By 1920 I could read and write and draw. I drew a picture of the house, and everybody sitting under the pine trees, on a blanket, on the grass, and sent it to Pop in the mail. He lived at Douglaston, which was about five miles away. But most of the time I drew pictures of boats, ocean liners with many funnels and hundreds of portholes, and waves all around as jagged as a saw, and the air full of "v's" for the sea-gulls.
Things were stimulated by the momentous arrival of my New Zealand grandmother, who had come from the Antipodes to visit her scattered children in England and America, as soon as the war had ended. I think she brought one of my aunts along with her, but I was most of all impressed by Granny. She must have talked to me a great deal, and asked me many questions and told me a great number of things, and though there are few precise details I remember about that visit, the general impression she left was one of veneration and awe--and love. She was very good and kind, and there was nothing effusive and overwhelming about her affection. I have no precise memory of what she looked like, except that she wore dark clothes, grey and dark brown, and had glasses and grey hair and spoke quietly and earnestly. She had been a teacher, like her husband, my New Zealand grandfather.
The clearest thing I remember about her was the way she put salt on her oatmeal at breakfast. Of this I am certain: it made a very profound impression on me. Of one other thing I am less certain, but it is in itself much more important: she taught me the Lord's Prayer. Perhaps I had been taught to say the "Our Father" before, by my earthly father. I never used to say it. But evidently Granny asked me one night if I had said my prayers, and it turned out that I did not know the "Our Father," so she taught it to me. After that I did not forget it, even though I went for years without saying it at all.
It seems strange that Father and Mother, who were concerned almost to the point of scrupulosity about keeping the minds of their sons uncontaminated by error and mediocrity and ugliness and sham, had not bothered to give us any formal religious training. The only explanation I have is the guess that Mother must have had strong views on the subject. Possibly she considered any organized religion below the standard of intellectual perfection she demanded of any child of hers., We never went to church in Flushing.
In fact, I remember having an intense desire to go to church one day, but we did not go. It was Sunday. Perhaps it was Easter Sunday, probably in 1920. From across the fields, and beyond the red farmhouse of our neighbor, I could see the spire of St. George's church, above the trees. The sound of the churchbells came to us across the bright fields. I was playing in front of the house, and stopped to listen. Suddenly, all the birds began to sing in the trees above my head, and the sound of birds singing and churchbells ringing lifted up my heart with joy. I cried out to my father:
"Father, all the birds are in their church."
And then I said: "Why don't we go to church?"
My father looked up and said: "We will."
"Now?" said I.
"No, it is too late. But we will go some other Sunday."
And yet Mother did go somewhere, sometimes, on Sunday mornings, to worship God. I doubt that Father went with her; he probably stayed at home to take care of me and John Paul, for we never went. But anyway, Mother went to the Quakers, and sat with them in their ancient meeting house. This was the only kind of religion for which she had any use, and I suppose it was taken for granted that, when we grew older, we might be allowed to tend in that direction too. Probably no influence would have been brought to bear on us to do so. We would have been left to work it out more or less for ourselves.
I find conversion stories really compelling--how a person is brought to an awareness of some kind of Higher Power. It seems Merton, from a very young age, yearned for some kind of connection with the divine. Being a cradle Catholic myself, I don't ever recall not having an awareness of God in my life. In fact, some of my earliest memories involve my whole family--father, mother, and siblings--getting on our knees after dinner and reciting the rosary. My father always intoned the prayers, quickly and with a sense of surety, like he was talking directly into God's ear.
Therefore, I don't have a conversion story for myself. I have specific moments in my life when I've felt closer to God than other moments. For example, I remember one very dark Easter night when I felt pretty abandoned, bordering on despair. I was alone in my house, and I grabbed a large handful of sleeping pills. Getting on my knees, I started talking to God. Actually, I'm pretty sure that I was cursing Him, calling Him every dirty name that I could think of. I told Him that if He didn't give a shit about me, I didn't give a shit about Him. I had every intention of swallowing each pill that I was holding in my fist. I had a bottle of water in my other hand. And I kept cursing and crying and cursing.
I woke up the next morning, still on my knees beside the bed. The pills were still in my fist. They were sweaty and wet. Through the window curtains, a bright blade of sunlight was streaming. It reached across the floor and bed, directly into my eyes. I lifted my head up and stared at the finger of brightness for a really long time. The rest of the room was still in darkness, but there was a thick, peaceful stillness in the air. Something had changed, and I knew that I had almost made a terrible mistake the night before.
An angel named Clarence didn't appear and take me on a journey of the world without me in it. But God was in the room with me that morning, reminding me that I wasn't alone. That He had my back. It wasn't anything physical. No invisible arms around my shoulders. No heavenly voice in my ears. I just . . . didn't feel alone any more. I felt uplifted. Alive.
You may not believe this story. You don't have to. But I'm still here, almost 15 years later. Still in the fight. Still cursing God sometimes. But I know that I am not alone. Will never be alone. Hope will always find me, like sunlight in a dark room.
In his life, Saint Marty has been saved, over and over and over.
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