Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy.
That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody’s business.
What we are asked to do is to love,
and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbors worthy.
~ Thomas Merton
Today is the anniversary of the death of Thomas Merton (Dec. 10, 1968). Merton’s life was rooted in the “hidden ground of love,” nourished by the subterranean substance and spaciousness of silence, and sustained by both the monastic rhythm of prayer and work and nature’s rhythm of grief and praise. He was one of the most genuinely human and holy prophetic mystics of the 20th century. From the cloistered hills of Kentucky, he was not only an adept exegete of the human soul, but also as intimately, passionately, deeply aware, and challenging a first responder as any living commentator on the social ills of his day.
Here are two poems of Merton’s, the first an early poem from the 1940’s, evoked by his visit to Cuba the year before he went into the monastery in December 1941. Merton was moved by an experience he had in one of the churches dedicated to Mary and was enamored by the warmth of the Cuban people, their song, and their dance. According to Beth Ciofolletti, this version is actually the earliest version of the poem. Merton slightly reworked it later.[i]
Song for Our Lady of Cobre
The white girls stir* their heads like trees,
The black girls go
Reflected like flamingoes in the street.
The white girls sing as shrill as water,
The black girls speak
as loud as clay.**
The white girls open their arms like clouds,
The black girls close their eyes like wings:
Angels bow down like bells,
Angels look up like toys,
Because the heavenly stars
Stand in a ring:
And all the pieces of the mosaic, earth,
Get up and fly away like birds.
The second poem is a poem for the season, aptly titled “Advent.”
Advent
Charm with your stainlessness these winter nights,
Skies, and be perfect! Fly, vivider in the fiery dark, you quiet meteors,
And disappear.
You moon, be slow to go down,
This is your full!
The four white roads make off in silence
Towards the four parts of the starry universe.
Time falls like manna at the corners of the wintry earth.
We have become more humble than the rocks,
More wakeful than the patient hills.
Charm with your stainlessness these nights in Advent,
holy spheres,
While minds, as meek as beasts,
Stay close at home in the sweet hay;
And intellects are quieter than the flocks that feed by starlight.
Oh pour your darkness and your brightness over all our
solemn valleys,
You skies: and travel like the gentle Virgin,
Toward the planets’ stately setting,
Oh white full moon as quiet as Bethlehem!
In Hope,
Dan
[i] On her blog “Louie, Louie” http://fatherlouie.blogspot.com/2010/04/song-for-our-lady-of-cobre.html, Beth Cioffoletti notes the following changes in the published version in Merton’s The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton: * lift, ** talk as quiet as clay.