Merton being thankful for friends, a teacher, and poetry . . .
Now I come to speak of the real part Columbia seems to have been
destined to play in my life in the providential designs of God. Poor
Columbia! It was founded by sincere Protestants as a college predominantly
religious. The only thing that remains of that is the university motto: In
lumine tuo videbimus lumen—one of the deepest and most beautiful lines of
the psalms. “In Thy light, we shall see light.” It is, precisely, about grace. It
is a line that might serve as the foundation stone of all Christian and
Scholastic learning, and which simply has nothing whatever to do with the
standards of education at modern Columbia. It might profitably be changed
to In lumine Randall videbimus Dewey.
Yet, strangely enough, it was on this big factory of a campus that the
Holy Ghost was waiting to show me the light, in His own light. And one of
the chief means He used, and through which he operated, was human
friendship.
God has willed that we should all depend on one another for our
salvation, and all strive together for our own mutual good and our own
common salvation. Scripture teaches us that this is especially true in the
supernatural order, in the doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ, which
flows necessarily from Christian teaching on grace.
“You are the body of Christ and members one of another.... And the eye
cannot say to the hand: I need not thy help: nor again the head to the feet, I
have no need of you.... And if one member suffer anything, all the members
suffer with it; and if one member glory all the others rejoice with it.”
So now is the time to tell a thing that I could not realize then, but which
has become very clear to me: that God brought me and a half a dozen others
together at Columbia, and made us friends, in such a way that our
friendship would work powerfully to rescue us from the confusion and the
misery in which we had come to find ourselves, partly through our own
fault, and partly through a complex set of circumstances which might be
grouped together under the heading of the “modern world,” “modern
society.” But the qualification “modern” is unnecessary and perhaps unfair.
The traditional Gospel term, “the world,” will do well enough.
All our salvation begins on the level of common and natural and ordinary
things. (That is why the whole economy of the Sacraments, for instance,
rests, in its material element, upon plain and ordinary things like bread and
wine and water and salt and oil.) And so it was with me. Books and ideas
and poems and stories, pictures and music, buildings, cities, places,
philosophies were to be the materials on which grace would work. But these
things are themselves not enough. The more fundamental instinct of fear for
my own preservation came in, in a minor sort of a way, in this strange, half-imaginary sickness which nobody could diagnose completely.
The coming war, and all the uncertainties and confusions and fears that
followed necessarily from that, and all the rest of the violence and injustice
that were in the world, had a very important part to play. All these things
were bound together and fused and vitalized and prepared for the action of
grace, both in my own soul and in the souls of at least one or two of my
friends, merely by our friendship and association together. And it fermented
in our sharing of our own ideas and miseries and headaches and perplexities
and fears and difficulties and desires and hangovers and all the rest.
I have already mentioned Mark Van Doren. It would not be exactly true
to say that he was a kind of nucleus around whom this concretion of friends
formed itself that would not be accurate. Not all of us took his courses, and
those who did, did not do so all at the same time. And yet nevertheless our
common respect for Mark’s sanity and wisdom did much to make us aware
of how much we ourselves had in common.
Perhaps it was for me, personally, more than for the others, that Mark’s
course worked in this way. I am thinking of one particular incident.
It was the fall of 1936, just at the beginning of the new school year—on
one of those first, bright, crazy days when everybody is full of ambition. It
was the beginning of the year in which Pop was going to die and my own
resistance would cave in under the load of pleasures and ambitions I was
too weak to carry: the year in which I would be all the time getting dizzy,
and in which I learned to fear the Long Island railroad as if it were some
kind of a monster, and to shrink from New York as if it were the wide-open
mouth of some burning Aztec god.
That day, I did not foresee any of this. My veins were still bursting with
the materialistic and political enthusiasms with which I had first come to
Columbia and, indeed, in line with their general direction, I had signed up
for courses that were more or less sociological and economic and historical.
In the obscurity of the strange, half-conscious semi-conversion that had
attended my retreat from Cambridge, I had tended more and more to be
suspicious of literature, poetry—the things towards which my nature drew
me—on the grounds that they might lead to a sort of futile estheticism, a
philosophy of “escape.”
This had not invoked me in any depreciation of people like Mark.
However, it had just seemed more important to me that I should take some
history course, rather than anything that was still left of his for me to take.
So now I was climbing one of the crowded stairways in Hamilton Hall to
the room where I thought this history course was to be given. I looked in to
the room. The second row was filled with the unbrushed heads of those who
every day at noon sat in the Jester editorial offices and threw paper
airplanes around the room or drew pictures on the walls.
Taller than them all, and more serious, with a long face, like a horse, and
a great mane of black hair on top of it, Bob Lax meditated on some
incomprehensible woe, and waited for someone to come in and begin to talk
to them. It was when I had taken off my coat and put down my load of
books that I found out that this was not the class I was supposed to be
taking, but Van Doren’s course on Shakespeare.
So I got up to go out. But when I got to the door I turned around again
and went back and sat down where I had been, and stayed there. Later I
went and changed everything with the registrar, so I remained in that class
for the rest of the year.
It was the best course I ever had at college. And it did me the most good,
in many different ways. It was the only place where I ever heard anything
really sensible said about any of the things that were really fundamental—
life, death, time, love, sorrow, fear, wisdom, suffering, eternity. A course in
literature should never be a course in economics or philosophy or sociology
or psychology: and I have explained how it was one of Mark’s great virtues
that he did not make it so. Nevertheless, the material of literature and
especially of drama is chiefly human acts—that is, free acts, moral acts.
