Archives

Awakening / Awareness / Grace / Presence / Seeing / Waking Up — 4 Comments
17
Jun 12

In the Chapter Room

photo by wallyg

“The solitary life, being silent, clears away the smoke-screen of words that man has laid down between his mind and things,” writes Thomas Merton in Thoughts in Solitude.  “In solitude we remain face to face with the naked being of things. And yet we find that the nakedness of reality which we have feared, is neither a matter of terror nor for shame. It is clothed in the friendly communion of silence, and this silence is related to love. The world our words have attempted to classify, to control and even to despise (because they could not contain it) comes close to us, for silence teaches us to know reality by respecting it where words have defiled it.”

When you are thinking of bicycles, you see bicycles everywhere.  Contemplating Parabola’s latest theme, “Alone and Together,” I find fresh evidence of the interplay between solitude and community everywhere.  I visited The Cloisters with my daughter Alex and her boyfriend Anthony.  Set on a hilltop with sweeping views of the Hudson River, The Cloisters is not just a museum of medieval art, it actually is a medieval cloister transported here from France.

Merton writes of it in The Seven Storey Mountain, the iconic memoir of his spiritual journey. Merton opens the book by saying that he was born in the shadow of some French mountains. “There were many ruined monasteries in those mountains,” he writes “My mind goes back with great reverence to the thought of those clean, ancient stone cloisters, those low and mighty rounded arches hewn and set in place by monks who have perhaps prayed me where I now am…”

And many momentous years later, after he lost his father and mother, after he went to private school and Cambridge University, and then on to Columbia University in New York, Merton encountered one of those ancient cloisters again…in the upper reaches of Manhattan.  Can you imagine?  He found himself at Columbia, in what I’ve heard called upstate Manhattan.  Under his friendliness and activity, he was lonely and searching.  And as he began to turn towards the contemplative path, as he began to turn towards the inner path—he found a monastery from the innermost layers of memory—literally relocated in time and place.  Can you imagine the proverbial mountain coming for you?

“One of [the cloisters], stone by stone, followed me across the Atlantic a score of years later, and got itself set up within convenient reach of me when I most needed to see what a cloister looked like, and what kind of place a man might live in, to live according to his rational nature, and not like a stray dog.  St. Michel-de-Cuxa is all fixed up in a special and considerably tidy little museum in an uptown park in New York, overlooking the Hudson River, in such a way that you don’t recall what kind of city you are in.  It is called The Cloisters.  Synthetic as it is, it still preserves enough of its own reality to be a reproach to everything else around it, except the trees and the Palisades (the lofty steep cliffs along the Hudson).”

I sat in the cool depths of the Chapter House. With Alex’s firm encouragement (understandably, she and Anthony wanted to drift through the garden and among the treasures without Mom on their heels), I sat for a long while in a twelfth-century enclosure where monks gathered for daily readings of the Rule of St. Bendict, the rules of their order—the most famous of which is about welcoming guests as if they were a manifesting divine.  I felt welcomed, and more.  The stones communicated something to me on a “preverbal”—possibly even a “post-verbal” level.

“True communication on the deepest level is more than a simple sharing of ideas, of conceptual knowledge, or formulated truth,” writes Merton in a talk he once planned.  “The kind of communication that is necessary on this level must also be ‘communion’ beyond the level of words….”

For a little while, sitting in the Chapter Room, I experienced The Cloisters not as a tourist but as a pilgrim.  I felt a presence or vibration in the stones around me.  It felt like I was being helped by the efforts of others in the past who tried to cultivate an awareness beyond ordinary words and knowledge—who tried to open to what is new, to welcome whomever and whatever arrives as a manifestation of the divine.

Eventually, Alex and Anthony arrived. I described my sense that the stones communicated something.  Alex is used to this sort statement from me.  But Anthony, who studies theoretical physics and math in graduate school at Princeton, looked doubtful.  No matter.  I know that he understands that nothing is solid and separate in his own way.  I know that we are made up of energies that too quick and subtle to perceive.

