Thomas Merton, William Blake, and I Contemplate Eternity

Trappist Blogging
in Honor of Thomas Merton's
100th Birthday:
Essay 6 of 6 on
"Fire Watch, July 4, 1952,"
the epilogue of 
The Sign of Jonas

My son Terry overlooking the Grand Canyon.

The things of Time are in connivance with eternity.

“Fire Watch, July 4, 1952”

Thomas Merton

I turn a corner on the path and suddenly the Grand Canyon is before me.  In that moment, the bottom drops out of my experience of time.  Personal insignificance and timeless significance coincide.  People on the rim are just grains of sand arbitrarily blowing across the uppermost layer of strata.  A glance over the edge is a plunge into eternity.

While it sounds right and looks awesome, I don’t think this is what Thomas Merton is referring to in the sentence highlighted above—which happens to be my personal favorite sentence in “Fire Watch, July 4, 1952,” Merton’s sublime epilogue to his book The Sign of Jonas.  The Grand Canyon experience is powerful, a true contender for supreme iconic image of eternity colliding with time.  But I think Merton was referencing something on an altogether different scale, available to everyone on a daily basis without the investment in a Southwest vacation.

Merton prefaces this sentence with a paragraph that resonates with the poetry of William Blake:

But there is a greater comfort in the substance of silence than in the answer to a question.  Eternity is in the present.  Eternity is in the palm of the hand.  Eternity is a seed of fire, whose sudden roots break barriers that keep my heart from being an abyss.

The things of Time are in connivance with eternity…

“Fire Watch, July 4, 1952”

Thomas Merton

The Grand Canyon.

Having written his Master’s thesis at Columbia University on William Blake (“Nature and Art in William Blake; A Essay in Interpretation”), Merton very intentionally echoes the famous first four lines of Blake’s poem “Auguries of Innocence”:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower 

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand 

And Eternity in an hour…

“Auguries of Innocence”

by William Blake

Merton knows that God must be met in the present moment, which he has learned from Blake is a doorway opening to eternity.  But what sounds simple is difficult because the awareness of passing time is a barrier to the experience of the moment of time.  It is a problem unique to mankind.  As Merton writes, “Only man makes himself illuminations he conceives to be solid and eternal.”  The things of time tease us with intimations of eternity, while leading us away from an experience of the spirit.

Merton steps through the door of the tower, onto the monastery’s roof, open to an experience of God in the night and in the moment.  The “things of time” sentence opens a paragraph that relegates the created world to shadows.

The things of Time are in connivance with eternity.  The shadows serve You.  The beasts sing to You before they pass away.  The solid hills shall vanish like a worn-out garment.  All things change, and die and disappear.  Questions arrive, assume their actuality, and also disappear.  In this hour I shall cease to ask them, and silence shall be my answer.  The world that Your love created, that the heat has distorted, and that my mind is always misinterpreting, shall cease to interfere with our voices.

“Fire Watch, July 4, 1952”

Thomas Merton

So while my view of the Grand Canyon is profoundly felt on one level, its very majesty connives to hide its ephemerality.  It, too, will “vanish like a worn-out garment,” a faith belief entirely in line with geological understanding.  Like the beasts in Merton, the view sings of eternity.  It blindsides us.  And then the mind pitches in and begins misinterpreting it.

Detail, Children's Games (1559-1560)
by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1525-1569)
oil on wood.
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

My most profound experience of eternity was not at the Grand Canyon or any of the National Parks, much as I love them.  It took place nearly thirty years ago when I was playing on a swing set.  At the time, I was working as an assistant at a home for five women with severe mental retardation.  One afternoon, I remember sitting on a two-person swing set in the home’s backyard.  I was on one swing and Carol, a young woman with Down syndrome, was on the swing next to me.  And we were simply swaying in the fall breeze, both of us content for the moment.  She had a beautiful smile and I was happy that she was happy.  Then the particulars vanished in the knowledge that everything was good, that there was no need to worry, that there was endless love emanating from anywhere and everywhere in the world and we were both loved.

You’re sitting on a swing and the bottom unexpectedly drops out of your normal experience of time ticking by.  The second hand on the watch stops.  A moment expands into eternity.

