May 6: Everything Seemed Clear, Hard Truths, "Dead Poets Society"

Merton readies himself for the monastery as Paris falls to the Nazis . . . 

The months passed quickly, but not quickly enough for me. Already it was June 1940: but the two months that remained until the date in August when the doors of the novitiate would open to receive thirty or forty new postulants seemed infinitely far away. 

I did not stay long in New York when I came back from Cuba. I was there only a few days, in which I went to the monastery on 31st Street, and learned from Father Edmund that my application for admission had been accepted, and that some of the necessary papers had arrived. It was a very good thing that this was so, because postulants entering a religious Order need documents from every diocese where they have lived for a morally continuous year since their fourteenth year, as well as a birth certificate and a lot of other things as well. 

But this was precisely the time when the German armies were pouring into France. At the moment when I stepped off the boat in New York, they had made their first great break through the French lines, and it had at last become obvious that the impregnable defence of the Maginot Line was a myth. Indeed, it was only a matter of very few days before the fierce armored divisions of the Nazis, following in the path broken out before them by the Luftwaffe, pierced the demoralized French army and embraced the betrayed nation in arms of steel. They had Paris within a fortnight, and then they were at the Loire, and finally the papers were full of blurred wirephotos of the dumb, isolated dining-car in the park at Compiegne where Hitler made the French eat the document on which the 1918 armistice had been written. 

So, too, if my father and mother’s marriage certificate from St. Anne’s in Soho, London, had not come in that year, it might never have come at all. I don’t know if the parish records of St. Anne’s survived the blitzkrieg that was about to be let loose over the head of the huge, dark city full of sins and miseries, in whose fogs I had once walked with such wise complacency.

Everything seemed clear. A month would go by, and then another, and soon I would be walking, with my suitcase, up some drab, unimaginable street in Paterson, New Jersey, to a small brick monastery which I could not very well envisage. But the drabness of the city would be left behind at the door and I knew, although I had no special illusions about St. Anthony’s novitiate either, that inside I would find peace. And I would begin my retreat, and after a month or so I would put on the brown robe and white cord of a friar and I would be walking in sandals with a shaved head, in silence, to a not too beautiful chapel. But anyway, there I would have God, and possess Him, and belong to Him.

It's amazing when your life seems clear, your way straight and unencumbered.  That's what Merton sees.  He is seeking a path to God, and that path runs directly through the Franciscan monastery in his mind.  Of course, life is never that simple, as Merton will soon learn.

It has been over a week since my last post.  In the betwixt time, I graded piles of student essays, entered final grades, took a day or two to celebrate surviving a year of pandemic teaching, and watched Dead Poets Society once or twice or seven times.  Other good things have happened, as well.  I got my teaching assignment for next fall semester, and I received some good news at my library job.  Overall, with some minor bumps and twists, my path to this point in the year was pretty much as I expected.  At least, in my professional life.

My personal life is a whole other ball of wax.  I am some place where I never thought I'd be.  Thirty years ago, I had a vision of what home and wife and family would look like.  I saw a clear path.  And now, sitting on my couch at 11:30 at night, watching Dead Poets Society yet again, typing this blog post, I can say that the road hasn't been all that easy.  In fact, it has twisted, turned, detoured, and potholed.  A few times, it completely shut down for construction.

No, I'm not feeling sorry for myself.  That's not what this is about.  It's about coming to terms with hard truths.  (Is that vague enough for you?  Unfortunately, that's about as specific as I'm going to get right now.)  Truth is not always pleasant.  In fact, truth can cause a whole lot of sleepless nights.  You can fight truth and be absolutely miserable.  Or you can accept it and make the necessary (if uncomfortable) adjustments.  

Me?  I'm somewhere between World War II and the Potsdam Agreement.  Not quite at peace, but really battle weary.  

So, disciples, this post will not be my Nobel Prize acceptance speech.  I have no wisdom to impart tonight, except for the fact that Dead Poets Society is a really damn good movie.  In some ways, I'm standing on top of my desk with Ethan Hawke, looking down at the world from a different perspective.  Not really liking what I see, but not being able to change it.

