December 22: Elysian Fields, Christmas Poem, Grace and Trust

 Merton has a Scrooge moment . . . 

Now I walked leisurely down Broadway in the sun, and my eyes looked about me at a new world. I could not understand what it was that had happened to make me so happy, why I was so much at peace, so content with life for I was not yet used to the clean savor that comes with an actual grace—indeed, there was no impossibility in a person’s hearing and believing such a sermon and being justified, that is, receiving sanctifying grace in his soul as a habit, and beginning, from that moment, to live the divine and supernatural life for good and all. But that is something I will not speculate about. 

All I know is that I walked in a new world. Even the ugly buildings of Columbia were transfigured in it. and everywhere was peace in these streets designed for violence and noise. Sitting outside the gloomy little Childs restaurant at IIIth Street, behind the dirty, boxed bushes, and eating breakfast, was like sitting in the Elysian Fields.

After attending a Catholic Mass for the first time, listening to the priest speak about the Incarnation of Christ, Merton is a changed man.  Walks about New York City in a state of sanctified grace.  He doesn't understand the peace he feels.  I don't think he even tries to comprehend the cause of his sudden happiness.  He just sees everything transfigured, shimmering with goodness.

In short, Merton has become Ebenezer Scrooge at the end of Dickens' novel.  A new man.  No longer chained to his past.  Living in the present moment.  Future before him, full of promise and hope.  That's what sanctifying grace is all about.  What Christmas is all about.

Now that my annual Christmas essay is done, I can turn my attention to my annual Christmas poem.  I've already started it.  Have been working on it for a few weeks.  It has simply taken a back seat since I turned my attention to prose.  Now, it will take the wheel and begin driving.  

I sort of depend on grace this time of year.  I don't suppose a whole lot of writers think of inspiration as grace.  I do.  When I find my path on something that I'm writing, it's as if someone/something else is at work.  All I know is that it's not me, and it's all me.

I know that's not a helpful way of explaining how I write.  It's not always easy.  Some days (a lot of days), it's more like clipping a dog's nails.  Each snip brings about pain, a yip, a bead of blood.  For example, this new poem.  It has been a slow, slow, sloooooowwww composition.  Lots of fits.  Starts and restarts.  But, I trust this process.  I have to.  

And that's what faith is all about, too.  Trusting.  In grace.  In God's love.  I've said that before.  I know that, by Christmas day, I will have a new poem, framed and wrapped and ready to deliver to family and friends.  This year, my essay took the same circuitous path into being.  Lots of crossing out and rewriting.  Yet, this morning, my recording of it played on Public Radio.  

Tomorrow, I will go out and buy frames for my poem.  Nice paper, as well.  Even though it's not fully written.  That is how much faith I have.  I think of it as sort of hoeing the field, getting it ready for planting.  Just like, sometimes, a person with a particularly hard heart needs to be cracked open before God can find a way in.

That's right. I'm comparing writing to spiritual conversion.  In a way, each person is a divine poem, if you will.  Me.  You.  My wife.  Each of my kids.  Even Donald Trump.  (He's sort of an obscene limerick written on the bathroom wall in a bar where a guy nicknamed Bodia sells heroin in the back booth, closest to the fire exit.)  We were all scribbled into existence by some Almighty Poet.

I'm not going to belabor this metaphor that is already working way to hard any more.  You get the idea.  My point is simply this:  I am putting trust out into the universe, and the universe will take care of me.  It always does.

In two days' time, there will be a new Christmas poem in existence on this planet.  In three days' time, we will celebrate another gift.  Christian's would say the Greatest Gift of All.

Here are some snapshots from my day:

• The baking element arrived for my broken stove.  With a little struggle--and about 15 minutes' time--my stove is back in working order.  Just in time to make some beautiful Christmas cookies.
• My beautiful friend Steph listened to my essay and texted me:  "It's beautiful."
• I cleaned at my church tonight.  It's all decorated for Christmas, and my beautiful organist friend Lynn was practicing Christmas music with her beautiful choir.  It reminded me how much I miss playing in church because of my quarantine.  It filled my soul to the brim.
• Late tonight, I watched a beautiful livestreamed Christmas concert by a wonderful local musician and his family.  

Poetry and grace were all around me today.  They will be around me tomorrow, as well.  I trust in that.  Christmas is coming.

Saint Marty gives thanks tonight for the miracle of poetry and creation.

December 21: Winter Stolstice, Bethlehem Star, "A Christmas Carol"

 Greetings, stargazers!

On this winter solstice, for the first time in 800 years, Jupiter and Saturn joined together in the night sky to create what people are calling the Bethlehem star.  A bright eye in the heavens.  To put that into perspective, the last time these two planets were this close to each other, the restoration of the Cathedral of Chartres was completed after it was destroyed by fire in 1194.  Francis of Assisi handed over the governance of the Franciscan Order to Brother Peter Catani.  The world was 100 years away from the Black Plague, which killed one third of the population of Europe.  The Spanish Inquisition began in 1230, and Marco Polo traveled to China in 1270.  The foundation stone of Salisbury Cathedral was laid.  And Christmas Day, 1220, fell on a Wednesday.

