March 30-31: Most Remarkable People, Doublespeak, Nostalgia

Merton writes about the Christmas of 1926 with some remarkable people . . .

In the winter of 1926 Father went to Murat.  Murat is in the Cantal, the old Province of Auvergne, a Catholic province.  It is in the mountains of central France, green mountains, old volcanoes.  The valleys are full of rich pastures and the mountains are heavy with fir trees or raise their green domes into the sky, bare of woods, covered with grass.  The people of this land are Celts, mostly.  The Auvergnats have been more or less laughed at, in French tradition, for their simplicity and rusticity.  They are very stolid people, but very good people.

At Murat, Father boarded with a family who had a little house, a sort of a small farm on the slope of one of the steep hills outside the town, and I went up there to spend the Christmas holidays, that year.

Murat was a wonderful place.  It was deep in snow, and the houses with their snow-covered roofs relieved the grey and blue and slate-dark patter of the buildings crowded together on the sides of these hills.  The town huddled at the foot of a rock crowned by a colossal statue of the Immaculate Conception, which seemed to me, at the time, to be too big, and to bespeak too much religious enthusiasm.  By now I realize that it did not indicate any religious excess at all.  These people wanted to say in a very obvious way that they loved Our Lady, who should indeed be loved and revered, as a Queen of great power and a Lady of immense goodness and mercy, mighty in her intercession for us before the throne of God, tremendous in the glory of her sanctity and her fullness of grace as Mother of God.  For she loves the children of God, who are born into the world with the image of God in their souls, and her powerful love is forgotten, and it is not understood, in the blindness and foolishness of the world.

However, I did not bring up the subject of Murat in in order to talk about the statue, but about M. and Mme. Privat.  They were the people with whom we boarded, and long before we got to Murat, when the train was climbing up the snowy valley, from Aurillac, on the other side of the Puy du Cantal, Father was telling me.  "Wait until you see the Privats."

In a way, they were to be among the most remarkable people I ever knew.  

Any person who knows me knows that Christmas is my jam.  Therefore, I love Merton's description of Murat in deep snow during the yuletide season.  And the huge statue of the Virgin Mary towering over the entire town.  It speaks to my Catholic childhood, where the walls were adorned with pictures of the Sacred Heart and a statue of the Blessed Mother looked down on family dinners from her perch on top of the china cabinet.

In this time of pandemic, I find my mind retreating to these simpler times, when life wasn't a daily struggle.  Even before Covid-19 entered the global consciousness, my life had become difficult in many ways.  Now, facing a kind of plague of Biblical proportions, I feel like everything that I thought was important and consequential is being stripped away.  Each day brings one less thing, one less comfort.

This morning, when I got to the hospital to report to work, I had to stand in line.  At the front of the line, I had to answer a series of questions ("Have you been experiencing fever or respiratory symptoms in the past week?" and "Have you traveled outside the Upper Peninsula in the past two weeks?" and "Have you been in contact with anyone who has been outside of the Upper Peninsula in the past two weeks?")  And then entered another line to have my temperature taken.  Only after passing this screening was I able to get my badge scanned and enter the building.

It was surreal, as if I was living in some kind of police state.  Now, I know that all this is being done in the interest of public safety, but that knowledge doesn't make this newest change any easier.  And a new (or old) language has entered the public domain, one that Orwell identified in 1948:  doublespeak.  Messages layered in double-negatives.  Announcements made and then minutes later retracted, rescinded, revised, or revoked.  This is the new normal.

That is why I allow myself to indulge in nostalgia these days.  Yes, the old days were not all sunshine and rainbows.  There was still poverty and racial injustice and homophobia and xenophobia and war and pestilences.  There hasn't been a time since Adam and Eve walked out of the Garden (metaphorically or literally, depending on your belief system) that human history hasn't been rife with these plagues, physical and existential. 

For tonight, however, I hold onto memories, like Christmases of the past.  My daughter's first Christmas.  She was twenty days old.  Fit into my elbow and slept there like a beautiful gift.  I hold moments like that close to me right now.  Dip into it like fresh water from a cold well.

Saint Marty wishes you all beauty and rest.

March 29: Truth and Morality, My Father, Sunday Morning

More on the morality of Merton's father . . .

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

March 29: The Future, In My Face, Poem from "Kyrie"

Right now, I try not to think too much about the future.  The furthest I allow myself to think of the future is this:  what is for dinner tonight?