Say it with Saint Marty, "O Captain!  My Captain!"

September 29-30: My New Religion, Communism, Strike a Match

Merton discusses capitalism . . .

It is true that the materialistic society, the so-called culture that has evolved under the tender mercies of capitalism, has produced what seems to be the ultimate limit of this worldliness. And nowhere, except perhaps in the analogous society of pagan Rome, has there ever been such a flowering of cheap and petty and disgusting lusts and vanities as in the world of capitalism, where there is no evil that is not fostered and encouraged for the sake of making money. We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible, in order to cater to them with the products of our factories and printing presses and movie studios and all the rest. 

Being the son of an artist, I was born the sworn enemy of everything that could obviously be called “bourgeois,” and now I only had to dress up that aversion in economic terms and extend it to cover more ground than it had covered before—namely, to include anything that could be classified as semi-fascist, like D. H. Lawrence and many of the artists who thought they were rebels without really being so—and I had my new religion all ready for immediate use.

Warning:  I may sound like a socialist/communist in this post.

Merton has an intense distrust of capitalism.  He pins all the ills of the world on the excesses of a capitalistic society.  (I'm not too far behind him in this idea.)  Of course, Merton hasn't found religion yet.  Instead, he attaches himself to any belief besides the belief in God.  It just so happens that his belief du jour is communism.

I think all young people go through periods where they try on different coats to see which one fits them best.  I know I did.  For quite a few years in college, I thought I was a computer programmer.  Then, I studied fiction writing and was convinced that I was Flannery O'Connor reincarnated (a notion that O'Connor would have found particularly repulsive or hysterically funny--probably both).  Then, I took a poetry class at the urging of one of my mentors at the university.  I was hooked.  I wanted to be Galway Kinnell and e. e. cummings and Sharon Olds and Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Of course, having been a student of poetry now for over 25-plus years now, I know that I am NOT and will NEVER BE Kinnell or Hopkins.  Sometimes, the best I can do is Helen Steiner Rice of Hallmark card fame.  And that's okay.  I have to learn to accept things as they are.  Nothing I do can change the outcome of certain situations, no matter how hard I hope, pray, or work.

Tonight, I accepted some hard truths.  These truths made me angry and sad and confused, all at the same time, anger being the dominant emotion.  I'm still angry, but now sadness is taking over.  I expect, near midnight, I will lapse into confusion and fall asleep in that mixed state.

It has been a very long year already.  I expect that the next three months will be more of the same.  Anger.  Sadness.  Confusion.  My life isn't going the way I thought it would.  In fact, it feels as if my life is going in the exact opposite direction I want it to go.  And nothing I do or say can fix it.  I simply have to watch it happen.

You see, a person I care about deeply has doused her life in gasoline and is about to strike a match.  She is turning her back on every person and thing that used to mean something to her.  I know that in the future, one or two or six or thirteen months from now, she's going to be filled with a whole lot of regret.  By that time, it may be too late.  Her kids will have lost faith in her love, and her spouse will be unwilling to be hurt again.

I have to accept all of that.  Not easy for me to do.  But my friend is hell bent of self-destruction.  Nothing will change her mind.  Believe me, I've tried.  She's too far gone, and she sees nothing wrong in her current trajectory.  Until she ends up alone on Christmas Eve or Day.  A good possibility.  Or until she gets sick, really sick, because of the choices she's making.  Another good possibility.

Hard truths.  Difficult to accept.  But I have to.  I will continue to pray for this person.  Hope for this person.  Love this person.  That's all I can do through this dark night of the soul.

It's what God expects Saint Marty to do.

May 19: The Point of Discovery, Hard Truths, Lilac Buds

Fourteen-year-old Merton faces some hard truths . . . 

One day I was in the deserted house all by myself with Athos, Porthos, Aramis, and d'Artagnan (Athos being my favorite and, in a sense, the one into whom I tended to project myself).  The telephone rang.  I thought for a while of letting it ring and not answering it, but eventually I did.  It turned out to be a telegram for me.

