December 31: Poor Men Who Labor, New Year's Eve, Burning Dumpster Heap

The end of Merton . . . 

That is the only reason why I desire solitude—to be lost to all created things, to die to them and to the knowledge of them, for they remind me of my distance from You. They tell me something about You: that You are far from them, even though You are in them. You have made them and Your presence sustains their being, and they hide You from me. And I would live alone, and out of them. O beata solitudo! 

For I knew that it was only by leaving them that I could come to You: and that is why I have been so unhappy when You seemed to be condemning me to remain in them. Now my sorrow is over, and my joy is about to begin: the joy that rejoices in the deepest sorrows. For I am beginning to understand. You have taught me, and have consoled me, and I have begun again to hope and learn. 

I hear You saying to me: 

“I will give you what you desire. I will lead you into solitude. I will lead you by the way that you cannot possibly understand, because I want it to be the quickest way. 

“Therefore all the things around you will be armed against you, to deny you, to hurt you, to give you pain, and therefore to reduce you to solitude. 

“Because of their enmity, you will soon be left alone. They will cast you out and forsake you and reject you and you will be alone. 

“Everything that touches you shall burn you, and you will draw your hand away in pain, until you have withdrawn yourself from all things. Then you will be all alone. 

“Everything that can be desired will sear you, and brand you with a cautery, and you will fly from it in pain, to be alone. Every created joy will only come to you as pain, and you will die to all joy and be left alone. All the good things that other people love and desire and seek will come to you, but only as murderers to cut you off from the world and its occupations. 

“You will be praised, and it will be like burning at the stake. You will be loved, and it will murder your heart and drive you into the desert. 

“You will have gifts, and they will break you with their burden. You will have pleasures of prayer, and they will sicken you and you will fly from them.

“And when you have been praised a little and loved a little I will take away all your gifts and all your love and all your praise and you will be utterly forgotten and abandoned and you will be nothing, a dead thing, a rejection. And in that day you shall begin to possess the solitude you have so long desired. And your solitude will bear immense fruit in the souls of men you will never see on earth. 

“Do not ask when it will be or where it will be or how it will be: On a mountain or in a prison, in a desert or in a concentration camp or in a hospital or at Gethsemani. It does not matter. So do not ask me, because I am not going to tell you. You will not know until you are in it. 

“But you shall taste the true solitude of my anguish and my poverty and I shall lead you into the high places of my joy and you shall die in Me and find all things in My mercy which has created you for this end and brought you from Prades to Bermuda to St. Antonin to Oakham to London to Cambridge to Rome to New York to Columbia to Corpus Christi to St. Bonaventure to the Cistercian Abbey of the poor men who labor in Gethsemani: 

“That you may become the brother of God and learn to know the Christ of the burnt men.”

SIT FINIS LIBRI, NON FINIS QUAERENDI

So Merton ends his book with the Latin phrase:  "SIT FINIS LIBRI, NON FINIS QUAERENDI."  Translation--"This may be the end of the book, but not the end of the quest."  The conclusion is not a conclusion, but a new beginning.  Merton takes his final vows.  Becomes a Trappist monk.  Renounces all the things of the material world that distract him from God.  

It is New Year's Eve.  Almost 2 a.m. as I type this.  I may not finish this post before I need to go to sleep.  At the end of 2021, I wish to put an end to this burning dumpster heap of a year.  I want this night to be the last page, and I'm not sure I want to continue the book of 2021.  Yes, some wonderful things have happened to me--new job, NEA grants, an award for Arts Advocate of the Year.  But, on the flipside, the first chapter of 2021 started with COVID quarantine, and the last chapter comes full circle.  COVID quarantine again.  My mother died.  This morning, I woke up sick.  I'm pretty sure it's COVID.  Went to get tested, but the Health Department testing center is closed for the holiday.  And, to top it all off, Betty White died today.

Like I said, pour some gasoline on 2021 and light a match.

