Meanwhile, at home, my education was progressing along the lines laid down by some progressive method that Mother had read about in one of those magazines. She answered an advertisement that carried an oval portrait of some bearded scholar with a pince-nez, and received from Baltimore a set of books and some charts and even a small desk and blackboard. The idea was that the smart modern child was to be turned loose amid this apparatus, and allowed to develop spontaneously into a midget university before reaching the age of ten.
The ghost of John Stuart Mill must have glided up and down the room with a sigh of gratification as I opened the desk and began. I forget what came of it all, except that one night I was sent to bed early for stubbornly spelling "which" without the first "h": "w-i-c-h." I remember brooding about this as an injustice. "What do they think I am, anyway?" After all, I was still only five years old.
Still, I retain no grudge against the fancy method or the desk that went with it. Maybe that was where my geography book came from--the favorite book of my childhood. I was so fond of playing prisoner's base all over those maps that I wanted to become a sailor. I was only too eager for the kind of foot-loose and unstable life I was soon to get into.
My second best book confirmed me in this desire. This was a collection of stories called the Greek Heroes., It was more than I could do to read the Victorian version of these Greek myths for myself, but Father read them aloud, and I learned of Theseus and the Minotaur, of the Medusa, of Perseus and Andromeda. Jason sailed to a far land, after the Golden Fleece. Theseus returned victorious, but forgot to change the black sails, and the King of Athens threw himself down from the rock, believing that his son was dead. In those days I learned the name Hesperides, and it was from these things that I unconsciously built up the vague fragments of a religion and of a philosophy, which remained hidden and implicit in my acts, and which, in due time, were to assert themselves in a deep and all-embracing attachment to my own judgment and my own will and a constant turning away from subjection, towards the freedom of my own ever-changing horizons.
In a sense, this was intended as the fruit of my early training. Mother wanted me to be independent, and not to run with the herd. I was to be original, individual, I was to have a definite character and ideals of my own. I was not to be an article thrown together, on the common bourgeois patter, on everybody else's assembly line.
If we had continued as we had begun, and if John Paul and I had grown up in that house, probably this Victorian-Greek complex would have built itself up gradually, and we would have turned into good-mannered and earnest sceptics, polite, intelligent, and perhaps even in some sense useful. We might have become successful authors, or editors of magazines, professors at small and progressive colleges. The way would have been all smooth and perhaps I would never have ended up as a monk.
But it is not yet the time to talk about that happy consummation, the thing for which I most thank and praise God, and which is of all things the ultimate paradoxical fulfillment of my mother's ideas for me--the last thing she would ever have dreamed of: the boomerang of all her solicitude for an individual development.
Nothing in Merton's description of his childhood education indicates the trajectory of his adult life. His parents, bohemian in their life choices and vocations, set out to raise their elder son to be independent, skeptical, and questioning. His faith was to be in himself and his own intellectual and artistic capacities. The Christian God was part of the mythological pantheon of Perseus and Medusa, an attempt by the human race to understand the mysteries of the universe. Organized religion was akin to capitalism--a way to control the unwashed masses of the world.
Of course, everything in this description also hints at Merton's eventual monkish vocation. He is fascinated by the world and its stories. He clings to narratives that place his experiences in larger contexts. The Greek heroes he loves to read about are merely precursors to the ultimate hero of his life--Jesus Christ. The Minotaur is a stand-in for Lucifer and Eden's serpent. Really, it's all about a grasping toward the infinite.
I think that's why I was drawn to poetry. As I said in a previous post, I was raised with an awareness of God in my life, unlike Merton. God was spoon fed to me. Having had this divine diet my whole life, I felt the stories about angels and multiplying fish and resurrections become sort of commonplace. They lost their miraculous quality. When I discovered writing and poetry, I was able to look at the world differently. Notice the everyday miracles more fully. In a sense, poetry gave me back my religion.
This morning, I woke up early, even though I'm on vacation. I stumbled to my kitchen table and began fleshing out a poem that I've been working on. It's a poem for my friend's funeral on Friday. She asked me to write something for the occasion a long time ago. I've had scribblings of the poem in my journal for some time, but I never finished it. I think I got superstitious about the task. You see, I've been my family's poet laureate for some time. When momentous things happen--weddings and funerals and baptisms--I write poems. In the past five years, I've written several funeral and wedding poems.
Here's where the superstitious side of me takes over. I don't like writing a funeral poem for a person who is still alive. To me, that's akin to having your name on a gravestone in a cemetery, your birth date chiseled into the marble, followed by a dash and a blank space. It creeps me out. It's a little too close to final. When my sister died of lymphoma of the brain, my family purchased a cremation stone large enough to contain her cremains and my parents' cremains, as well. And my parents' names went on the stone, birth dates and all. Within a few years, my father passed away. (Granted, he was in his nineties, but I still have this idea of that gravestone sort of calling my dad home prematurely.)
So, I don't finish funeral poems until after a person dies. It's bad luck. It would make me feel as though I'm wishing mortality on a person I love if I have an elegy in a folder, waiting for the occasion to read it. Plus, I need the immediacy of emotion to write a tribute to a person I've lost. For me, it helps in my grieving process. I'm able to wrap my mind around the absence better, manage it.
That's why poetry and religion are sort of tied together in my head and heart. They both help me understand experiences that are shot through with mystery. As Gerard Manley Hopkins put it, "The world is charged with the grandeur of God. / It will flame out, like shining from shook foil."
Saint Marty was wrestling with God's shook foil for a while this morning.
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