Except, I find that we can sense this great mystery with these very bodies, hearts, and minds. Sometimes when we are very still, there can be a subtle movement of availability and we can receive something extraordinary that is being offered, radiated.  Sitting at The Cloisters the other day, I glimpsed that reality—a finer level reality—is not something chilly and abstract.  It really does come “clothed in the friendly communion of silence.”

 

Uncategorized — 12 Comments
28
May 12

Finding the Source

Most people associate the creative with the lush, the prolific, the fertile, the rich.  Contemplation or meditation as the Trappist Monk Brother Paul Quenon describes it in “Alone and Together” sounds like the opposite:   It “is too poor, too empty, and obscure.  It is mostly an entrance to and abiding in the emptiness of Christ.  And that largely without being aware that it is Christ’s emptiness.  Gradually one ceases to think of it as one’s own as well. “

It sounds bleak.  Trappist monk, who received his novitiate training under Thomas Merton, makes his calling and his mentor Merton’s calling sound like an exile in the desert—going beyond comfort and hope,  in which “the self and its sense of well-being, or lack thereof, is incidental.”  The strange thing is that Brother Paul is a prolific writer and by many accounts a wonderful, happy, engaged human being—and so was his famous mentor.

Brother Paul, who wake up at 2:40 in the morning to start his meditation in Vigils at 3:00 a.m. , asks what he is doing.  This is a good question–especially because this good kind human being senses that what he needs is something “too pure and brief for me to dwell on.”  What he really needs—what we all really need—is a connection with life that is intimate and true.  We need to know that we are accepted by God and by life as we are.  As Brother Paul puts in a journal entry included in his essay: “the truth of my name is already spoken in the silence….”

Or as I have thought of it far more folksy, slangy terms:  “sometimes God likes to get us alone.”   I have been in a few deserts in the course of my life, most of us have—stretches of life not going according to plan, times of not knowing what would come.   These stretches can lead to a very intimate contact with your life–this naked contact is essential to a truly creative life.

Did you ever wonder why a soul like Merton–overflowing with creativity and a wish to serve—would enter a Trappist monastery?   Into the desert Brother Paul goes—and finds that the detachment and freedom that opens the flood gates of creativity.  He quotes a spare little poem by his mentor Merton called “Song for Nobody” –“A yellow flower/(light and spirit)/sings by itself/For nobody.”

Merton might have been describing a scraggly flower on the gravel path to his hermitage, according to Brother Paul, yet its song contains “the grandeur and the poverty of interior prayer.”    Brother Paul makes the point that true creativity begins when we stop caring in an ordinary way—when we stop caring about being a success in the eyes of the world.  Brother Paul offers the example of Emily Dickinson, who lived like a nun and didn’t care at all about success or publication.  For Dickinson, poetry was a way of meditating or contemplating: “Thought belongs to Him who gave it.”

The word contemplation comes from the Latin word contemplatio. Its root is also that of the Latin word templum, a piece of ground consecrated for the taking of auspices, or a building for worship, derived either from Proto-Indo-European base *tem- “to cut”, and so a “place reserved or cut out” or from the Proto-Indo-European base *temp- “to stretch”, and thus referring to a cleared space in front of an altar.  The Latin word contemplatio was used to translate the Greek  word θεωρία (theoria).

To contemplate or meditate is enter an empty space (the root of the word sacred means to set apart).  As Merton famously said real prayer is learned in the hour when easy wordy prayers are impossible).  I have been writing in this space about the importance of letting go and letting be.  Now I am adding the importance of daring to enter the desert, of daring to be poor and obscure and maybe even a little crazy in the eyes of the world.   Dare to be useless and incoherent.  As Thomas Merton said:  “If you have learned only how to be a success, your life has probably been wasted.”

Life can be like this:  Just when we’ve given up hope of finding a way out of the desert we may come upon a spring.   Just when you have accepted that scorn of the world or your parents or mentors—just when you are too parched and tired to care about anybody’s judgments, you may find a deep well.   It happens at the point when you go beyond all the noise—let them call you a lunatic, a bum, an extra and thoroughly unwanted human who doesn’t pull her weight,  someone too impractical, artistic, mystical, unrealistic (you may add your favorite salt to the wound of being you).   It happens when you stop needing assurances and praise.  You will sink into a stillness below the words, and remember the simple vibrant, naked sense of being alive.   And then you may find the source, the wellspring.  No one knew to tell you it was there—no one knew.  No one but God, and now you.

