The times lacerate us, crucify us. Can we tease out the meanings, or are the meanings beyond us? Someone has to watch while the world is burning and toll the bell. Is there still the possibility for love in the ruins?

(from a memoir, The Man Who Balanced A Tea Cup On His Head and other Fugitive Pieces)

The news is about a church in Texas and shootings. Baptist, I think, but it could be any church, any school, any public space. There’s a picture of the gunman and some history as to how he may have come to that decision which was to go into that church and shoot children point-blank and not from a distance, as that other fellow did in Las Vegas, or that fellow in South Carolina who did much the same at a church in Charleston. There are other such stories that populate the news; too many I think and wonder why. It’s a struggle to understand or perhaps it’s past understanding. Disconcerting, dis-edifying, if those are the words.

It seems to be our lot and our vocation to suffer such. Quid petis? we might ask. And the answer should be “mercy.”

It’s Trappist and to get there from the north one has to find Highway 247 also called Monks Road; it’s a country road connected to Highway 31E which comes south out of Bardstown and south by southeast out of Louisville. It’s a lovely drive come spring. And the bourbon aroma in Bardstown is “intoxicating.” And begging one to stay awhile, sit on a bench, take up the banjo.

The monks are guided by St. Benedict’s Rule; idle talk is discouraged so no chit-chat since such disturbs the quiet and is, well, too much amusement. There’s also a Trappist abbey in South Carolina, Mepken, which has a website and things to consider. I may meander down for a visit.

Deep is the calling, the call to the mystery of each person, the call for mercy.

The work at Mepken interestingly concerns mushrooms, dried shiitake and oyster. Visitors are welcome.  Another in Iowa makes lovely wooden caskets and thus proof that monasteries of this Trappist ilk work for the quick and the dead. I’ve studied the casket catalog and things look good in the pictures: good joinery in the word-working, good staining and finishing, lovely brass handles, and if I ever thought about serious pre-planning I might place a pre-emptive order, drive over and get some tailored measurings….

But I was interested in Thomas Merton and a few years back would in February drive to Louisville for an annual conference on Contemporary Literature. I would usually deliver a “paper” and give a reading and then meander down those Kentucky country roads for a retreat at Gethsemani, as it’s called.

I’ve read Merton and taught Merton and wonder in these decades following his death that if he had lived, would he think that these present days are filled with multitudes of evil spirits such that one should argue the need for more fire watchers? I wonder if he would think that evil is like a cancer with tentacles that reach out and touch living parts, destroying the spirit animating those parts?

Joan Didion asks the question: What makes Iago evil? And then parses the question that some people ask but the narrator in Slouching Toward Bethlehem adds, “I no longer ask.” She’s passed away now, gone to be with….

One must, though, ask.

Because I have questions about what we are witnessing. What is hiding under rocks? Under the porch? Beneath bridges or those round iron discs one sees in the middle of city streets? Who are these people who are going into churches and shooting children point blank? Messengers of a reckoning? If we kept a spiritual journal with an attempt to get at the deep spiritual meaning of the world around us, as I think we are supposed, and the wholeness of that world’s paradoxes, what can we conclude? And why do I think that such a gunman shooting children at point blank did so with a certain kind of “joy”? But not the kind of “joy” lived in the wholeness of the “truth” or those mystical moments of experience in which we might haver witnessed matter converted into spirit. Can one imagine the “ecstasy” of the murderer which must be a hued characterization of someone from whom no deep prayer ever crept forth and whose end in life is like a slow descent into the death regions of Sheol? Can we combine the words “holy” and “monster” together?

The times lacerate us, crucify us by the actual noise that impinges upon the knowing of our own nature. Can we tease out the meanings or are the meanings beyond us? A few days ago at a stop light, a man in front of me exited his car and scurried to the car in front of him to berate an elderly lady who was tardy in making a left-hand turn. Vulgar, and angry… the man, not the lady.

