Merton goes to Catholic Mass for the first time . . .
Sometime in August, I finally answered an impulsion that had been working on me for a long time, livery Sunday, I had been going out on Long Island to spend the day with the same girl who had brought me back in such a hurry from Lax’s town Olean. But every week, as Sunday came around, I was filled with a growing desire to stay in the city and go to some kind of a church.
At first, I had vaguely thought I might try to find some Quakers, and go and sit with them. There still remained in me something of the favorable notion about Quakers that I had picked up as a child, and which the reading of William Penn had not been able to overcome.
But, naturally enough, with the work I was doing in the library, a stronger drive began to assert itself, and I was drawn much more imperatively to the Catholic Church. Finally the urge became so strong that I could not resist it. I called up my girl and told her that I was not coming out that week-end, and made up my mind to go to Mass for the first time in my life.
The first time in my life! That was true. I had lived for several years on the continent, I had been to Rome, I had been in and out of a thousand Catholic cathedrals and churches, and yet I had never heard Mass. If anything had ever been going on in the churches I visited, I had always fled, in wild Protestant panic.
I will not easily forget how I felt that day. First, there was this sweet, strong, gentle, clean urge in me which said: “Go to Mass! Go to Mass!” It was something quite new and strange, this voice that seemed to prompt me, this firm, growing interior conviction of what I needed to do. It had a suavity, a simplicity about it that I could not easily account for. And when I gave in to it, it did not exult over me, and trample me down in its raging haste to land on its prey, but it carried me forward serenely and with purposeful direction.
That does not mean that my emotions yielded to it altogether quietly. I was really still a little afraid to go to a Catholic church, of set purpose, with all the other people, and dispose myself in a pew, and lay myself open to the mysterious perils of that strange and powerful thing they called their “Mass.”
God made it a very beautiful Sunday. And since it was the first time I had ever really spent a sober Sunday in New York, I was surprised at the clean, quiet atmosphere of the empty streets uptown. The sun was blazing bright. At the end of the street, as I came out the front door, I could see a burst of green, and the blue river and the hills of Jersey on the other side.
Broadway was empty. A solitary trolley came speeding down in front of Barnard College and past the School of Journalism. Then, from the high, grey, expensive tower of the Rockefeller Church, huge bells began to boom. It served very well for the eleven o’clock Mass at the little brick Church of Corpus Christi, hidden behind Teachers College on 121st Street.
How bright the little building seemed. Indeed, it was quite new. The sun shone on the clean bricks. People were going in the wide open door, into the cool darkness and, all at once, all the churches of Italy and France came back to me. The richness and fulness of the atmosphere of Catholicism that I had not been able to avoid apprehending and loving as a child, came back to me with a rush: but now I was to enter into it fully for the first time. So far, I had known nothing but the outward surface.
It was a gay, clean church, with big plain windows and white columns and pilasters and a well-lighted, simple sanctuary. Its style was a trifle eclectic, but much less perverted with incongruities than the average Catholic church in America. It had a kind of a seventeenth-century, oratorian character about it, though with a sort of American colonial tinge of simplicity. The blend was effective and original: but although all this affected me, without my thinking about it, the thing that impressed me most was that the place was full, absolutely full. It was full not only of old ladies and broken-down gentlemen with one foot in the grave, but of men and women and children young and old—especially young: people of all classes, and all ranks on a solid foundation of workingmen and -women and their families.
I found a place that I hoped would be obscure, over on one side, in the back, and went to it without genuflecting, and knelt down. As I knelt, the first thing I noticed was a young girl, very pretty too, perhaps fifteen or sixteen, kneeling straight up and praying quite seriously. I was very much impressed to see that someone who was young and beautiful could with such simplicity make prayer the real and serious and principal reason for going to church. She was clearly kneeling that way because she meant it, not in order to show off, and she was praying with an absorption which, though not the deep recollection of a saint, was serious enough to show that she was not thinking at all about the other people who were there.
What a revelation it was, to discover so many ordinary people in a place together, more conscious of God than of one another: not there to show off their hats or their clothes, but to pray, or at least to fulfil a religious obligation, not a human one. For even those who might have been there for no better motive than that they were obliged to be, were at least free from any of the self-conscious and human constraint which is never absent from a Protestant church where people are definitely gathered together as people, as neighbors, and always have at least half an eye for one another, if not all of both eyes.
Since it was summer time, the eleven o’clock Mass was a Low Mass: but I had not come expecting to hear music. Before I knew it, the priest was in the sanctuary with the two altar boys, and was busy at the altar with something or other which I could not see very well, but the people were praying by themselves, and I was engrossed and absorbed in the thing as a whole: the business at the altar and the presence of the people. And still I had not got rid of my fear. Seeing the latecomers hastily genuflecting before entering the pew, I realized my omission, and got the idea that people had spotted me for a pagan and were just waiting for me to miss a few more genuflections before throwing me out or, at least, giving me looks of reproof.
Soon we all stood up. I did not know what it was for. The priest was at the other end of the altar, and, as I afterwards learned, he was reading the Gospel. And then the next thing I knew there was someone in the pulpit.
It was a young priest, perhaps not much over thirty-three or -four years old. His face was rather ascetic and thin, and its asceticism was heightened with a note of intellectuality by his horn-rimmed glasses, although he was only one of the assistants, and he did not consider himself an intellectual, nor did anyone else apparently consider him so. But anyway, that was the impression he made on me: and his sermon, which was simple enough, did not belie it.
