I had to slam the book shut on the picture of Camaldoli and the bearded
hermits standing in the stone street of cells, and I went out of the library,
trying to stamp out the embers that had broken into flame, there, for an
instant, within me.
No, it was useless: I did not have a vocation, and I was not for the
cloister, for the priesthood. Had I not been told that definitely enough? Did I
have to have that beaten into my head all over again before I could believe
it?
Yet I stood in the sun outside the dining hall, waiting for the noon
Angelus, and one of the Friars was talking to me. I could not contain the
one thing that filled my heart:
“I am going to a Trappist monastery to make a retreat for Holy Week,” I
said. The things that jumped in the Friar’s eyes gave him the sort of
expression you would expect if I had said: “I am going to go and buy a
submarine and live on the bottom of the sea.”
“Don’t let them change you!” he said, with a sort of a lame smile. That
meant “Don’t go reminding the rest of us that all that penance might be
right, by getting a vocation to the Trappists.”
I said: “It would be a good thing if they did change me.”
It was a safe, oblique way of admitting what was in my heart—the desire
to go to that monastery and stay for good.
On the morning of the Saturday before Palm Sunday I got up before five,
and heard part of a Mass in the dark chapel and then had to make a run for
the train. The rain fell on the empty station straight and continuous as a
tower.
All the way down the line, in the pale, growing day, the hills were black,
and rain drenched the valley and flooded the sleeping valley towns.
Somewhere past Jamestown I took out my Breviary and said the Little
Hours, and when we got into Ohio the rain stopped.
We changed stations at Gabon, and on the fast train down to Columbus I
got something to eat, and in southern Ohio the air was drier still, and almost
clearing. Finally, in the evening, in the long rolling hills that led the way in
to Cincinnati, you could see the clouds tearing open all along the western
horizon to admit long streaks of sun.
It was an American landscape, big, vast, generous, fertile, and leading
beyond itself into limitless expanses, open spaces, the whole West. My
heart was full!
Merton knows somehow that his life is about to change forever. Instead of running for the hills like Jonah does when God tells him to go to Nineveh, Merton listens to God, gets on the train, and sets out for Kentucky. And he is overflowing with happiness.
If you can't tell, I've been having a difficult time blogging and writing recently. I've tried to write early in the morning. And in the afternoon. Late at night. Each time I sit down at the keyboard to pound out a post, exhaustion sort of overtakes me. My mind gets foggy. And it's over for the day.
Right now, it's past midnight, and I am ready to give up again. This past weekend, as part of a writing challenge with a good friend, I did get almost 20 pages of poetry written. An entire chapbook. It felt great to sort of be back in the saddle. I'm not saying every single poem I wrote was good. In fact, I'd say I've got a few stinkers in the manuscript. However, I did it.
And that fills Saint Marty's heart. For the first time in a long while.
One of my new poems . . .
for Celeste
by: Martin Achatz
I think of that first morning I held you
after a night of wind, ice, snow, the world
clear, fragile as a pane of Windexed glass.
As you settled into my elbow, I told you
my arms were forever, that you would be
part of me until my lungs gave up
their last pocket of air, my heart said
your name one last time before going silent.
There have been 7,547 mornings since,
each stitched with tiny acts of surrender,
seeing you take those necessary steps away
from that first morning, with you pressed
to my chest until our breaths, hearts joined,
and I couldn’t tell where you ended,
I began. On this morning, another necessary
letting go, you into another person’s waiting
arms, I want you to know I still hold all
your breaths, every note your heart has sung,
like constellations in the Milky Way of my body.
I think of that first morning I held you
after a night of wind, ice, snow, the world
clear, fragile as a pane of Windexed glass.
As you settled into my elbow, I told you
my arms were forever, that you would be
part of me until my lungs gave up
their last pocket of air, my heart said
your name one last time before going silent.
There have been 7,547 mornings since,
each stitched with tiny acts of surrender,
seeing you take those necessary steps away
from that first morning, with you pressed
to my chest until our breaths, hearts joined,
and I couldn’t tell where you ended,
I began. On this morning, another necessary
letting go, you into another person’s waiting
arms, I want you to know I still hold all
your breaths, every note your heart has sung,
like constellations in the Milky Way of my body.
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