I had planned to witness this celestial event.  However, being a resident of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, the skies do not always cooperate.  Heavy snow clouds tonight.  No stars or moon visible.  The Star of Bethlehem remains hidden from this particular magi.  

Yet, it was a magical evening.  The sun disappeared around 5 p.m.  At 7 p.m., a group of my actor friends got together for a dramatic reading of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, an adaptation by James Hutchison.  It was a fundraiser that I organized for local homeless shelters.  And it was glorious.  

Charles Dickens is one of my favorite authors, and my mother first read me A Christmas Carol when I was about six or seven years old.  So, as I sat at my laptop and listened to the performance, it was almost like sitting next to my mother as she read, "Marley was dead to begin with with  . . ."

I spent most of the day in preparation for this program, sending out emails to the actors and presenters.  Updating promotional information.  Writing introductions.  By the time Jupiter and Saturn were dancing, the reading had begun.  

For most of my adult life, I worked in the healthcare industry.  It was work that I enjoyed, and it provided my family with insurance and a steady income.  However, it was not work that fed my creative soul.  Now, working for the library, I'm able to produce staged readings of plays, organize poetry and musical events.  Last Monday, I spent a few hours composing a poem for a Christmas video.  And I'm getting PAID to do all of it.  Paid to create art.

That is an amazing privilege.  

Here are a few snapshots of my day:

• Today was my beautiful daughter's last day of quarantine.  She is now considered "recovered" from COVID, even though she still can smell or taste nothing.
• My beautiful actor friends gave a tremendous performance of A Christmas Carol, and it was viewed by people as far away as Australia.
• I sent a recording of my annual Christmas essay to the local Public Radio station.  I hope there is some beauty in it. 
• After the performance was over, I was exhausted.  I changed into my pajamas, popped the beautiful movie Love Actually into the Blu-ray player, sat on my couch, and promptly fell asleep.  I woke up at 2 a.m. and finished this blog post.

There is grace at work in my life.  A pastor friend defines grace as evidence of God's ridiculously extravagant love for us.  We don't earn grace.  It's simply given to us.

On this shortest day and longest night of the year, with Saturn and Jupiter embracing in the heavens, Saint Marty was the recipient of God's extravagant love.  For that miracle, he gives thanks.

December 20: Annual Christmas Essay, Carlos Ruiz Zafon, "Bigfoot Noel"

Sorry that I didn't post anything yesterday.  I spent more than 11 hours working on my annual Christmas essay.  A long day of trying to create something.  It was the normal thing--I try to throw everything, including the kitchen sink, into my essay, and hope that it all comes together in the end.

Well, I started writing at 7 a.m., and by 6 p.m., I had something that passed muster.  At least, I think it does.  Today has reminded me of something, though:  writing is hard work.  Writer Carlos Ruiz Zafon says this on the subject:

It's hard work, writing, you know.  Honestly, a fight every day against your own limitations.  You have to squeeze books out of your brain, you're constantly trying to solve challenges.  I think most writers enjoy the feeling of having written something, rather than the process of writing it.

I would agree with that sentiment.  I like what I've gotten down on paper, but the process of creation has been painful today, moving in fits and starts.  That's the way it has been for the past month with me.  Blog posts take me hours, and a six-page, single-spaced essay--at least two or three very long days.

But, my essay is done, and I can move onto my next writing project:  my annual Christmas poem.  I don't want to even think about how long that is going to take me.  I love writing--even when it is difficult.  When I know that I'm going to be scribbling away in my journal, or stabbing at my keyboard, I am always filled with a wonderful kind of anticipation.

Here is a snapshot of my day:

• Got up at 7 a.m. and started writing.  Not sure if what I wrote was beautiful, but it felt good.
• Led a rehearsal for a reader's theater Zoom production of A Christmas Carol, and got to watch ten beautiful, talented actors perform.
• My beautiful little sister (-in-law) Cori picked up our grocery order for us this evening.
•  Watched the beautiful Christmas move Love Actually tonight.

Quarantine continues to bring all kinds of blessings into my life, even if those blessings come with struggle.

Marty really is a lucky, lucky saint.

. . . and a poem from a few years ago:

Bigfoot Noel

by:  Martin Achatz

He slouches through this night,
an eclipse of hair and muscle and foot,
guided by some wild nova
in the chambers of his Neanderthal
chest. It’s an ancient story,
Precambrian even, about ice,
juniper berry in the deadest of winter.
Digging through dermal frost
to root and worm. Mushroom
caps in frozen moss, strips
of pine gnawed into sweet paste.
And moon held in knuckles of sumac.