And then it contracts, as the second hand inevitably starts circling again.  The things of time fall back into place.  I recall the impossible-to-capture experience but not how it ended.  Perhaps it was like this:

There are drops of dew that show like sapphires in the grass as soon as the great sun appears, and leaves stir behind the hushed flight of an escaping dove.

“Fire Watch, July 4, 1952”

Thomas Merton

Those are the concluding words of “Fire Watch,” coming after God speaks in Paradise, conveying a message that everything is blessed. (“No more lay hold on time, Jonas, My son, lest the rivers bear you away.”)  In Merton’s case, his job on the Fire Watch ends as the sun rises.  He returns to the mundane tasks of being a monk while the Holy Spirit departs like a dove.

The Grand Canyon.

Reference Source

The Sign of Jonas by Thomas Merton

Click here for the entire six-part Fire Watch series.

© 2015 Lee Price

Thomas Merton and a Hedgehog on the Hero's Journey

Trappist Blogging
in Honor of Thomas Merton's
100th Birthday:
Essay 5 of 6 on
"Fire Watch, July 4, 1952,"
the epilogue of 
The Sign of Jonas

Part One:  Fear of the Dark

In Yuri Norstein's enchanting animated short
Hedgehog in the Fog (1975), our hero ventures
into the fog drawn by a beautiful vision.  It is
a classic hero story, where the hero embarks
on a quest that leads to deeper self-knowledge.
Hedgehog in the Fog shares much in common
with Thomas Merton's "Fire Watch," where
Merton's solitary trek through the monastery
 leads to revelation.

Defying traditional expectations, Thomas Merton depicts the dark as spiritually good.  This is in the nature of a paradigm shift—and it’s not easy to cause a shift in anything as hidebound as a 2,000- year-old religion anchored to a set of ancient sacred texts.

In the very first paragraph of “Fire Watch, July 4, 1952,” Merton writes:

“You (God) have seen the morning and the night, and the night was better.”

Merton’s God blesses the darkness.  This is a concept that would seem to fly in the face of much scripture:

The hero's journey continues.
Top frame: The hedgehog sees a beautiful
vision of a white horse in the fog.  Middle
frame:  Unseen by the hedgehog, the horse
sniffs a leaf that that the hedgehog has
dropped.  Bottom frame:  Safely home, the
hedgehog is haunted by the vision of
the horse.  In "Fire Watch," Merton
pursues an unattainable intimacy,
yearning to receive answers from God
to his existential questions.

“And God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light.  And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness.”  (Note:  Light good, dark bad.)

Genesis 1:3-4

“So Moses stretched out his hand toward heaven, and there was thick darkness in all the land of Egypt three days… but all the people of Israel had light where they dwelt.”  (Note:  Light good, dark bad.)

Exodus 10:22-23

“The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shined.”  (Note:  Light good, dark bad.)

Isaiah 9:2

“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”  (Note:  Light good, dark bad.)

John 1:5

“Let us then cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.”  (Note:  Light good, dark bad.)

Romans 13:12

While positive passages about darkness exist in the Bible, they are few and far between.  Negative views of darkness overwhelmingly predominate.

The hero's journey continues.
Wandering lost in the fog, hoping to see the
horse again, the hedgehog is frightened by
mysterious beasts of the night:  an owl, a
bat, and an elephant, dimly seen.  As he
wanders through the monastery at night,
Merton evokes a haunted house:  "Shadows
move everywhere... There are faint sounds
in the darkness, the empty choirstalls creak
and hidden boards mysteriously sigh."

But Merton saw through this darkness surrounding darkness to realize that the light-dark dichotomy was always intended as metaphor, and that sometimes metaphors must change with the times.  Darkness served as a favorite image in ancient times because it was universally known and feared.  Our contemporary fears of darkness are much milder by comparison.  If fear begins to seize us, we can simply flick on a light switch, performing our own, “Let there be light.”

When the books of the Bible were written, intense anxieties about the night, the darkness, and the wilderness were very real and reasonable. Communities banded close together to protect themselves from the dangers that lurked outside.  Assurances of safety dissolved when the sun sank below the horizon. The civilized space contracted.  People gathered together within known, familiar spaces... and they barred the doors.  The wilderness outside the city walls, home to dangerous animals and bandits, advanced closer in the darkness.  Any venture out into the dark carried considerable risk.  Better to wait inside for the night to pass and a new day to dawn.

