Here is an adaptation the text of my presentation "Dialogue With the World––Through Poetry and Music" for the International Thomas Merton Society at Santa Clara, CA June 27.
I began with settings of two poems––one rather ancient,
one modern. The first was a short poem of Hafiz, the 14th century
Persian poet and mystic, in Daniel Ladinsky’s rendition––“startled By God”; and
the second a poem of the essayist, naturalist, poet and novelist Wendell Berry,
who is also, incidentally, a fellow Kentuckian to the monks of Gethsemani,
entitled “The Circle of Our Lives.”
* * *
I entitled the presentation “Hidden Manna.” I got
that idea and image from an acquaintance of mine who used to talk about the
gems of spiritual wisdom that can sometimes be found in secular music, even in
popular song. He called these gems the “hidden manna.” The phrase comes from
the Book of Revelation 2:17:
‘To everyone who conquers,
I will give some of the hidden manna,
and I will give a white stone,
and on the white stone is written a new name
that no one knows except the one who
receives it.
Such evocative images!––both the hidden manna and
that white stone, which of course has resonance with the “true self,” a theme
that was so important to our present subject, but we don’t have time for a
detour into that right now…
I added onto that the subtitle: “Dialogue With the
World.” There is that famous phrase from Saint Justin Martyr to which I return
often
––
semina verbi, “seeds of the Word.”
Justin had converted to Christianity as a philosopher, but he still saw all the
other wisdom as seeds of the Logos that came to full bloom in Christ. That
phrase gets picked up in the 20
th century as a rationale for
interreligious dialogue––hence Vatican II’s “Declaration on the Relation of the
Church to Non-Christian Religions” teaches that the “Catholic Church rejects
nothing that is true and holy in” other religions; and that she regards their
precepts and teachings as well as their conduct with reverence “because they
often reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all people.”
Having immersed myself in the writings of Benedictine
Fr. Bede Griffiths, who ended his monastic life as a member of my own monastic
congregation, I easily turned doing lectio
on sacred texts of other traditions into writing songs based on those same texts.
Let me give you an example of that, one of my earliest and favorites–“Lead Me
From Death Into Life.”
This song is based on a famous
mantra from the Bridharanyaka Upanishad that a Jain monk named Satish Kumar
adapted as a poem and called it the World Peace Prayer. An organization known
as the Fellowship of Reconciliation circulated it widely, asking that it be
prayed daily at noon. The verses instead are taken from the Bhagavad Gita.
Speaking of “seeds of the Word,” though this is a dialogue between Lord Krishna
and Arjuna, when I hear the words “I am the taste of living water, / and the
light of the sun and the moon. / I am OM, the sacred word, / the sound in the
silence,” I just as easily hear them on the lips of Jesus.
This song is based on a famous
mantra from the Bridharanyaka Upanishad that a Jain monk named Satish Kumar
adapted as a poem and called it the World Peace Prayer. An organization known
as the Fellowship of Reconciliation circulated it widely, asking that it be
prayed daily at noon. (Side note: my friend John Dear, who served for a time as
the executive director of that same organization, reminded me that Merton, the
Berrigans, Thich Nhat Hahn and Dr. King were all a part it.) The verses instead
are taken from the Bhagavad Gita. Speaking of “seeds of the Word,” though this
is a dialogue between Lord Krishna and Arjuna, when I hear the words “I am the
taste of living water, / and the light of the sun and the moon. / I am OM, the
sacred word, / the sound in the silence,” I just as easily hear them on the
lips of Jesus.
* * *
In addition to setting texts from other traditions
to music, at some point––having decided I had nothing left to say about God or
Absolute Reality––I also started singing poetry. My late confrere and mentor, Fr.
Bruno Barnhart, who was a unique monastic writer himself, had almost raised
Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams to the level of canonical
scripture, so I was in good company and a noble lineage. So, both singing
sacred texts from other traditions and singing poems that dealt with sacred
themes then became for me this “hidden manna.” Since these two themes abide in
the life and work of Thomas Merton––both interreligious dialogue and poetry––I
thought this would be an appropriate presentation for our gathering.
For many years now I have been playing around with
what I call “chanting poetry.” If you think about it, that is what we monks do
when we chant the psalms, flinging the poems and songs of Scripture across the
choir to each other three, four, up to seven times a day. In some way I just
applied the same technique to poetry, walking around with a text, singing it to
myself until a melody emerged out of it, or actually chanting it instead of
reciting it.
These are two pieces that were born from that
exercise.