Earlier this year, May or so, 150 young people were sitting in their cars or standing around, talking, listening to music in an area near some tennis courts which were lighted until about midnight. When the lights cycled off, gunshots rang out. Mikaya Hawkins was lying on the asphalt of the tennis court with a wound to her head. I knew her. We would pass each other weekends in the morning. She was a gymnast, lithe and flexible, and she would be gymnastically walking on the sidewalk, grooving, I thought, bending and stretching. We would talk. She was graduating and would start Furman University in the fall, pre-med, but no longer. It was Mother’s Day; she was a bystander only. There were bullet holes in the tennis court netting, gang related, or so said the sheriff, adding that such was the fourteenth fatality “so far” that month of her death, no, her murder.

“So far,” two grim words of promise.

It is what it is, I guess, but again can we tease out the meanings or are the meanings beyond us?

The prophetic figure of Jonah in the belly of the sea monster is a prefiguring of Jesus’ own sojourn in the tomb before His resurrection. Merton knows this and joins together his own sojourn through the bowels of the monastery and his ascent to the bell tower to begin his “fire watch.” It’s a good book that, The Sign of Jonas.

For what purpose? Someone has to watch while the world is burning and toll the bell.

Go set a watchman Isaiah says, and let him announce what he sees. And what do we see? Is there still the possibility for love in the ruins? A piercing book that one. Dr. Tom More and his stethoscope of the human spirit anxious to find a cure for spiritual flu, for society in free fall. Spot on I’ve come to think but not dated except for July 4th….

The same with Merton, his The Sign of Jonas, July 4th….

A book, I believe, explaining how to make what has become vile precious: join one’s life with a prophet even if that prophet is a reluctant Jonas, that image of death and resurrection and hope and pray that God will not let go, that His mercy will be great and never little.

He’s stationed at his post, “whole nights,” and, well, behold “here come riders, horsemen in pairs.” The fires rage in the country-side.

To serve as a watchman, the vanguard for the larger community that he represents, watching for brush fires, for signs and portents. Merton and his tower, Percy’s long suffering priest and his small remnant of faithful catholics, John of the Cross and the ascent of Mount Carmel, St. Simon Stylites, an early warning system but the watcher’s solitude is not for his solitude alone but to watch alone in the name of community, the membership as Wendell calls it.

I’m briefly reminded of my last Appalachian Trail trek, November but not of the soul. I had made my way from Greasy Gap to the Clyde Smith Shelter. Rain and wind that night. And the next day, portents. From Clyde Smith I would descend slowly into a valley, Hughes Gap, and then would come the ascent to Roan Mountain, some 2200 feet upward in the “space” of a little more than a mile giving definition to the word “grade.” And done this way: climb and count 500 steps; stop and count to 100; climb and count 500 steps; stop and count 100. And this a few days after Sunday Mass when our parish priest chatted away about “purgatory.”

Chatted is the exact word.

….For signs and portents!

For Merton there’s language like this as he sits cross-legged in an open window of the bell tower: “The door swings out upon a vast sea of darkness and of prayer.” The image is striking, black silence, a paradox, an ambiguity, God’s presence and absence at once but with prayer maybe that small still voice listened to by Elijah in his cave, the voice in Hebrew called bat kol. Samuel heard it, too, but so ordinary and meek. It’s not necessarily planet shaking so much as it is familiar like, oh, the shepherd’s voice to his sheep.

The drive is hilly and the road is curved now and again. It’s a spring morning and I am driving early. There’s a curve and then a hill and once I top the hill off to the left is an old world wall enclosing the eastern end of the abbey church, the apse, an enclosed area separated from the world, a respected private space as is Merton’s hermitage and his grave.

I slow and see the cemetery, uniform small white metal crosses surrounding the apse.

The Monastery Cemetery: Gethsemani Abbey

Leave us alone, the white crosses say, we’re
Ordinary men who loved raspberries, whose lives
Were spent in prayer, growing onions, while
Pestilence raged the nation. We were patient men,

Men scrubbing our own floors, believing we could
Wash the stains away if we rubbed hard enough.
Stay here if you enjoy being blessed by God;
Leave if you live your life like an argument.