A twentieth century man living in the first full century of electric illumination, Thomas Merton was open to finding new metaphors to express the old truths.  For him, the night was simply an unexplored space—like the terra incognita at the edge of an old map.  With less to fear, he was more aware that God was fully present in the dark, blessing the night just as he blessed the day.

At the close of “Fire Watch,” Merton prophetically speaks for God:

The Voice of God is heard in Paradise:

“What was vile has become precious.  What is now precious was never vile.  I have always known the vile as precious for what is vile I know not at all.”

“Fire Watch, July 4, 1952”

Thomas Merton

In the new metaphor, there’s nothing to fear in the dark.  The night assumes a new dignity, now recognized as precious before God.

The hero's journey continues.
Despite his fears, the hedgehog ultimately finds only kindness and
compassion in the fog.  Left: A dog (with very scary jaws) returns the
hedgehog's lost bag to him.  Right: When the hedgehog falls into a
stream, a fish offers him a ride back to safety.  In "Fire Watch,"
Merton writes that the animals in the wilderness outside the monastery
are misunderstood.  "That is why some people act as if the night and the
forest and the heat and the animals had in them something of contagion,
whereas the heat is holy and the animals are the children of God..."

The hero's journey at its most sublime.
Perhaps the most beautiful of all the images in Hedgehog in the Fog,
the hedgehog uses a firefly to light his way as he moves forward
through a cathedral of trees.  The world appears sacred.  In "Fire Watch,"
Thomas Merton writes:  "Now the huge chorus of living beings rises up
out of the world beneath my feet:  life singing in the watercourses,
throbbing in the creeks and the fields and the trees, choirs of millions
and millions of jumping and flying and creeping things.  And far above
me the cool sky opens upon the frozen distance of the stars."

Watch Hedgehog in the Fog...

Purchase the The Complete Works of Yuri Norstein DVD at Amazon or other vendor.

Purchase Masters of Russian Animation 2 DVD at Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

Rent Masters of Russian Animation 2 at Netflix or other rental service.

Reference Source

The Sign of Jonas by Thomas Merton

Click here for the entire six-part Fire Watch series.

© 2015 Lee Price

Thomas Merton and Vincent van Gogh Under the Stars

Trappist Blogging
in Honor of Thomas Merton's
100th Birthday:
Essay 4 of 6 on
"Fire Watch, July 4, 1952,"
the epilogue of 
The Sign of Jonas

Thomas Merton’s spiritual embrace of the night sky in “Fire Watch, July 4, 1952,” the epilogue to his book The Sign of Jonas, puts me in mind of Vincent van Gogh’s celebrations of the night.

In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus tells his disciples that the Kingdom of God is in their midst.  I like to think that when Thomas Merton and Vincent van Gogh looked up at the night sky, they saw the Kingdom in their midst, encompassing and challenging them.

Starry Night Over the Rhone, 1888,
by Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890),
oil on canvas.
Musee d'Orsay.

Lane of Poplars at Sunset, 1884,
by Vincent van Gogh,
oil on canvas.
Kroller-Muller Museum.

The Old Tower at Dusk (1884)
by Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890),
oil on canvas.
Private Collection.

Country Road in Provence by Night (1890)
by Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890),
oil on canvas.
Kroller-Muller Museum.

Landscape with Wheat Sheaves and Rising Moon (1889)
by Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890),
oil on canvas.
Kroller-Muller Museum.

Cafe Terrace on the Place du Forum (1888)
by Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890),
oil on canvas.
Kroller-Muller Museum.

Vincent van Gogh ran into a problem when he decided he wanted to paint the night sky, so much more visible in the town of Arles than it had been in well-lit Paris.  His subject turned out to be uncooperative.  Desiring to paint Impressionist-style, en plein air, Van Gogh set up his easel on a sidewalk, positioning himself under a gas light so he could see his paints.  But, naturally, the artificial light masked a thousand stars above, defeating his intention.  As a result, his first great nocturnal scene from Arles, Café Terrace on the Place du Forum, does a fine job of capturing the personality of the cafe but left him unsatisfied with its depiction of a starry night.