The first is a setting of the late poet Richard
Wilbur (1921-2017), called “Sirens.” In his memorial of Wilbur, Christian Wiman
wrote that he “left behind a body of work that rivals that of the great
modernists,” and said he thought that Wilbur’s closest kin was Robert Frost. In
a “time that prizes innovation,” Wilbur was a classicist, one of those artists
who perfected a style rather than inventing one.
And the second song is a setting of a poem by Jessica
Powers (1905-1988), the secular pen name of Sister Miriam of the Holy Spirit, who
was also a cloistered Carmelite nun. I often say that if someone after living
for years as a cloistered nun could still write with such sensual, even erotic
imagery as is found in this poem, then something was obviously working right in
her religious life. The original title of the poem is “The Kingdom of God,”
which makes it even more interesting, but I chose to call the song after the
evocative image in the first line: “Beautiful Naked Runner.” I’ve added onto
to, as a refrain, the haunting words from Saint Augustine’s Confessions.
* * *
In The Sign of
Jonas Merton wrote, “I have to be a person that nobody knows. They can have
Thomas Merton. He’s dead.” Rowan Williams commented about this that truth can
only be spoken by someone that nobody knows, because only in the unknown person
is there no obstruction to reality; only in the unknown person is the ego of
self-oriented desire––that wants to dominate and organize the world––absent. It’s
even more than that though, a great truth found across the spiritual
traditions.
The founder of my monastic congregation, the
Camaldolese, Saint Romuald of Ravenna, left behind very little of his own
words, only a paragraph about which we can be reasonably sure, what’s referred
to as his Brief Rule for Hermits. And it ends with the words “Empty yourself
completely, and sit waiting.” But the Latin is stronger––
destrue, which is more like ‘destroy yourself,’ or probably better,
‘deconstruct yourself.’ One of my friends is a Sufi singer, and this is a theme
well known to Sufis, called
fanā,
sometimes translated as “annihilation of the self.” She made a song of St. Romuald’s
rule: “Empty yourself of yourself…” That’s it. Or as Rumi says, “Wash yourself
of yourself. Be like melting snow.” In the kabbalah tradition this is known as
bitul hayesh––the nullification of one’s
something-ness. Or as Angelus Silesius
wrote: “God whose love and joy are present everywhere cannot come to visit you
unless you are not there.” Or again, back to Rumi: “There is no room for two
‘I’s in this house.”
Merton wrote about this Sufi concept of fanā in comparison to his own prayer,
saying that his prayer was…
… a
kind of praise rising up out of the center of Nothing and Silence. If I am
still present “myself,” this I recognize as an obstacle about which I can do nothing
unless He Himself removes the obstacle. If He wills He can then make the Nothingness
into a total clarity. If He does not will, then the Nothingness seems itself to
be an object and remains an obstacle.
And his own translation of the fourteenth-century Islamic
mystic Ibn Abbah:
To belong to Allah
Is to see your own existence
And all that pertains to it
Something that is neither yours
Nor from yourself,
Something you have on loan;
To see your being in His Being,
Your substance in His substance,
Your strength in His strength:
Then you will recognize in yourself
His title to possession of you
As Lord,
And your own title as servant:
Which is Nothingness.
That led me to two songs from the Islamic tradition:
the first of Hafiz again, called “Journey Into Nothing.” And the second is from
the fascinating 15th century north Indian poet and mystic Kabir,
“Moon in My Body.”
* * *
In a letter to Czeslov Milosz Merton wrote:
We
should all feel near to despair in some sense because this semi-despair is the
normal form taken by hope in times like ours. Hope without any tangible
evidence on which to rest. Hope in spite of the sickness that fills us. Hope
married to a firm refusal to accept any palliatives or anything that cheats
hope by pretending to relieve apparent despair.
These next two poems seemed to go together for their own
wrestling with despair. There is something almost casual in their approach to
very dire subjects, and it’s probably not without import that these are two
women poets.
The first is Wisława Szymborska (1923-2012). She was already
well known in her native Poland, when she started to receive international
recognition after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996. The Academy said
that her poetry “with ironic precision… allows the historical and biological
context to come to light in fragments of human reality.” Her work is
characterized not only by wit and irony, but, perhaps not unlike Mary Oliver, a
deceptive simplicity. She projects domestic details and mundane occasions onto
the larger scrim of history. “After every war,” she wrote, “someone’s got to
tidy up.”
