I have been reading Matthew Fox’s new book A Way to God: Thomas Merton’s Creation Spirituality Journey courtesy of a long-time member of The Human & the Holy spiritual formation community. Merton, one of the most important spiritual writers of the 20^th century, was one of the four wise guides whose life and writings we focused on together for the past nine months.

It would be limiting, of course, to call Merton a nature mystic, but clearly the natural world was an integral dimension of who he was, going all the way back to his childhood. After the death of his mother when he was six, Merton’s father, a landscape painter from New Zealand, let young Tom trapes around with him as he painted scenes in places like Cape Cod, Bermuda, and a longer stint while living in the south of France. Merton’s love of creation culminates in the last three years of his life when he was granted permission from his abbot to live in the woods as a hermit on the monastery property.

It is generally agreed that Merton wrote, or I should say published, too much. He said so himself. And I concur with Merton’s fellow Cistercian Basil Pennington and others who maintain that, with a few exceptions, the best of what he did write tended to be anything autobiographical, which includes The Seven Story Mountain that made him world famous only seven years after he thought he was going to disappear in a Kentucky monastery as a Trappist in December 1941. Then there were the journals he faithfully kept since his youth, and the plethora of letters he wrote to an extraordinary cast of famous and unknown characters the world over. In addition to the journals he published while living, a seven volume series of journals and a five volume series of letters were published posthumously twenty-five years after his premature death by electrocution in Bangkok at the age of 53.

Of the autobiographical works, some of my favorite and I think most beautiful Merton writings– both from his poetry and prose— are about the sacredness of the natural world. By way of example:

Warm sun. Perhaps these yellow wild-flowers have the minds of little girls. My worship is a blue sky and ten thousand crickets in the deep wet hay of the field. My vow is the silence under their song. I admire the woodpecker and the dove in simple mathematics of flights.  Together we study practical norms. The plowed and planted field is red as a brick in the sun and says: “Now my turn!” Several of us begin to sing.[1]

And again here from his journal Woods, Shore, Desert written while visiting the redwoods in California on the first leg of his trip to Bangkok in a rare journey outside the monastery and one from which he would not return alive:

The worshipful cold spring light on the sandbanks of Eel River, the immense silent redwoods. Who can see such trees and bear to be away from them? I must go back. It is not right that I should die under lesser trees.[2]

While reading Fox’s book I was struck anew by a beautiful passage of Merton’s I was familiar with from Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander in which Merton describes the first chirps of the waking birds at dawn as they speak to the Creator “not in fluent song, but with an awakening question”. . . asking “if it is time to ‘be’? [God] answers ‘Yes.’ Then they one by one wake up and become birds. They manifest themselves as birds, beginning to sing.” Creation itself exhibits an even greater humility. Merton continues: “Meanwhile, the most meaningful moment of the day is that when creation in its innocence asks permission to “be” once again, as it did on the first morning that ever was.”[3]

I am moved by the thought of creation asking the creator, each new dawn, for the permission to come into being. I hear this cosmic request against the backdrop of our age that is so often characterized by a spirit of presumption and entitlement, the chief nemeses of any authentic spirituality. Grounded in humility with the deepest reverence for the Source of its being, the cosmos asks permission to “be” as it waits in the liminal space between dark and light, death and new life.

In contrast, Merton describes humans as no longer being intimately familiar with the primal and precarious “virgin point between darkness and light, between nonbeing and being.” Aroused by hubris and foolishness, we take our existence for granted, feel entitled to it, and fall into the illusion of “self-mastery and cannot ask permission of anyone. We face our mornings as [persons] of undaunted purpose. We know the time and we dictate the terms.”[4]

Merton lays out the difference between the innocence and awe of birds and the ignorance and arrogance of humans. He sees where true wisdom lies. He sides with the birds. While we are convinced of being self-made men and women, blinded by our self-deception so that we don’t even need the darkness before dawn to keep us from seeing the forest for the trees and the trees in the forest— the birds and creation hold their breath between being and not being, in “a moment of awe and inexpressible innocence.” They wake in surprise and delight to wonder and gratefulness, joy and praise, and “an unspeakable secret” that too many of us humans still don’t know: namely, that it’s all gift, and that “paradise is all around us and we do not understand . . . It is wide open . . . but we do not know it.”[5]

I have long taught— as if I said it out loud enough times I might finally “get it” myself— that the wise ones have learned not to wait for tragedy or trauma to wake them up to the incomprehensible surprise of living, to the extravagant gratuity of being itself against the certain but well-avoided guarantee one day of non-being. Rabbi Abraham Heschel says it this way:

Our mind has ceased to be sensitive to the wonder. Deprived of the power of devotion to what is more important than our individual fate, steeped in passionate anxiety to survive, we lose sight of what fate is, of what living is. Rushing through the ecstasies of ambition, we only awake when plunged into dread or grief. In darkness, then, we grope for solace, for meaning, for prayer.[6]

As a result, the sages sew into the fabric of their daily lives, conscious practices that awaken them to the wonder of it all, to the gift they (and we) have been given, to the ineffable truth and mystery Merton calls the “point vierge” and the birds call “wisdom” or “first morning” so generously given again.

Prone to presumption myself, but desiring to live moment to moment from an awakened and grateful heart, spurred on by the awe and innocence of the birds and the humility and reverence of creation as depicted by Merton, I have recently begun a new morning practice upon waking. While still in bed and before opening my eyes, like the catbirds and the cardinals, the sparrows and wrens, the doves and the crows, and yes, creation itself, I ask God permission to “be” once again, to allow me one more day to express “gratefulness for witnessing the wonder, for the gift of our unearned right to serve, to adore, and to fulfill.”[7]

And each morning after I ask “permission to ‘be’ once again,” I pray, “If I do die today, let it be from wonder, from gratitude, from joy or acclamation,” as the poet Mary Oliver describes it:

Every day
I see or hear
something
that more or less

kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle

in the haystack
of light.
It was what I was born for–
to look, to listen,

to lose myself
inside this soft world–
to instruct myself
over and over

in joy,
and acclamation.[8]

May we be reverent as the birds and humble as creation. If gifted with another day, may we hold it as unearned gift, not as our rightful possession. Until we die, may we awake to the newness of dawn in wonder. May we mottle our day with awe and gratitude, acclamation and joy. May we come to taste and see the unspeakable secret— that paradise is all around us.

[1] Thomas Merton, The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton, p. 400.
[2] Thomas Merton, Woods, Shore, Desert, p. 46.
[3] Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, p. 131.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid., p. 132.
[6] Abraham Joshua Heschel, Man’s Quest for God, p. 4-5.
[7] Ibid., p. 5.
[8] Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Volume Two, p. 90. Note well: It is important to me to print a poem exactly as the poet published it. As of this writing, I have not been able to format it as Mary Oliver does in her book. My apologies.