Yes, it’s about need and hunger,
a bottomless lake carved by glacier.
It’s wilderness, the blind
sound of nebulae exploding seventy
million miles a day. Ice Age. Meteor
rain. Seraphim screaming hosannas
over panicked rams. Starlight and manure.
The coming of Something
ferocious, untamable.

He knows all this somehow,
the way he knows where salmon leap, spawn.
He stands at the edge of a clearing,
stares up, into the hills, toward
an empty cave. He tilts back
his head, opens his throat, sings a song
for the evolution of love.

image by satanfudge.com

December 19: Visibly Present on the Altar, Highlights of the Yuletide Season, Living Nativity

Merton finds himself in the presence of God, and he runs for the hills . . .  

I wonder what would have happened in my life if I had been given this grace in the days when I had almost discovered the Divinity of Christ in the ancient mosaics of the churches of Rome. What scores of self-murdering and Christ-murdering sins would have been avoided—all the filth I had plastered upon His image in my soul during those last five years that I had been scourging and crucifying God within me? 

It is easy to say, after it all, that God had probably foreseen my infidelities and had never given me the grace in those days because He saw how I would waste and despise it: and perhaps that rejection would have been my ruin. For there is no doubt that one of the reasons why grace is not given to souls is because they have so hardened their wills in greed and cruelty and selfishness that their refusal of it would only harden them more.... But now I had been beaten into the semblance of some kind of humility by misery and confusion and perplexity and secret, interior fear, and my ploughed soul was better ground for the reception of good seed. 

The sermon was what I most needed to hear that day. When the Mass of the Catechumens was over, I, who was not even a catechumen, but only a blind and deaf and dumb pagan as weak and dirty as anything that ever came out of the darkness of Imperial Rome or Corinth or Ephesus, was not able to understand anything else. 

It all became completely mysterious when the attention was refocused on the altar. When the silence grew more and more profound, and little bells began to ring, I got scared again and, finally, genuflecting hastily on my left knee, I hurried out of the church in the middle of the most important part of the Mass. But it was just as well. In a way, I suppose I was responding to a kind of liturgical instinct that told me I did not belong there for the celebration of the Mysteries as such. I had no idea what took place in them: but the fact was that Christ, God, would be visibly present on the altar in the Sacred Species. And although He was there, yes, for love of me: yet He was there in His power and His might, and what was I? What was on my soul? What was I in His sight? 

It was liturgically fitting that I should kick myself out at the end of the Mass of the Catechumens, when the ordained ostiarii should have been there to do it. Anyway, it was done. 

Catholics ascribe to the concept of transubstantiation.  That is the belief that the bread and wine of Holy Communion actually become the Body and Blood of Christ.  In essence, all who are present are in the actual physical presence of God.  Merton, who has been anything but holy for most of his life, who has, in fact, rejected God's love at every turn, feels shame when face-to-face with divinity.  So, he withdraws.  Kicks himself out onto the street.

This will be a short post tonight.  I am still in the throes of finishing my annual Christmas essay, which, I am happy to report, finally seems to be taking on a life of its own.  Early this afternoon, I hosted an author chat with Les Standiford, writer of the book The Man Who Invented Christmas, for the library, which will probably be one of the highlights of this yuletide season for me.  I've loved the book for years, and the film adaptation, starring Christopher Plummer as Scrooge, is one of my favorite Christmas movies.

And then tonight . . .

My sister-in-law's church staged a drive-through living nativity.  I packed up my entire family, including my puppy, and drove to Marquette.  It was wonderful to be out of the house.  We got in the queue of cars, drove up, parked, and tuned our radio to the proper station.  At the appointed time, we listened to the Gospel narrative of the birth of Christ as the angels warmed themselves by a fire and the sheep threw snowballs at each other.  It was simply perfect.

And it made me realize how much I miss being in church this Christmas season.  I miss the music and stained glass.  The sense of community, even if we sit distanced and masked.  Feeling the presence of God.  For about five minutes this evening, I had all that.  It filled me up, buoyed my spirits, which have been waxing and waning these last few days.

Here are a few snapshots from my day:

• I woke to a fresh layer of beautiful snow.  Not enough to make me swear, but enough to Currier & Ives the world.
• I wrote most of the day, and the words started flowing beautifully.  At last.
• I received a note in the mail from a beautiful poet friend of mine, with a gift inside that reminded me of the goodness of the universe.
• I got to Zoom with the author of one of my favorite Christmas books.  It was a beautiful 60 minutes of being in the presence of the Ghost of Christmas Present.
• I attended a beautiful living nativity tonight, and felt the presence of God.

It has been another day of small and big miracles in quarantine.  A day that has brought me closer to the manger.

For that blessing, Saint Marty gives thanks.