The next song was a poem of the late Maya Angelou
(1928-2014), who was almost an exact contemporary of Szymborska. As her
daughter wrote about her, Maya Angelou’s…
… principal message was one of inclusiveness; that despite our ethnic,
religious and cultural differences, we are more alike than unalike. She
saw all our differences in language, orientation and perspective as an
indication of the richness of our imagination and creativity, and as elements
of our nature that we should celebrate. She believed that we are all
images of God, no matter how we look or what name we use to call upon the
Divine and Sacred Being.
This rather ironic poem again is set against the
background of the looming threat of nuclear war.
* * *
On the one hand, there is a resonance between the
asceticism of the artist, even the poverty of devotion to one’s craft, and
religious, saintly, monastic asceticism.
On the other hand there is something different about
the asceticism of art and the interiority of the artist, as compared to the
asceticism and interiority of the mystic, not that they can’t be compatible.
In
the essay on “Poetry and the Contemplative Life” that Merton wrote for The
Commonweal in 1947 he said that “poetry can, indeed help to bring us rapidly
through that part of the journey to contemplation… but when entering the realm
of true contemplation, where eternal happiness begins,” poetry may actually “turn
around and bar our way.”
I
suppose we could say the same thing about art in general, with its
self-mediating demands. Why is that? Well, that’s the dark secret of the
contemplative way. It’s because (this is from
Seeds of Contemplation) …
The
ordinary way to contemplation lies through a desert without trees and without
beauty and without water. The spirit enters a wilderness and travels blindly in
directions that seem to lead
away
from vision,
away from God,
away from all fulfillment and joy. It
may become almost impossible to believe that this road goes anywhere at all
except to a desolation full of dry bones…
That’s why contemplative prayer, like the monastic
calling itself, has a preference for the desert, because prayer and
contemplation involve ‘a kind of descent into our own nothingness.’ “There is
an absolute need for the solitary bare, dark, beyond concept, beyond-feeling
type of prayer.” In other words, it is only in the darkness––the
via negativa, the apophatic mystical
tradition, the desert––that God can be perceived as the One who is All-in-All.
And that leads me to this next piece, the next
poet, Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936), and the poem “Los Laberintos.” I’ve
left this in the original Spanish; the English translation is:
The labyrinths / that time creates
/ vanish.
(Only the desert / remains.)
The heart / fountain of desire / vanishes.
(Only the desert / remains.)
The illusion of dawn / and kisses /
vanish.
Only the desert / remains.
Undulating / desert.
And I tagged onto it another short poem of Lorca called
“The Silence,” that uses the same word––ondolado–undulating:
Listen, my child, to the silence.
An undulating silence,
a silence / that turns valleys and
echoes slippery,
and makes foreheads / bow to the
ground.
* * *
Antonio Machado
was a Spanish poet born in Seville in 1875.
He is considered one of the most emblematic figures of turn of the century
Spain. He grew up in the cosmopolitan environment of Madrid and was able to rub
shoulders from a very early age with some of the central figures of the Spanish
intellectual establishment; and he also spent large portions of time in Paris,
working as a translator for a major publishing house. But at the end of the 19th
century, Spain was in a state of near despondency after having lived for decades
in chaos, following the revolution that had ousted the monarchy of Queen
Isabella in 1868. And it was during this time that Machado’s poems became deeply
personal and lyrical, tapping into the popular roots of Spanish tradition and
Andalucían folklore; and he became known as “the people’s poet.” The poem I
have set to music is from this period, his “Last Night As I Lay Sleeping.” Machado
died of ill health in 1939 in the final days of the civil war that established
the fascist regime of Francisco Franco, and even though he was not a direct
casualty of the war, like García-Lorca, for instance, he is still considered to
be one of the most high profile victims of that war.
Theodore Roethke
(1908-1963) on the other hand wrote in the transcendental tradition of Emerson
and Thoreau, though he is sometimes also compared to Walt Whitman, particularly
for his length of line. He had a powerful identification with nature from
having spent much of his childhood exploring the vast greenhouses owned by his
father and uncle in Saginaw, Michigan, twenty-five acres filled with roses and
orchids. A whole series of awards culminated in the Pulitzer Prize for his 1953 collection The Waking. “The Waking” itself,
which I set to music, is one of his most celebrated poems.
What is particularly entrancing
about this poem, and what makes it so attractive to me as a songwriter, is its
circling form with all its repetitions. It’s in a nineteen-line French verse
form
that originated in 16th century rustic Napolitano song from called a
villanella.