I am not being an ostrich, sticking my head in the sand.  I am fully engaged in what is going on in the world.  Don't have a choice about it.  I'm a teacher and healthcare worker and church musician, professions that have been impacted greatly by this pandemic.  Reality is in my face all day, every day.

Being a poet, I also grapple with the truth of this crisis.  That's what poets have been doing since the beginning of time.  Homer dealt with the Trojan War and its aftermath.  Thomas Nashe wrote about the Black Plague, that killed 30% to 50% of the world's population.  (Chaucer grew up during the time of the Black Plague.)  Walt Whitman dealt with the Civil War in the United States  So did Emily Dickinson, although she did it slant.  Poets stare truth directly in the face.

So, that is what I am doing.  I'm dealing with the daily truths I encounter.  I write about them.  Wrestle with them.  Kick them out of my head.  Invite them back inside.  

But Saint Marty is thinking about dinner right now.

A poem from Kyrie about war and pandemic and thinking about the future . . . 

from Kyrie

by:  Ellen Bryant Voigt

Dear Mattie, Pug says even a year of camp

would not help most of us so why not now.

Tomorrow we take a train to New York City,

board a freighter there.  You know how the logs

are flushed through the long flume at Hodnett's Mill,

the stream flooding the sluice, the cut pines

crowding and pushing and rushing, and then

the narrow chute opens onto the pond?

I'll feel like that, once we're out to sea

and seeing the world.  I need to say

I've saved a bit, and you should also have

my Grandpa's watch--tell Fan that I said so.

Keep busy, pray for me, go on with Life,

and put your mind to a wedding in the yard--

Thanks to my sister-in-law for my new mask

March 26, 27, 28: Abundance of the Heart, My Puppy, Saint Juno

Merton writing about how he learned about religion as a child . . .

There was also a Catholic chapel in the Lycee, but it was falling into ruins and the glass was out of most of the windows.  Nobody ever saw the inside of it, because it was locked up tight.  I suppose back in the days when the Lycee was built the Catholics had managed, at the cost of several years of patient effort, to get this concession out of the government people who were erecting the school:  but in the long run it did not do them much good.

The only really valuable religious and moral training I ever got as a child came to me from my father, not systematically, but here and there and more or less spontaneously, in the course of ordinary conversations.  Father never applied himself, of set purpose, to teach me religion.  But if something spiritual was on his mind, it came out more or less naturally.  And this is the kind of religious teaching, or any other kind of teaching, that has the most effect.  "A good man out of the good treasure of his heart, bringeth forth good fruit, and an evil man out of the evil treasure bringeth forth that which is evil.  For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh."

And it is precisely this speech "out of the abundance of the heart" that makes an impression and produces an effect in other people.  We give ear and pay at least a partially respectful attention to anyone who is really sincerely convinced of what he is saying, no matter what it is, even if it is opposed to our own ideas.

I have not the slightest idea what the little pasteur told us about the Pharisee and the Publican, but I shall never forget a casual remark Father happened to make, in which he told me of St. Peter's betrayal of Christ, and how, hearing the cock crow, Peter went out and wept bitterly.  I forget how it came up, and what the context was that suggested it:  we were just talking casually, standing in the hall of the flat we had taken on the Place de la Condamine.

I have never lost the vivid picture I got, at that moment, of Peter going out and weeping bitterly.  I wonder how I ever managed to forget, for so many years, the understanding I acquired at that moment of how St. Peter felt, and of what his betrayal meant to him.

Greetings from my Saturday morning.  Usually, pre-pandemic, I would be choosing and practicing the music I would be playing for Mass this evening and worship tomorrow at one of the other churches for which I play.  In a lot of ways, music has been religion for most of my life.  Merton learned from his father, and I learned from sitting on an organ bench as a young adult.  It wasn't until I had to pay attention to liturgy and Gospel readings as a church musician that I really got it, that it sank through the thick bone in my head.

And now, in this piece of history in which I'm living right now, I am learning how to cope from a another source:  my puppy, Juno.  She is a mini Australian shepherd, and every minute of her life is about joy and finding joy.  So, for this post, I am going to let Juno take over the keyboard.  I figure, out of the abundance of her canine heart, she can teach us all a little about how to appreciate what we have.  Here is Juno, in her own words:

I love this blue twisty thing, with its bumps and knots.  It makes my teeth feel so good when I bite it, and the two-leggeds don't mind.  They don't get all barky at me if I sit in the middle of the floor and gnaw and gnaw and gnaw.