He kept trying, driven by love of art, nature, and a spiritual impulse that he couldn’t deny.  He wrote, “I have a terrible need of—shall I say the word?—religion.  Then I go out at night to paint the stars.”

Van Gogh wanted to capture the colors of the night in a new way that would shatter conventional depictions of a black sky with pinprick white stars.  He wrote to his brother Theo, describing the sky as he saw it during a nighttime walk along the seashore:

“The deep blue sky was flecked with clouds of a blue deeper than the fundamental blue of intense cobalt, and others of a clearer blue, like the blue whiteness of the Milky Way.  In the blue depth the stars were sparkling, greenish, yellow, white, pink, more brilliant, more emeralds, lapis lazuli, rubies, sapphires.”

I think Thomas Merton and Vincent van Gogh were kindred spirits.  Both were seized by strong religious yearnings while young and felt themselves called to a religious life.  Although personally dedicated to the Trappist traditions, Merton found that he continued to need artistic outlets, expressing his insights through prose and poetry.  He viewed his religion through the eyes of an artist.  In contrast, Van Gogh never found a religious base to call home.  Rejected in his ministerial calling, Van Gogh sublimated his essential religious nature into his art.

Thomas Merton embraced the night in “Fire Watch, July 4, 1952,” praising it as a gift of freedom:  “You have seen the morning and the night, and the night was better.”

Vincent van Gogh marveled at the night sky, witnessed a vision of vibrant cosmic creativity that he felt compelled to share, and he painted Starry Night.

Starry Night (1889)
by Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890),
oil on canvas.
The Museum of Modern Art.

Reference Sources

Van Gogh: The Life by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith
The Sign of Jonas by Thomas Merton

Click here for the entire six-part Fire Watch series.

© 2015 Lee Price

Thomas Merton and Bob Dylan Riffing on Isaiah

Trappist Blogging
in Honor of Thomas Merton's
100th Birthday:
Essay 3 of 6 on
"Fire Watch, July 4, 1952,"
the epilogue of 
The Sign of Jonas

Part One:  Isaiah, Dylan, and Merton

Kingdoms are poised to fall in the Book of Isaiah.  From a besieged city’s highest tower, the watchman will sound the alarm.

Upon a watchtower I stand, O Lord,

Continually by day,

And at my post I am stationed whole nights.

And, behold, here come riders, horsemen in pairs!

Isaiah 21:8-9

Watchman, what of the night?

Watchman, what of the night?

Isaiah 21:11

There must be something in these lines that resonates with genius because both Thomas Merton and Bob Dylan responded with some of their strongest work.  In “Fire Watch, July 4, 1952,” Merton’s epilogue to his book The Sign of Jonas, he opens with the line, “Watchman, what of the night?”  The 13 pages that follow are Merton’s response to Isaiah’s question.  Fifteen years after Merton wrote “Fire Watch,” Bob Dylan re-imagined Isaiah 21:8-9 in his famous song “All Along the Watchtower.”

Isaiah 21 is part of a section where the prophet issues a series of oracles prophesying the fall of cities.  Verses 1 through 10 address the impending fall of Babylon.  Destruction will come like “whirlwinds in the Negeb.”  Dylan takes this and hints at the storm to come: “The wind began to howl.”  The approach of the two riders, along with the wildcat growling and the wind howling, signals apocalypse.  The song ends just as the end of things begins.

The other Isaiah verse quoted above come from a second oracle.  Although it is addressed to Dumah (or Edom), a city located near Jerusalem, the subject still appears to be the fall of Babylon and its repercussions for Judah and Israel.  To the question “What of the night?” the watchman responds:

“Morning has come, and also night.  If you will request, request.  Return and come.”

According to the commentary of Rashi (1040-1105), the watchman’s response refers to the release of the Hebrew captives from Babylon (“morning has come”), a time that will be accompanied by judgment for some (“and also night”).  The exiles are urged to request permission of the conquering Persian army to return to the ancestral home (“If you will request, request.”).  And the passage ends with a call for all to return with appropriate humility and repentance (“Return and come.”).

