The Knitting Theologian

I found this in The Seven Storey Mountain. Merton is writing about his first experience singing chant in the choir with the Trappist monks after he joined the novitiate.

But the cold stones of the Abbey church ring with a chant that glows with living flame, with clean, profound desire. It is an austere warmth, the warmth of Gregorian chant. It is deep beyond ordinary emotion, and that is one reason why you never get tired of it. It never wears you out by making a lot of cheap demands on your sensibilities. Instead of drawing you out into the open field of feelings where your enemies, the devil and your own imagination and the inherent vulgarity of your own corrupted nature can get at you with their blades and cut you to pieces, it draws you within, where you are lulled in peace and recollection and where you find God.

(Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain, New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1948, p. 425.

This pretty well sums up why I love Gregorian chant. I have not had the experience of singing it in an abbey. But I have sung it in a church made mostly of concrete in the Mid-Wilshire district of Los Angeles (St. Basil’s) where the notes echoed up and down the nave with an almost otherworldly sound. It sent chills up and down my spine.

In my twenty minutes of mental prayer this morning, I found myself thinking about the barriers I still have between me and God. Here is God, who "always arrives before me, desiring to connect with me even more than my most intimate friend," (to quote Sacred Space) and here am I, distracted by thoughts of job and relationships and bodily discomfort and so many other irrelevant details I can barely concentrate on God for a few seconds. And yet that astonishing fact of His love for me, His desire for me, makes me weep.

I was looking, too, at a verse from Matthew where Jesus says:

And everyone who has left houses, brothers, sisters, father, mother, children or land for the sake of my name will be repaid a hundred times over, and also inherit eternal life. (Matthew 19:29)

I was thinking about how little I have given up for Jesus, and how much I have, and how impossible it seems to even know where to start to divest myself of things. How do I even know which things are the biggest barriers?

I was also thinking of Thomas Merton’s conversion story, of how he came to realize that it wasn’t a matter of simply avoiding mortal sin, but a matter of truly changing his life. And I was thinking about those observations of his, the things he said he should have begun doing immediately after his baptism to solidify his conversion, but they didn’t occur to him.

I should have begun at once, in the first place, to go to Communion every day….I should have sought constant and complete spiritual direction….I should have begun to pray, really pray….One of the big defects of my spiritual life that first year was a lack of devotion to the mother of God….But the one thing I needed most of all was a sense of the supernatural life, and systematic mortification of my passions and of my crazy nature. (Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain, New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1948, pp. 253-256.)

All of these trains of thought seem to point to one conclusion for me: that it’s time to take my own conversion (or reversion, if you like; it seems more like a conversion to me) to the next level. And that’s the way to start breaking through the barriers between me and God. I guess it’s all very well to pray to God to remove those barriers (as I was doing this morning). But I’m wondering whether, since I erected them in the first place, God might remove them only by working through me, by giving me the strength to tear them down, stone by stone.

First, from Morning Prayer this morning:

When I found your words, I devoured them;
they became my joy and the happiness of my heart.
Because I bore your name,
O Lord, God of hosts. (Jer 15:16)

This verse caught my attention this morning, as I thought about how much I love Scripture and how much more meaningful it becomes to me as part of my deepening conversion. It seems to me that when I ask God to show me His will, He nearly always sends me back to Scripture. I don’t always–or even frequently, to be honest–understand it, but sometimes the gift of reflection helps me to discern at least a part of it.

Perhaps pausing to meditate on that verse from Jeremiah during Morning Prayer helped me to be even more receptive to the first reading for today.

Thus says the Lord;
I will allure her;
I will lead her into the desert
and speak to her heart.
She will respond there as in the days of her youth,
when she came up from the land of Egypt.

On that day, says the Lord,
She shall call me "My husband,"
and never again "My baal."

I will espouse you to me forever;
I will espouse you in right and in justice,
in love and in mercy,
I will espouse you in fidelity,
and you shall know the Lord. (Hosea 2:16, 17c-18, 21-22)

In those words I heard such tenderness, the tenderness that I long for. And yet I was also struck by the cost of that tenderness. I know the story of Hosea, that he was a prophet whose wife became a prostitute. I know that Hosea, the prophet, is speaking to Israel about God’s tenderness and fidelity even in the face of Israel’s infidelity. And even as I warned myself about personalizing the message too much, I also felt I could hear, loud and clear, God speaking to me individually.

I have often thought, over the past few months, as I await the decision of the marriage tribunal, and as my longing to receive the sacraments again increases,  that despite my retreat experience last December I shouldn’t presume too much on God’s unconditional love for me. At any rate I feel I need to remember my part in my estrangement from God. I was the one who turned away and left. God doesn’t move and doesn’t change.

This reading reminds me that despite all that, the anger at God, the turning away, the willful disobedience, that God waits for me, fully aware of all I did, but ready to speak tenderly to me and receive me back and even cherish me, something I hardly dare hope for. For some reason that knowledge makes it much easier for me to desire true repentance and contrition for my sins. Instead of pretending that it’s all over now, and acting as though none of it ever happened, I want to experience the renewal of true repentance and reconciliation, and the experience of moving forward into a new and deeper intimacy with God.

Tell me whether this sounds just plain crazy.

I was reading True Devotion to Mary last Friday morning, chapter 2, "The Necessity of Mary." I was reading along about all the reasons why we need to pray through Mary, and how especially efficacious her prayers are, and how her prayer is more powerful before God than all the angels and saints.,

While I was reading, I was thinking, "OK, yes, well, this guy’s a saint so this must be true, but I’d sure like to see the citations from Scripture or other Church documents that he used to develop these arguments." Honestly, I didn’t *think* I was being skeptical. Then I came to this paragraph:

If I were speaking to the intellectuals of our time, I would prove at length everything I am now simply stating, using Sacred Scripture and the Holy Fathers from which I would recount passages in Latin, and to which I would add many solid arguments such as those found in the lengthy deductions by R.P. Poire in his "Triple Crown of the Holy Virgin." But because I am speaking particularly to the poor and the simple, who being of good will and having greater faith than the typical intellectual, believe more simply and and more meritoriously…

And I had the oddest feeling as I read that passage, as though someone was right with me, asking me, "did you notice that? Are you paying attention?"

Well, shut my mouth. I only pray that the Holy Spirit might grant me that kind of faith. Or maybe I should pray to Mary Herself about it, no?