What is that?  It's something outside, high-pitched.  One of the two-leggeds just made sounds like "pring" and "irds" or something like that.  I don't understand everything they bark at each other.  But it seems like the irds are the ones making that high-pitched sounds because it is pring outside.  And the two-leggeds don't seem excited about it.  They don't go outside even though it's warm and full of good smells and that bright ball up above is bouncing in the big blue.

I love that bright ball in the blue.  I want to chew it, feel it against my tongue. It hurts to look at it, but I think it must taste wonderful, like my treats, but better.  Warmer, softer.  Like when I sink my teeth into the male two-legged's toe, and he barks at me.  But that soft part of him in my mouth makes me so happy.  As if I've caught something small and alive and wriggling running through the white piles outside.

I go to the thing with the gold knob and scratch it.  The two-leggeds ignore me.  I scratch again.  The two-leggeds ignore me.  I need to go out and see the bright ball and taste the air.  I look at the two-leggeds.  They don't move.  I go to the middle of the room, spread my back legs, and squat.  

The male two-legged jumps up and scoops me off the floor.  He rushes to the thing with the gold knob and pulls it open.  He puts a leash on me, and soon I am standing on the stone ground outside.

I am surrounded by smells and sounds.  I put my snout up and sniff deeply.  There's dirt and rot and water and mud and the bright ball in the blue and the high-pitched irds.  The two-leggeds said this is pring.  I love pring.  I want to roll in pring, drive it into my back and belly.  I want to carry it around with me forever.

I bark.  It sounds so good, I bark again.  The sound fills the air.  I want the irds and the bright ball to know I'm out here.  I bark again and again.  The male two-legged says "pee" and tugs the leash.

How can he not be on the ground, rolling in pring?  How can he just stand there and not raise his face and bark with me?  I bark at him, pull him toward a pool of mud.  He pulls me back.  I bark at him again, grab the leash in my mouth.  He pulls me back.  I pull.  He pulls.  I pull.  He pulls.  What a great pring game!

Finally, the male two-legged scoops me up again.  I lick and nip at his face.  He puts me on top of one of the big white piles.  "Pee," he says.

I can see so much more.  I am closer to the bright ball, the irds.  I can smell something in the air.  Something new.  It's like when the female two-legged makes light with the stick.  She takes the stick and makes light and then puts the light on another stick.  And she lets that stick burn and burn and fill the room with sweet.  That's what this new smell is like.  It's like light burning, but bigger.  More sweet.  And it smells like food, too. It makes my teeth itch.

Mmmmrrrrrrrr-rark-Rrrrrrrrr--rarkkkkk--Rrraarrrkkk!

I'm singing to the bright ball, to the irds.  It is so much glory.  And the male two-legged doesn't see it.  Doesn't smell it.  Doesn't taste it.  I roll on top of the big white pile.  I roll and roll.  I will take pring inside with me.

The male two-legged pulls on my leash and grabs me.  He is huffy and annoyed.  But underneath, I taste something else on him, too.  Something that has nothing to do with pring or pee or irds or the bright ball.  I lick his face.  I've tasted this before.  

I taste it on the little male two-legged when he goes into a dark room.  It tastes sharp and cold.  And I can taste it all over the big male two-legged right now.  He carries me inside.  I squirm and wriggle, try to rub pring and the bright ball and the irds into him.  

Take it, I tell him.  Take it from me.  It's yours.  I want you to have it.  Take the irds.  Take the bright ball.  Take pring.  There's enough for both of us.

He sets me on the floor inside.  He sits down.

I go to the blue twisty thing with bumps and knots, take it in my mouth.  I carry it to the male two-legged.  He sits in his place, stares at me.  I drop the blue twisty thing on his feet.  He reaches over.  Rubs my ears.  Makes sounds that make me feel warm.

The sharp and cold moves away.  There is no dark right now.  In this moment.  In this place.  Between me and him.  I jump into his lap, flop on my back.  He scratches my belly.  He keeps making those warm sounds.

I fall asleep with the sound of the irds in my ears. 

Have a wonderful night, from Saint Marty and Saint Juno.