Trappist Blogging
in Honor of Thomas Merton's
100th Birthday:
Essay 2 of 6 on
"Fire Watch, July 4, 1952,"
the epilogue of
The Sign of Jonas
Part 1: Valuing the Darkness
The
fire watch is an examination of conscience in which your task as watchman
suddenly appears in its true light: a
pretext devised by God to isolate you, and to search your soul with lamps and
questions, in the heart of darkness.
“Fire Watch, July 4, 1952”
Thomas Merton
The world’s evil forms a current that swirls down a vortex into unspeakable horror, presided over by a Mr. Kurtz somewhere on the Congo River. That’s the standard image of the heart of darkness, courtesy of Joseph Conrad. In horror
novels and movies, the climactic action inevitably seems to move toward either an ascent or a descent into a heart of darkness. Monsters await there. Biblical
references to darkness tend to be equally negative: “whoever follows me will never walk in
darkness” and “the sons of the kingdom will be thrown into the outer darkness;
there men will weep and gnash their teeth.”
 |
| Enjoying the Moon: Landscape in the Manner of Wang Meng by Gu Yide (active ca. 1620-1630), China, dated 1628, hanging scroll. The Metropolitan Museum of Art |
In preparation for writing this series, I read Barbara
Brown Taylor’s excellent recent book Learning to Walk in the Dark. Taylor and
Merton are Christians who—despite the myriad Biblical quotes that praise the
light and condemn the dark—hear something deeply spiritual beckoning to them in
the night. In their own ways, each of
them finds God in the darkness, and each finds the experience radically
different than worship in the glare of the sun.
Although Merton feels the presence of God more strongly at
night than during the day, it is a presence that offers few consolations and no
personally satisfying answers to his questions.
His spiritual experience of God in the dark renders him simultaneously
overwhelmed and frustrated.
“…in
the nighttime You have confronted me, scattering thought and reason.”
and
“…You have descended upon me, with great gentleness, with
most forbearing silence, in this inexplicable night, dispersing light,
defeating all desire.”
Merton uses the silent hours of the night to meditate upon
his own calling and God’s intentions for him.
As he silently moves from room to room, from the monastery’s basement to
the top of the highest tower, he hungrily petitions God to come closer and to
reveal more.
He acknowledges that he asks similar questions in the
day but he expects no answers then. His
one hope of clear communication is the night.
Even in a monastery, surrounded by vows of silence, Merton experiences
the day as full of the noise of human rationalizations and empty talk. He turns to the silence of the night for truth.
 |
| The Lonely Tower, detail by Samuel Palmer (1805-1881), British, 1879, etching in black on laid paper. National Gallery of Art |
1) Pitch black: The utter darkness of a cave, where you can’t
even see your hand held in front of your face.
In the ocean, it is the darkness at the bottom of the deepest
trenches. In space, it is the unfathomable
void between stars.
2) Night darkness: Light exists, but it is pale and the shadows
are deep. As our eyes adjust to the night, we become aware of moonlight, starlight, and all sorts of stirring life around us.
3) The darkness of
fog: Light is deceptively dispersed
through a seemingly opaque vapor, with the density of the fog obscuring even close
objects from view.
The darkness discussed by Merton in his “Fire Watch” essay falls
under categories 2 and 3, the night and the fog. The darkness he describes is mainly a night
darkness, full of life and open to the appreciation of attentive eyes. But it is also like a fog. One of Taylor ’s
key insights is that Moses meets God within a night-like cloud that descends
upon Mount Sinai . Merton directly refers to the same Biblical image as
he steps out into the night at the top of Gethsemane ’s
highest tower:
With
you there is no dialogue unless You choose a mountain and circle it with
cloud and print Your words in fire upon the mind of Moses.
“Fire
Watch, July 4, 1952”
Thomas
Merton
Like Moses, Merton encounters God within the darkness of fog.
 |
| Moses receives the tablets from God in the cloud. Illuminated manuscript, Central Italy (Florence), last quarter of the 15th century. British Library |
The two types are complementary, neither better than
the other, and the world needs both. It’s
just a matter of temperament. Winter
Christians must arm themselves with flashlights and move through the night in a search for God that they fully realize may be futile. They do it because they have to. Thomas Merton, Barbara Brown Taylor, and I
don’t have much choice in the matter.
The darkness beckons.
The darkness beckons.
Part Two: Christmas Eve
 |
| Winter Moonlight (also known as Christmas Eve), 1866, by George Inness (1825-1894), oil on canvas. Montclair Art Museum |
While passing through the choir novitiate during his rounds as night watchman, Thomas Merton smells the frozen straw and it triggers a memory:
…the
freezing tough winter when I first received the habit and always had a cold,
the smell of frozen straw in the dormitory under the chapel, and the deep
unexpected ecstasy of Christmas—that first Christmas when you have nothing left
in the world but God!
“Fire
Watch, July 4, 1952”
Thomas
Merton
 |
| Winter Moonlight, detail, by George Inness (1825-1894) Montclair Art Museum |
Merton’s Christmas memory reminds me of this beautiful
early painting by George Inness.
Originally called Winter Moonlight,
the painting seems to have picked up the very appropriate name Christmas Eve about a century ago. It resonates with the power of a silent night. The clouds break in the middle to frame the
resplendent moon, but its light is insufficient to remove the dark shadows that
dominate the painting. The figure in the
middle, like a shepherd or king, follows the light even as it leads him toward
the shadows.
As Merton wrote near the conclusion of “Fire Watch”:
Lord
God of this great night: do You see the
woods? Do you hear the rumor of their
loneliness? Do You behold their secrecy? Do You remember their solitudes?
“Fire
Watch, July 4, 1952”
Thomas
Merton
These seem appropriate questions to ponder, while
silently appreciating this beautiful painting in the collection of the Montclair Art Museum
in New Jersey .
Reference Source
The Sign of Jonas by Thomas Merton
Click here for the entire six-part Fire Watch series.
© 2015 Lee Price
Click here for the entire six-part Fire Watch series.
© 2015 Lee Price
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