Father was not afraid to express his ideas about truth and morality to anybody that seemed to need them--that is, if a real occasion arose. He did not, of course, go around interfering with everybody else's business. But once his indignation go the better of him, and he gave a piece of his mind to a shrew of a French-woman, one of those spiteful sharp-tongued bourgeoises, who was giving free expression to her hatred of one of her neighbors who very much resembled herself.
He asked her why she thought Christ had told people to love their enemies. Did she suppose God commanded this for His benefit? Did He get anything out of it that He really needed from us? Or was it not rather for our own good that he had given us this commandment? He told her that if she had any sense, she would love other people if only for the sake of the good and health and peace of her own soul, instead of tearing herself to pieces with her own envy and spitefulness. It was St. Augustine's argument, that envy and hatred try to pierce our neighbor with a sword, when the blade cannot reach him unless it first passes through our own body. I suppose Father had never read any of St. Augustine, but he would have liked him.
This incident with the shrew reminds one a little of Leon Bloy. Father had not read him either, but he would have liked him too. They had much in common, but Father shared none of Bloy's fury. If he had been a Catholic, his vocation as a lay-contemplative would certainly have developed along the same lines. For I am sure he had that kind of a vocation. But unfortunately it never really developed, because he never got to the Sacraments. However, there were in him the latent germs of the same spiritual poverty and all of Bloy's hatred of materialism and of false spiritualities and of worldly values in people who called themselves Christians.
For some reason, when Merton speaks of his father in this book, I picture my own father. I'm not sure if this association has anything to do with Owen Merton's character or just the fact that, since Merton provides no clear descriptions of his father (other than some passages about his facial hair), I fill in the physical details with those of my own dad. Or it may simply be that the word "father" in my mind is delineated by my experiences, and I am projecting them into my reading of Merton's memoir.
Yet, here I sit, on a rainy Sunday morning in late March in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in the middle of a global pandemic in the year 2020, being visited by the ghosts of two fathers--Merton's and my own. My father was born in 1927, nine years after the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, and he died in 2018, 100 years after the Spanish flu and two years before Covid-19. Owen Merton died in 1931, just four years after my father was born, and roughly 13 years after the Spanish flu outbreak. Owen was an artist. My dad was a plumber. Owen was unschooled in religion. My dad was a cradle to grave Catholic. Yet, both men had some kind of internal moral compass that was uncompromising.
Don't get me wrong. My dad was no saint, and neither was Merton's father. Owen Merton was an itinerant painter who had no problem leaving the care of his children to almost complete strangers in pursuit of his art. My dad was stridently conservative in his values, and his ideas of social responsibility bordered on (and sometimes stepped fully into) racism at times. No person is perfect, and these two fathers bear that out. And both had different responses to organized religion.
Yet again, there is no church this Sunday morning, which unsettles me a great deal, because my father and mother dragged me to Mass every weekend, forced me to fast during Lent, and made my siblings and me recite the rosary every night after dinner. You could say that my internal clock and calendar were synced with the Church. Were he alive today, my father would be restless and unsettled without Church, as well. As a child, he served as an altar boy and graduated from a Catholic high school. Up until just a few years before his death, my dad was an usher, passing the baskets down the pews every Saturday evening.
Merton's father, it seems, was aware of the teachings of Jesus Christ. The above passage seems to indicate that Owen Merton actually embraced Christian morality and put it into practice, even though he didn't prescribe to any religious denomination. Maybe that's why Merton turned out to be a monk and on the shortlist to sainthood. For Merton, religion wasn't about being IN a church. For Merton, religion was about BEING a church. Big difference. He learned that from his father.
So, both of these fathers passed along some pretty strong lessons about church and religion to their sons. It took me a while, but I finally realized that Jesus Christ was a social extremist. Believe it or not, friends, he was more radical than Bernie Sanders in his teachings. Most Christians don't see Him that way, but He was. Feed the poor. Share your wealth. Take care of the sick. Watch out for the elderly. Teach the young. Sound familiar? That's not Bernie's platform. That's Gospel. Merton got that from his dad. I, because my dad dragged me to church every weekend and holy day, got it, too, although my father probably wouldn't admit to Jesus' progressiveness.
So, here I sit, working a check-in table at the hospital on a Sunday morning, haunted by two guys, one long dead, the other still very much present in memory. For the third week in a row, the churches are empty. People are "attending" worship online. Me? I'm thinking that Jesus would probably be sitting at a check-in table at a hospital. Or bringing sick people to the ER. Or dropping groceries off on front porches. Or multiplying masks and gloves. He'd be pretty darn busy. Jesus learned that from His father.
Saint Marty hopes his kids learn some good lessons from him, too.
Be well and healthy, everyone. Amen.
Sister by Jon Cattapan
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