To try to salvage this last day of 2021 for my son, I ordered from Pizza Hut for lunch.  Then I took him to a huge Christmas lights display tonight.  Let him run around with our puppy.  Took pictures.  When we got home, we played some board games, watched a couple movies. Counted down the last seconds to midnight.  Blew some horns.  Raised a glass and let my son give a toast.  

He talked about his grandma, grandpa, Aunt Sally, and Uncle Kevin in heaven.  About getting and staying healthy.  Loving his parents and sister and puppy.  In short, my son gets it.  He knows what's important.

At midnight, I sent text messages to everyone I love.  My daughter, who's staying at her boyfriend's parents' house to avoid infection.  My sisters.  My sisters-in-law . A couple of my closest friends.  Because that is what's important.  The people in my life.  Pretty much everything I do in my life is for them.  Period.

So, as I say goodbye to Thomas Merton after this two-year journey, I am ready for this quest to end and a new one to begin.

Tomorrow, I start a new book.  Something simpler.  But beautiful.  The big reveal to happen in my first post of 2022.  As Merton says, ". . . and I have begun again to hope and learn."

Saint Marty is ready for a little hoping and learning, starting tomorrow.

December 13: How to Be Very Happy, Looking for Happiness, Grilled Cheese Sandwich

 Merton graduates from Columbia and sets out to find happiness . . .

The last week of that school year at Columbia had been rather chaotic. Lax and Freedgood had been making futile efforts to get their belongings together and go home. Bramachari was living in their room, perched on top of a pile of books. Lax was trying to finish a novel for Professor Nobbe’s course in novel-writing, and all his friends had volunteered to take a section of the book and write it, simultaneously: but in the end the book turned out to be more or less a three-cornered affair—by Lax and me and Dona Eaton. When Nobbe got the thing in his hands he could not figure it out at all, but he gave us a B-minus, with which we were more than satisfied. 

Then Lax’s mother had come to town to live near him in the last furious weeks before graduation and catch him if he collapsed. He had to take most of his meals in the apartment she had rented in Butler Hall. I sometimes went along and helped him nibble the various health-foods. 

At the same time, we were planning to get a ride on an oil barge up the Hudson and the Erie Canal to Buffalo—because Lax’s brother-in-law was in the oil business. After that we would go to the town where Lax lived, which was Olean, up in that corner of New York state. 

On “Class Day” we leaned out the window of Lax’s room and drank a bottle of champagne, looking at the sun on South Field, and watching the people beginning to gather under the trees in front of Hamilton, where we would all presently hear some speeches and shake hands with Nicholas Murray Butler. 

It was not my business to graduate that June at all. My graduation was all over when I picked up my degree in the registrar’s office last February. However, I borrowed the cap and gown with which Dona Eaton had graduated from Barnard a year before, and went and sat with all the rest, mocking the speeches, with the edge of my sobriety slightly dulled by the celebration that had just taken place with the champagne in Furnald. 

Finally we all got up and filed slowly up the rickety wooden steps to the temporary platform to shake hands with all the officials. President Butler was a much smaller man than I had expected. He looked intensely miserable, and murmured something or other to each student, as he shook hands. It was inaudible. I was given to understand that for the past six or seven years people had been in the habit of insulting him, on these occasions, as a kind of a farewell. 

I didn’t say anything. I just shook his hand, and passed on. The next one I came to was Dean Hawkes who looked up with surprise, from under his bushy white eyebrows, and growled:

“What are you doing here, anyway?” 

I smiled and passed on. 

We did not get the ride on the oil barge, after all, but went to Olean on a train, and for the first time I saw a part of the world in which I was one day going to learn how to be very happy—and that day was not now very far away.

Merton's life is about to change.  In that last paragraph, he pretty much spells it out.  He's traveling to place where he will learn to be happy (my emphasis).  It's not the place that's going to make him happy.  It's the place where he will somehow undergo a education in which he attains happiness.  There's a big difference.