The Fall of Babylon (1569), engraving by
Philips Galle (Netherlandish, 1537-1612)
after Maarten van Heemskerck.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Employing considerable creative license, Merton assigns his opening Isaiah quote to God rather than Isaiah’s unnamed speaker.  In “Fire Watch,” the first line, “Watchman, what of the night?” is italicized.  Merton doesn’t return to italics until the penultimate three-paragraph section of the essay where “The Voice of God is Heard in Paradise.”  In this construction, God opens the essay with a question and concludes with a strong (if ambiguous) statement.  In between, Merton ventures his own tentative responses to the question, “What of the night?”

Merton differs from both Isaiah and Dylan in his gentle treatment of the wilderness.  In Isaiah, the animals of the countryside will surely kill you:  “And the birds of prey will summer upon them (the people who flee the city)/and all the beasts of the earth will winter upon them.”  (Isaiah 18:6.)  Dylan is similarly ominous, with a wildcat’s growl announcing the impending destruction.  In contrast, Merton finds peace in the sounds of the Kentucky wilderness outside the monastery:

The world of this night resounds from heaven to hell with animal eloquence, with the savage innocence of a million unknown creatures.  While the earth eases and cools off like a huge wet living thing, the enormous vitality of their music pounds and rings and throbs and echoes until it gets into everything, and swamps the whole world in its neutral madness which never becomes an orgy because all things are innocent, all things are pure….  The heat is holy and the animals are the children of God and the night was never made to hide sin, but only to open infinite distances to charity and send our souls to play beyond the stars.

“Fire Watch, July 4, 1952”

Thomas Merton

Merton turns from the violent overthrows of Isaiah and Dylan to find a different kind of apocalypse in the night.

Vanitas (1661)
by N. L. Peschier (Netherlandish, active 1659-1661),
oil on canvas.
Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Part Two:  The Apocalypse of Thomas Merton

Lord, God, the whole world tonight seems to be made out of paper.  The most substantial things are ready to crumble or tear apart and blow away.

“Fire Watch, July 4, 1952”

Thomas Merton

Scratch the surface of the Abbey of Gethsemane and a void opens.  Merton roams the silent halls on his fire watch, where everything is ostensibly quiet and peaceful, but his thoughts keep slipping toward premonitions of destruction and oblivion.

Burning of Old South Church,
Bath, Maine, detail, c. 1854,
John Hilling (British, 1822-1894),
oil on canvas.
National Gallery of Art.

The monastery is solid as rock by day.  But, in Merton’s essay, everything appears different at night.  The night watchman’s job—keeping everyone safe from danger—is doomed to ultimate failure.  In the essay’s second paragraph, Merton sets out on his rounds “in the house that will one day perish.”  In this context, the word “house” operates poetically.  In Merton’s very Christian understanding, it is not just the monastery but the world as we know it that will perish.

From cellar to tower, Merton’s prescribed route through the monastery is a search for portents of disaster.  He checks a fuse box, fully aware that a single observation per night is insufficient to ensure any real safety.  “I am satisfied that there is no fire in this tower which would flare like a great torch and take the whole abbey up with it in twenty minutes…”

As he ascends the winding stairs of the monastery’s tower, Merton foresees his own non-existence, along with the passing of everything he loves in the material world.  “The beasts sing to you before they pass away.  The solid hills shall vanish like a worn-out garment.  All things change, and die and disappear.  Questions arise, assume their actuality, and also disappear.  In this hour I shall cease to ask them, and silence shall be my answer.”

This is Merton’s mystic apocalypse, blessing the world while acknowledging its ultimate ephemerality.  Creation fades into darkness.

One by one I shall forget the names of individual things.

“Fire Watch, July 4, 1952”

Thomas Merton

Thomas Merton's grave at the Abbey of Gethsemane.
Detail of a photo by Erik Eckel.  Wikimedia Commons.

The door swings out upon a vast sea of darkness and of prayer.

“Fire Watch, July 4, 1952”

Thomas Merton

Even from the highest tower, all that can be seen is a vast sea of darkness.  This is our future—a night that can be faced with either hope or despair.

Reference Source

The Sign of Jonas by Thomas Merton

Click here for the entire six-part Fire Watch series.

© 2015 Lee Price