Uncategorized — 18 Comments
07
May 12

Alone With Others

Our luminous “Alone and Together” issue is now appearing everywhere like a beautiful new spring bird.  And not surprisingly, I have been reflecting about the connection between solitude and community. At times, it feels like THE theme—the very key to life.  There is a fascinating article in the issue, on the poet Rilke, who longed for solitude so he could draw close to the source of things.   Exhausted from my editorial labors, I streamed “Merton: A Film Biography,” the other evening. I was struck by scenes that depicted how communal the life is in the Trappist monastery Gethsemani.   Young Thomas Merton entered the monastery seeking a place apart “to entertain silence in the heart and listen for the voice of God – to pray for (my) own discovery.”  And yet for years, he was rarely alone.

In pictures from his ordination, Merton glows with youth and happiness–in spite of an extremely Spartan life and striking lack of privacy.  The monks sleep in little cubicles and otherwise seem to do everything collectively and under the watch of the abbott.  And this seems to be the source of the freedom and simplicity and radiates from Merton.  In the community of the monastery, he sheds a skin of separation.

It reminded me of what can happen briefly on retreat.  There is a wearing down of the ego and its relentless insistence on making us special (if only by being especially bad at kitchen work).  There comes a point when we let go of the story of ourselves, when we let go of our fear of what others think and of being no one and all the rest.  Seeking solitude, we find ourselves in community.  Letting go of ourselves, we may find our way to deeper feeling of connection with life.

Living apart from ordinary society as a monk, Merton found his way to the heart of life. In bustling downtown Louisviille, Kentucky, Merton had an epiphany.  He saw himself in every passing stranger’s face.  He was not separate from them, nor they from him.  Merton went on seeking solitude. He was the first Trappist monk to be given permission to live in a little hermitage, away from the communal life of his brothers.  And yet from that place of solitude, Merton reflected and wrote on the burning issues of the day.  He travelled the world from that place, and he never lost that recognition of our common humanity.

There is a stillness under the noise of the world and our own thoughts.  There is a kind of solitude that not a flight from others but a way of being with ourselves—the whole of our experience, excluding nothing.  How precious it is in this pressured age to unplug and drop out and tune in to the experience of being fully present for a time—if only for the space of a prayer or a meditation or a walk.  Retreating for a time, we may find our way home to our humanity.

Seemingly worldly people can harbor a secret monasticism.  In Merton’s case, certainly being a writer is a monastic calling—even his famous excess, the girls and parties and time spent in the bars around Columbia University were ways of sending up flares: find me, God.  And most adolescents are seekers. Most hide pure hearts under what they hope are tough and worldly exteriors.  Most are seeking a way to be alone among others.  Last time, I alluded to a high school boyfriend who liked to dress in black and act all dark and mysterious.  There was actually a group of us who tried to give off a whiff of outlaw or underground—who tried to be psychedelic seekers. We would gather often in the attic room of a boy who liked to call himself “Shiva Gonzo” (which gives you some indication of his major influences).  We would sit there by the light of candles shaped like dripping skulls, listening to Led Zepplin and Spirit and similar music, trying to find our way to the source.

A dozen years ago, I interviewed Ram Dass for a magazine.  We warmed to each other and wound up spending hours laughing and talking.  I told him I felt I had bonded with him—specifically with his book Be Here Now– years before.  I described being in an attic room in a house in Northern New York with a crowd of psychedelic seekers that included a boy named Shiva Gonzo.  But all the while, I felt a connection to his purifying pilgrimage to India and his meeting with the extraordinary guru who saw through  his social exterior—who showed him his true self.  “If I had a nickel for everyone who has said that to me,” Ram Dass laughed, banging his hand on the arm of his wheel chair (a little more on this encounter to come).

It strikes me now that I was a lamb in protective wolf’s clothing.  The dripping skull candles were really votive candles.  I was looking for a place of solitude—a place (in Merton’s words) “to entertain silence in the heart and listen for the voice of God – to pray for your own discovery.”