I think we're all looking for happiness.  There'd be something wrong with you if you set out every day to make yourself as miserable as possible.  Sought out grief and tragedy.  That's the job of journalists, to show up at every school shooting or plane crash or Donald Trump press conference.  Places and events that engender sorrow and outrage.

It has been a little over 24 hours since I found out that my son was COVID-positive.  I spent most of yesterday afternoon and evening watching Christmas movies.  Normally, after doing my four hours for the library on Saturday morning, I would have spent four or five hours getting ready to play the pipe organ for the 4 p.m. Mass.  Getting music prepared and practicing, and then, eventually, sitting down on the organ bench, switching on the organ, and playing.  Instead, I watched A Beautiful Day and Elf and Miracle on 34th Street and The Polar Express and The Nativity Story and The End of the Tour.  

It was a comforting activity.  Something that, under normal circumstances, I would never have allowed myself to do.  Because I'm too busy.  It was like those afternoons from my childhood when my mother would make me a grilled cheese sandwich and Campbell's chicken noodle soup.  I would sit by her huge hi-fi wooden stereo, eat, and listen to her records.  Doris Day.  Bing Crosby.  The soundtrack of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma!  Brenda Lee.  Petula Clark.  I felt so . . . content in those moments.

It's Sunday.  I was supposed to play a service for a Lutheran church this morning.  I didn't do that.  Instead, I slept in, another thing I never allow myself to do.  Then I got up, checked my email, and took my puppy for a spin around the backyard.  I was just sinking onto the couch to do some computer work when my phone rang again.  

It was the local Health Department, doing a call for contact tracing.  I spent about ten minutes on the phone talking to the nurse, giving her details about each person in the house and their health conditions.  She reconfirmed our quarantine and isolation times, suggesting that we all get tested, as it might shorten the time we are house-bound.  

Now, I am back on the couch, watching movies again.  And working.  I am leading a poetry workshop this evening, so I have some prep work to do for that.  Then, writing and writing and, after that, a little more writing.  I haven't figured out what I'm making for dinner yet.  I'm not feeling very ambitious, so I may be throwing together a ham-and-cheese quiche.  

My life has slowed down these last 24 hours.  Time seems to be stretching out, like a cat in a shaft of afternoon light.  I am learning about happiness and gratitude.  I loved watching all those movies yesterday.  Grilled cheese sandwich movies.  I loved the peace of not rushing from one obligation to another yesterday.  Doris Day peace.

And I have felt so loved.  So, so loved.  People offering to drop off food and go shopping for us.  More texts and IMs than I can count.  I already knew that my family and friends are amazing people, but, in the middle of this pandemic and contentious election, it's easy to lose sight of the goodness that exists in the world.  To feel jaded and angry.  Yet, I can tell you, as Anne Frank wrote so long ago in her diary, ". . . in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart."

I am learning new happiness today.  A quiet happiness.  Filled with kindness and compassion.

Here are a few snapshots from the last 48 hours:

• My beautiful daughter is feeling worse today.  Body aches and fever.  No respiratory problems.
• My beautiful friend, Rose, dropped off a Christmas turkey on our front porch this afternoon.
• My other beautiful friend, Esther, is bringing frozen pizzas and treats for my puppy tomorrow. 
• My wife's beautiful cousin, Amy (we are the obnoxious drunks at family gatherings), has offered to replenish my liquor cupboard once my supply has dwindled.
• My beautiful puppy snuggled with me for almost an hour last night.  She's enjoying the quarantine.  A lot.
• Some of my beautiful poet friends will be joining me this evening for a poetry workshop on miracles.

Yes, this slower existence is stitched with concern.  But I am surrounded by light.  I truly feel it.

Saint Marty gives thanks tonight for the miracle of friends and family, unexpected kindnesses, and the comfort of Christmas movies.