At first, I could not make out the words, as the Scotch lady in the telegraph office was pronouncing them.  Then, when I did make them out, I did not believe them.

The message ran:  "Entering New York harbor.  All well."  And it came from Father, in the hospital, in London.  I tried to argue the woman at the other end of the wire into telling me that it came from my Uncle Harold, who had been travelling in Europe that year.  But she would not be argued into anything but what she saw right in front of her nose.  The telegram was signed Father, and it came from London.

I hung up the receiver and the bottom dropped out of my stomach.  I walked up and down in the silent and empty house.  I sat down in one of the big leather chairs in the smoking room.  There was nobody there.  There was nobody in the whole huge house.

I sat there in the dark, unhappy room, unable to think, unable to move, with all the innumerable elements of my isolation crowding in upon me from every side:  without a home, without a family, without a country, without a father, apparently without any friends, without any interior peace or confidence or light or understanding of my own--without God, too, without God, without heaven, without grace, without anything.  And what was happening to Father, there in London?  I was unable to think of it.

The first thing that Uncle Ben did when I entered the house at Ealing was to tell me the news with all the dramatic overtones he gave to his most important announcements.

His eyes widened and he stared at me and bared his great teeth, pronouncing every syllable with tremendous distinctness and emphasis, saying:  "Your father has a malignant tumor on the brain."

Father lay in a dark ward in the hospital.  He did not have much to say.  But it was not as bad as I had feared, from the telegram he had sent me.  Everything he said was lucid and intelligible and I was comforted, in the sense that a clearly apparent physiological cause seemed to me to exclude the thought of insanity in the strict sense.  Father was not out of his mind.  But you could already see the evil, swelling lump on his forehead.

He told me, weakly, that they were going to try and operate on him, but they were afraid they could not do very much.  Again he told me to pray.

I did not say anything about the telegram.

Leaving the hospital I knew what was going to happen.  He would lie there like that for another year, perhaps two or three years.  And then he would die--unless they first killed him on an operating table.

Since those days, doctors have found out that you can cut away whole sections of the brain, in these operations, and save lives and minds and all.  In 1929 they evidently did not yet know this.  It was Father's lot to die slowly and painfully in the years when the doctors were just reaching the point of the discovery.

Hard truths for a young person to face.  Merton knows he is going to lose his father in a slow, painful manner.  Regardless of Merton's assertion that "doctors have found out that you can cut away whole sections of the brain . . . and save lives and minds and all," a malignant brain tumor, even with today's medical advancements, is something that will change your life significantly.  Or end it.  I've seen this situation up close and personal.

I am not working today.  I took the rest of this week off from the medical office.  At the moment, the entire healthcare system is "ramping up" for full operations.  That means that lots and lots of people are going to be coming through our doors after almost two months of social distancing and isolation.  I decided I really didn't want to be around for that.  

Of course like young Merton, I have to face some hard truths.  I can't remain at home, socially distant, indefinitely.  Yes, I'm an insulin-dependent diabetic, and less likely to survive a bout of Covid-19.  But I also have to support my family and pay my bills.  Thus, I will return to work next week, masked and anxious.  I will wash my hands every 20 minutes, eat lunch in an office by myself, and avoid large groups of patients/coworkers as much as possible.  These will be be the hard truths of my life for quite some time.  

Truth isn't always pleasant.  It can wound and depress.  Yet, on my morning walk with my puppy today, I felt warm wind on my face, the sun on my neck, and I realized that I was having a great time.  I was listening to a good book (Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman), and I could smell summer in the air.  The lilac bushes in my backyard are getting some green buds despite a particularly punishing winter season.  Soon, my entire neighborhood will smell and be purple.  These are truths, too.

I will not be attending any parades this summer.  If there are fireworks, I probably won't be at those, either.  If you see me out and about, I will be wearing a face mask, as will the rest of my family.  Don't think I'm being an alarmist.  My truth is different than your truth.

For this afternoon, however, I am grateful for the miracle and truth of sunlight and coming-of-summer winds and lilac buds.  

For this, Saint Marty gives thanks.