Merton visits his brother . . .
Meanwhile, I would go upstate. The best thing I could think of was to join Lax and Rice and Gerdy and Gibney and the red-headed Southerner Jim Knight who were all living at the cottage on the hill over Olean. But on the way, I went through Ithaca to see my brother at Cornell.
Perhaps this was the last time I would see John Paul before I entered the novitiate. I could not tell.
This was the year he was supposed to graduate from Cornell, but it turned out that things had gone wrong, and he was not graduating after all. The bored, lost, perplexed expression that wrinkled his forehead, the restlessness of his walk, and the joyless noisiness of his laughter told me all I needed to know about my brother’s college career. I recognized all the tokens of the spiritual emptiness that had dogged my own steps from Cambridge to Columbia.
He had a big second-hand Buick in which he drove up and down all day under the heavy-hanging branches of the campus trees. His life was a constant reckless peregrination back and forth between the college and the town in the valley below it, from his classes to Willard Straight Hall to sit on the terrace with the co-eds and drink sodas in the sun, and look at the vast, luminous landscape as bright and highly colored as a plate in the National Geographic Magazine. He wandered from the university library to his rooms in the town, and thence to the movies, and thence to all those holes in the wall whose names I have forgotten or never knew, where Cornell students sit around tables in a dull, amber semi-darkness and fill the air with their noise and the smoke of their cigarettes and the din of their appalling wit.
I only stayed with him at Ithaca a couple of days, and when I got up in the morning to go to Mass and Communion, he came down and knelt with me and heard Mass, and watched me go to Communion. He told me he had been talking to the chaplain of the Catholic students, but I could not make out whether his real attraction was the faith, or the fact that the chaplain was interested in flying. And John Paul himself, as it turned out, was going down most days to the Ithaca airport and learning to fly a plane.
After we had had breakfast, he went back to the campus to take an examination in some such subject as Oriental history or Russian Literature, and I got on a bus that would take me to Elmira where I would get the train to Olean.
Merton recognizes himself in his little brother, John Paul. John Paul is going through the motions of being a college student. Class. Dorm. Library. Bars. Coeds. I teach kids like Merton's brother all the time. They fill their lives with all kinds of busyness, because that's what college students do. But, for a lot of them, there is really no sense of direction or purpose. There's simply something missing.
Now, I'm not saying all college students are spiritually dead if they don't find Jesus. I'm saying that most people walk through these kinds of spiritual deserts at some point in their lives. They either lose their way or never had a way to begin with. This situation often occurs in college, where young people go to find themselves and their futures.
But grown adults are not immune to this desert wandering, either. A person very close to me has been lost in the sand for close to three or more years now. She thinks she sees a path to happiness, but I don't see a whole lot of joy in her. Her happiness seems fraught with a lot of tears and anger and instability, for herself and her family. And she hasn't even arrived at her destination yet.
If she reads this post and recognizes herself, she won't agree with me. There's a certain kind of denial, especially in people with addictive personalities, that pulls a veil between reality and understanding. The alcoholic says, "Beer doesn't count." The prescription drug addict says, "I have terrible back pain." The sex addict says, "It's my life, my body, my choice." It's a way of justifying a pretty empty existence. Replacing the Higher Power with a bottle or pill or flesh.
The result is always the same, eventually. Shame. Sadness. Emptiness again. Then the cycle starts all over. The thrill of the pill. Joy of the drink. Excitement of the touch. Then, when that jolt of joy is over--shame, sadness, and emptiness returns.
It's only when the person recognizes and acknowledges this destructive cycle, stands at the lip of the hole and really sees the hole, that something will change. Until that time, it's just, as Merton says above, a spiritual emptiness. And the people around that desert hermit do one of two things: suffer or move on. Children cease to trust. Spouses cease to love. Friends cease to friend.
I'm looking for a positive way to end this post. The path's a little unclear to me. I know that nothing is impossible. As a Christian, I cling to hope. It's sort of the point of the whole Jesus narrative. Salvation after darkness. Resurrection after death.
If the desert wanderer in my life is reading this post right now--or if you're a desert wanderer yourself--I'm praying for you. Pray for you every day. That's all I have left to give you. I'm tired. Worn down. I have to make the choice to be happy. Really happy--not based on a person or bottle or pill. You have that choice, too.
Saint Marty wishes you happiness. True happiness that lasts, fills that hole. Forever.
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