Roethke’s belief in
inner vision really comes out in this poem: sleep is the state in which we are
truly awakened; wisdom isn’t found in conscious knowledge, but in instinct––we
“think by feeling” and can hear his being “dance from ear to ear.”
* * *
I didn’t want to neglect
to include this song in this presentation, in honor of Fr. Merton’s “consorting
with a Chinese recluse who [shared] the climate and peace of [his] own kind of
solitude,” and who was his “own kind of person.” “One may dispute the thesis
that all monasticism … is essentially one.” Nevertheless, as he wrote in his
introduction to The Way of Chuang Tzu,
… there is a monastic outlook which is common to
all those who have elected to question the value of a life submitted entirely
to arbitrary secular presuppositions, dictated by social convention, and
dedicated to the pursuit of temporal satisfactions which are perhaps only a
mirage.
My own sympathy with the
Taoist tradition grew in earnest at the very beginning of my own 10-year period
living outside of my community as a hermit, preacher, and wanderer, and one
morning ran into Chapter 20 of Tao Te Ching which ends with the words:
“Everyone else has got something to do. I alone am aimless and sad. I am
different: I’m nourished by the Great
Mother.”
This song is derived
from both Chapters 10 and 20 of Tao Te Ching, entitled simply “The Great
Mother.”
* * *
Earlier this year Alan Jacobs wrote an article in the
New Yorker in which he said of Thomas Merton that he “sought the peace of pure
and silent contemplation, but came to believe that the value of that experience
is to send us back into the world that killed us.” And for that reason he is
perhaps the
… patron saint of our information-saturated age,
of we who live and move and have our being in social media, and then, desperate
for peace and rest, withdraw into privacy and silence, only to return. As we
always will.
In the end, there can’t
be any separation between the discovery of one’s true self and the discovery of
all humankind in God. Anything less is an illusion, an escape into consolation.
“The more we are alone with [God], the more we are with one another.”
Silence and solitude, even the necessary practice of withdrawal of the monastic
life, are never ends in and of themselves. Especially for the Christian, in the
end there has to be a sense of identification and solidarity with others, a
compassion for others, and an acceptance of responsibility for our world, and
that means also sharing in the “universal anguish and the inescapable
condition’ of humanity.”
Thomas Merton’s
connection to Buddhism, of course, is well known and in some way set the stage
for all of us who followed who would be involved in dialogue between religions.
So I thought it would be fitting to sing this setting of the Metta Sutta–the dedication of merit from
the Buddhist tradition. It’s my own arrangement of a setting by my friend the
Rev. Heng Sure of the Chinese Cha’an tradition, introduced by the Sanskrit Maha-mrytymjaya mantra.
As the famous quote from The Asian Journal, has it, it’s…
Not that we discover a new unity, but
we discover an old unity. … we are already one. But we imagine we are not. And
what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be, is what we
are.
* * *
And that led to one last piece, in honor of the
“Hidden Manna” and the “Hidden Ground of Love,” a song I call “Hidden Wisdom.”
It’s actually a sonnet entitled “O Sapientia” by a
fascinating contemporary man named Ayodeji Malcolm Guite. He is a Nigerian-born
English poet, priest, singer-songwriter. (He also heads up a blues and rock
band called “Mystery Train” in Cambridge––a man after my own heart.) This is
from his book Sounding the Seasons,
which is a collection of sonnets all on scriptural liturgical themes, in which
he states his aim is to “be profound without ceasing to be beautiful.” What
draws me to this text is that––whether intentionally or not––he avoids
typically religious language. Not only does he write about Christmas (really,
about the Incarnation) without ever mentioning the babe in the manger or snow;
you gotta love someone who can write a text about God without ever mentioning
“God.” He focuses instead on the Word, even the apophatic aspect of the Word as
“hidden wisdom” and the “ground of being.”
I’ve disrupted his form a bit and used the last
two lines of his sonnet as a refrain, a prayer which I love and I invited the
audience sing with me as our closing prayer.
I
cannot think unless I have been thought,
Nor
can I speak unless I have been spoken;
I
cannot teach except as I am taught,
Or
break the bread except as I am broken.
Come,
hidden Wisdom, come with all you bring,
Come
to me now, disguised as everything.
O Mind
behind the mind through which I seek,
I
Light within the light by which I see,
O Word
beneath the words with which I speak
O
founding unfound Wisdom, finding me.
O
sounding song whose depth is sounding me,
O
Memory of time, reminding me,
My
Ground of Being, always grounding me,
My Maker’s
bounding line, defining me.