And, as a matter of fact, literature, drama, poetry, make certain statements
about these acts that can be made in no other way. That is precisely why
you will miss all the deepest meaning of Shakespeare, Dante, and the rest if
you reduce their vital and creative statements about life and men to the dry,
matter-of-fact terms of history, or ethics, or some other science. They
belong to a different order.
Nevertheless, the great power of something like Hamlet, Coriolanus, or
the Purgatorio or Donne’s Holy Sonnets lies precisely in the fact that they
are a kind of commentary on ethics and psychology and even metaphysics,
even theology. Or, sometimes, it is the other way ’round, and those sciences
can serve as a commentary on these other realities, which we call plays,
poems.
Happy Thanksgiving to all my disciples out there!
Merton and Martin are pretty much in agreement here. Merton, by sheer luck, is thrown into a class where his life is changed. He meets people who will have a profound influence on him. A teacher who will shape his understanding of the world, and friends who will, eventually, lead him to his conversion and calling to poetry and religious life.
I have had all of those things. Well, I wasn't called to be a monk, but I was called into a church ministry (music) to which I've pretty much devoted a good portion of my adult life. And my Mark Van Doren was a teacher (now colleague and friend) I met in my first year of graduate school. I'll call her Professor B. Professor B directed both my Master's thesis (a collection of short fiction) and my MFA thesis (a collection of poems). She was the one who recognized the poet in me, when the idea of leading a life devoted to poetry seemed as foreign as joining the French Foreign Legion.
Poetry has, literally, saved my life so many times, In times of struggle, when I couldn't feel God anywhere, poetry has brought me into His presence. In joyful times, poetry has reminded me that God is celebrating with me. In my normal, day-to-day existence of work and teaching and home, poetry makes those tiny moments of domesticity into things holy and sacred.
Now, this day which, in the United States, is set aside for gratitude. The pandemic has altered our lives, made it impossible to gather and give thanks the way we normally do. Instead, we are expressing our love and thanks for each other by staying home. While there won't be the physical immediacy of family and friends, we can still be present. Raise each other up to the universe in praise and prayer and poetry.
My mother is in the nursing home this year. She has been there since late summer, when she fell out of bed and broke her hip. First she went to the hospital for surgery, and then, from the hospital, she was transferred to a long-term care facility. Most likely, she will never come home again. We have not been able to see her, except for a short window visit. On top of her mobility issues, she has macular degeneration and Alzheimer's, and she's extremely hard of hearing. That means she's isolated from us not only physically, but also in memory, sight, and sound.
I don't know when, or if, I will ever be able to hold my mother's hand again. Yet, I reach out to her this Thanksgiving. I say a prayer of thanks for all that she's given me. Remember all those Thanksgiving meals she cooked. Turkey. Mashed potatoes and gravy. Stuffing full of sage and onion Jell-O molds of quivering fruit. Home-made loaves of bread. Buttery corn and cranberry sauce. Pumpkin and pecan pies. All for love. All for love.
She is with me now, as I type this post. I'm not sure if I'm with her. Not sure what part of me her mind allows her to have. Maybe I'm five or six, a stubborn child who will only eat turkey and bread, no vegetables. Or maybe I'm a teenager, more interested in finishing dinner so that I can meet up with friends. Or maybe I'm an adult, handing over my infant son to her, so she can coo and rub his back until he falls asleep in her arms while I mash the potatoes for her.
There will be Thanksgiving with my mother today. In my mother. She will get her plate of turkey and stuffing. Her pecan pie. She will smile and say to the nurse who brings her dinner, "Thank you." She taught me that. To be grateful for everything you're given.
Wherever you are, whoever you are with, however you are celebrating, I wish you grace and gratitude. Memories of Thanksgivings past to sustain you, fill you with love. Peace of mind for this Thanksgiving present to satisfy your hearts hungry for togetherness. And hope for Thanksgivings yet to come to carry you forward in joy and wonder.
Saint Marty gives thanks for Professor B this day. For his friends and family. His mother. And for the poetry that binds us all together.
Pecan Pie
by: Martin Achatz
Mix eggs, sugar and Karo,
melted butter, vanilla from Mexico
in a bowl until it all runs
yellow as corn silk. Add pecans,
one-and-a-quarter cups. Fold
them into the gold syrup,
the way a farmer folds
manure into a field of hay
or my son folds a Tootsie Roll
under his tongue, plants it there,
lets it feed the furrows
of his young body. Pour this filling
into a shell, edges fluted
by my wife's hands, crimped
between thumb and forefinger
to peaks and troughs of dough.
Bake at 350 degrees.
Forty-five minutes to an hour.
You'll know when it's done.
The house will smell
brown and warm and sweet.
Dip a butter knife blade
into the center of the pie.
If it comes out hot and clean,
take the pie out of the oven. Put it
on the front porch to cool.
You can leave it there overnight.
It'll be waiting in the morning.
Cover it with a hand towel. Carry
it to your parents' house,
where your mother asks you
"Is it cold outside?"
over and over as you cut
the pie. "Yes," you tell her.
And "yes" when she asks again.
It is cold this Thanksgiving.
And, yes, pecan pie is her favorite.
Give her a large slice,
with extra Cool Whip
and a hot cup of coffee.