All of us who lie here tug at the earth like
A share of blanket, without anger, belligerence.
When we stare up at night, the stars school
Like fish; we pray with open mouths forever.

The moon swings by like a lure; this is the way
Eternity begins, a line of light pulling us closer.

***

Pestilence raging the nation, life lived like an argument, children in church shot point-blank, the two words becoming hideous, point blank.

A left turn and then another left turn and the parking lot. I cross the asphalt to the cement sidewalk. There are monk’s graves to either side, older than those around the apse or so I think. One of Abraham Lincoln’s teachers is buried along this area but I don’t step off the sidewalk to meander around, looking. Leave us alone. It’s quiet but I do hear the sound of a tractor and I do see the bell tower and I think of Merton sitting in that window cross-legged in the darkness, the watchman.

I am here for a day visit only.

What I see are older men and I’m reminded that following World War II monasticism increased incrementally, a viable alternative for many men and women longing to live in peace as far from turmoil as they could after too much history and an impulse that has over time been both weaker and stronger. Merton’s own Gethsemani exporting itself to Utah, if that’s the right word, exporting.

As for those older men, it’s not hard to imagine a desire to escape conflict and embrace seclusion and a life different from that pursued by the majority of humanity.

The point is that for Gethsemani it’s not only the monastery’s most celebrated monk, Thomas Merton, but it’s also less his extended shadow and more other men whose desire is to seek God in the hum-drum detail of every day life, in the quiet spaces, familiar with the meek voice.

The spaces between hum and drum to which I should attach an emoji, smiling.

But for the day, and some hiking.

Crossing “Monks Road” there’s a small hill rising to a meditative spot, St. Joseph’s. It’s one of many on the hiking trails around the monastery grounds. But this one trails through the grass and with the dew still on the grass one can see the trails left by other visitors or the monks themselves. No one is there now, though, and on this day which has dawned bright and clear a good spot to be, and to sit still and to see this iconographic statue of St. Joseph holding his infant son, as he must have time and time again. Venerated by Lutherans also and the patron saint of workers and a model for fathers. There are lilies blooming here. My preference, should anyone ask, is the lineage from Solomon and a man who has dreams. Our priest sometimes neglects his name, Joseph, or skips over it, during the Eucharistic Prayers; I think he should not.

There’s a small bench and I sit down and as fold my hands together I wonder for a moment why we do that, folding the hands, such a common practice. What’s the reasoning behind it, this joining together of left and right, Submission I think, fidelity, humility, pleading, obedience.

But then this, as if one cannot escape vulgarity, graffiti: Someone has carved on a leg on the underside of the bench and obscene word and a man and a woman copulating. Vandalism.

Are the monks aware? Have they left it there on purpose?

There was a time I believe when there were lines no one would cross but now there seems to be a change toward that once deemed sacred. A church in Spartanburg, South Carolina, recently had the word “bitch” carved on the front door.

A church….

Who can escape it?

So presented to the mind in so many forms the mind could become unfit for contemplation unless the purpose is to prepare the mind for obscene contemplation. If so, take pity on us; the heart, the mind, the soul have so often fallen into division. Quid petis? Mercy.

Merton writes that work in the fields helps contemplation: “Yesterday we were out in the middle bottom, spreading manure all over the gray mud of the cornfields. I was so happy I almost laughed out loud. It was such a relief to get away from a typewriter.”

Life’s work the poet Donald Hall has written.

It’s something I can understand since there’s a metaphor in there somewhere but unexplored: happily spreading manure over the gray mud of the cornfields. Father Louis spreading manure, happily.

Because happiness is not a matter of emotional intensity, he wrote, but of balance, order, rhythm and harmony. It’s the eternal search and one we should swallow whole lest violence and obscenity quell the question, Quid petis?

Mercy for Mikaya Hawkins. And all of us….

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The featured image is ” “Jonah” (1894) by George Frederic Watts, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.