiate the great festival of destruction that they, the sane ones, have prepared. What makes us so sure, after all, that the danger comes from a psychotic getting into a position to fire the first shot in a nuclear war? Psychotics will be suspect. The sane ones will keep them far from the button. No one suspects the sane, and the sane ones will have perfectly good reasons, logical, well-adjusted reasons, for firing the shot. They will be obeying sane orders that have come sanely down the chain of command. And because of their sanity they will have no qualms at all. When the missiles take off, then, it will be no mistake.
Thomas Merton. “A Devout Meditation in Memory of Adolf Eichmann” in Raids on the Unspeakable. New York: New Directions Publishing Co., 1964: 45, 46-47.
Listen to the rain
A couple of nights ago I woke up to the sound of rain and I thought of Thomas Merton. Whenever it rains I think of Merton.
I came up here [to his hermitage] from the monastery last night, sloshing through the cornfield, said Vespers, and put some oatmeal on the Coleman stove for supper. It boiled over while I was listening to the rain and toasting a piece of bread at the log fire. The night became very dark. The rain surrounded the whole cabin with its enormous virginal myth, a whole world of meaning, of secrecy, of silence, of rumor. Think of it: all that speech pouring down, selling nothing, judging nobody, drenching the thick mulch of dead leaves, soaking the trees, filling the gullies and crannies of the wood with water, washing out the places where men have stripped the hillside! What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone, in the forest, at night, cherished by this wonderful, unintelligible, perfectly innocent speech, the most comforting speech in the world, the talk that rain makes by itself all over the ridges, and the talk of the watercourses everywhere in the hollows!
Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it. It will talk as long as it wants, this rain. As long as it talks I am going to listen.–Thomas Merton. “Rain and the Rhinocerous” in Raids on the Unspeakable. New York: New Directions Publishing Co., 1964: 9-10.
Merton and morality
It sometimes happens that the men who preach most vehemently about evil and the punishment of evil, so that they seem to have practically nothing else on their minds except sin, are really unconcious haters of other men. They think the world does not appreciate them, and this is their way of getting even.–Thomas Merton, Seeds of Contemplation.
This quote struck me once again tonight as I pondered the ramifications of the U.S. Senate’s recent vote to pass the Kyl-Lieberman amendment Continue reading “Merton and morality”
A radical change
This quote came in the mail today from the Merton Institute. I liked it a lot and I’m putting it up here for reflection. Thomas Merton was and continues to be an influence in my life and contemplation as Merton defines it does change me. It is as Merton says, ” a radical change in my way of being and living.”
Contemplation is not a deepening of experience only, but a radical change in one’s way of being and living, and the essence of this change is precisely a liberation from dependence on external means to external ends. Of course one may say that an opening of the “doors of perception” is not entirely “external” and yet it is a satisfaction for which one may develop a habitual need and on which one may become dependent. True contemplation delivers one from all such forms of dependence. In that sense it seems to me that a contemplative life that depends on the use of drugs is essentially different from one which implies liberation from all dependence on anything but freedom and divine grace. I realize that these few remarks do not answer the real question [about drugs and contemplation] but they express a doubt in my own mind.”
Thomas Merton. Faith and Violence: Christian Teaching and Christian Practice. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968: 217.
Soul Searching
I just finished watching a documentary I purchased today while visiting Abbey of the Genesee. Entitled “Soul Searching–The Journey of Thomas Merton,” it’s well worth your viewing time. Continue reading “Soul Searching”
Blessed imperfection
In the last couple of days there have been two politicians exposed for hypocrisy. Why is it that these right wingers have taken it upon themselves to attempt to legislate a morality that they themselves cannot endure. Thomas Merton wrote of the shadow. Continue reading “Blessed imperfection”
Do not resist an evil person
Nowadays, much of what passes as patriotism is actually fanaticism. In some quarters our attempts to combat fanatical forces that oppose us has actually engendered a movement towards fanaticism. I read this quote from Thomas Merton tonight and reflected on its message for today. Continue reading “Do not resist an evil person”