It was not long: but to me it was very interesting to hear this young man quietly telling the people in language that was plain, yet tinged with scholastic terminology, about a point in Catholic Doctrine. How clear and solid the doctrine was: for behind those words you felt the full force not only of Scripture but of centuries of a unified and continuous and consistent tradition. And above all, it was a vital tradition: there was nothing studied or antique about it. These words, this terminology, this doctrine, and these convictions fell from the lips of the young priest as something that were most intimately part of his own life. What was more, I sensed that the people were familiar with it all, and that it was also, in due proportion, part of their life also: it was just as much integrated into their spiritual organism as the air they breathed or the food they ate worked in to their blood and flesh.
What was he saying? That Christ was the Son of God. That, in Him, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, God, had assumed a Human Nature, a Human Body and Soul, and had taken Flesh and dwelt amongst us, full of grace and truth: and that this Man, Whom men called the Christ, was God. He was both Man and God: two Natures hypostatically united in one Person or suppositum, one individual Who was a Divine Person, having assumed to Himself a Human Nature. And His works were the works of God: His acts were the acts of God. He loved us: God, and walked among us: God, and died for us on the Cross, God of God, Light of Light, True God of True God.
Jesus Christ was not simply a man, a good man, a great man, the greatest prophet, a wonderful healer, a saint: He was something that made all such trivial words pale into irrelevance. He was God. But nevertheless He was not merely a spirit without a true body, God hiding under a visionary body: He was also truly a Man, born of the Flesh of the Most Pure Virgin, formed of her Flesh by the Holy Spirit. And what He did, in that Flesh, on earth, Fie did not only as Man but as God. He loved us as God, He suffered and died for us, God.
And how did we know? Because it was revealed to us in the Scriptures and confirmed by the teaching of the Church and of the powerful unanimity of Catholic Tradition from the First Apostles, from the first Popes and the early Fathers, on down through the Doctors of the Church and the great scholastics, to our own day. De Fide Divina. If you believed it, you would receive light to grasp it, to understand it in some measure. If you did not believe it, you would never understand: it would never be anything but scandal or folly.
And no one can believe these things merely by wanting to, of his own volition. Unless he receive grace, an actual light and impulsion of the mind and will from God, he cannot even make an act of living faith. It is God Who gives us faith, and no one cometh to Christ unless the Father draweth him.
Unlike Merton, I have been attending Catholic Mass ever since I can remember. All of the things that strike him as revelatory have been a part of my life since infancy. The whole Jesus narrative is sort of part of my DNA. I think every Christian, Catholic or Protestant, is drawn to certain parts of the life of Christ. For some, it's the Passion--from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday--and all the accompanying bells and smoke.
For me, it's always been about the Nativity--God taking on a human nature. Body and soul. Christmas. Here I sit, staring at the tree glowing in the corner of my living room. All of my life, I have loved every narrative element of the birth of Christ, from the angel appearing to Mary, to the shepherds scared shitless by the heavenly host. It all fills me with joy. Every year.
I think the part that I find the most moving in the Nativity is the idea of God becoming human. Taking on a body, being victim to all the indignities that plague each one of us on a daily basis. Jesus Chris got diaper rash. Went through puberty. Had a favorite color and food. Maybe fell in love with a neighbor girl. Suffered heartbreak. And died.
I'm sipping a glass of wine right now, thinking about two people who used to love each other. They were together, day and night, for the better part of four years. And now they're not. It has been painful to witness. Instead of remembering the joy and happiness of their time together, being thankful for it, they hurt each other.
I suppose that's all part of being human, as well. That impulse to inflict pain on other people who have caused us pain. Now, I can't imagine Jesus doing that. Even though he was human, Jesus had a God part, too. And that God part probably gave him greater compassion and understanding of the human condition. And he forgave. That's sort of what he came into the world to do.
I don't see a whole lot of forgiveness going on between these two people at the moment. That makes me incredibly sad. They are stuck in painful humanity, forgetting that, at some point in their lives, they would look into each other's eyes and see something beautiful. Something divine. Love.
That's the part of the Christmas story I hold onto the most. God loved us so much that he became human. Being human, he endured suffering. Accepted it. There's the old saying that grief is the price we pay for love. Or something like that. If you love something or someone, you will eventually experience its loss. It's inevitable.
So, tonight, I lift up these two people who are experiencing the flipside of love. I wish happiness for the both of them, and that they, eventually, remember the joy they used to bring to each other. Being in quarantine has given me a lot of time to reflect on things like this. I truly believe that love conquers all manner of hurt. That's what the Christmas story is all about.
A few snapshots from my day:
- My beautiful poet friend Amanda reached out this afternoon to see how I am doing. Amanda is enduring her own struggles with sadness and depression. Yet, she wanted to make sure I am okay.
- I got takeout Thai food from one of my favorite restaurants tonight. I ordered it, drove to the restaurant, called when I got there. The beautiful owner of the restaurant brought out our food. Put it in our backseat. After she closed the door, she stood by the car window and said, "You guys doing okay?"
- Working today for the library, I was able to send out some emails to some beautiful poets. I'm creating a poetry event in celebration of Inauguration Day.
- I was able to get some work done on my Christmas essay. Don't know if it's going to be beautiful or not, but it felt good to be writing again.
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