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

Nativity Essays: William Blake and a Gnostic-Style Manger Scene

Nativity Blogging
for the Season of Christmastide 2014-15:
William Blake’s
The Nativity

The Nativity by William Blake,
1799 or 1800, tempera on copper, 10 3/4 x 15 1/16 in.,
gift of Mrs. William Thomas Tonner, 1964,
Philadelphia Museum of Art

The most memorable Christmas Eve sermon I’ve ever heard was delivered by Pastor Brian Rhea (now pastor at Newcombtown United Methodist Church in Millville, New Jersey) shortly after the birth of his second child.  Fresh from experience, Brian vividly shared just how gross childbirth really is, with all its blood, tears, and other leaking fluids.  And he didn’t imagine the manger was all tidy and neat either!  It was truly a great sermon.

Today’s featured painting by William Blake (1757-1827) is the polar opposite.  Blake’s The Nativity has to be the most antiseptic of all childbirth paintings.  The baby literally flies out of the womb, spotless and glowing, into the hands of the waiting midwife, in this case Mary’s cousin Elizabeth.

Detail, The Nativity by William Blake,
Philadelphia Museum of Art

While it would be impossible to realistically reconcile Brian’s sermon with Blake’s painting, I’d like to think that both descriptions fall within a broad Christian tradition that’s always been open to embracing paradoxes.  Blake’s painting is the real boundary-tester.  As expressed in his poetry and artwork, Blake’s mysterious, complex, and intensely personal beliefs evince strong Gnostic tendencies, and Gnosticism has been labeled heretical by the mainstream church for nearly two thousand years.  But given a choice between celebrating visionary genius or the cold judgments of Inquisition-style church tribunals, I’ll go with genius any day.  Blake’s okay by me.

"The Tyger" by William Blake,
Songs of Innocence and
of Experience (1794),
Wikimedia Commons

William Blake dedicated his life to expressing his radical and mystical ideas through poetry, painting and etching, and the art of printing.  He’s probably best known for his poetry book Songs of Innocence and of Experience which contains the famous poem “The Tyger”:

Tyger, Tyger, burning bright

In the forest of the night:

What immortal hand or eye,

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

The Nativity is one of fifty small Bible-based paintings that Blake made for Thomas Butts, an English War Office clerk, in 1899 and 1890.  For this project, Blake enjoyed considerable artistic freedom in choosing his subjects and approach.  While many of the paintings have been lost, there is enough of a record to attempt a reasonable guess at the scope of the ambitious project.  In Blake as an Artist, art historian David Bindman suggests that “the series probably consisted of approximately fifteen Old Testament subjects and thirty-five from the Life of Christ.”

Detail, The Nativity
by William Blake,
Philadelphia Museum of Art

The Nativity would have been the second of the Life of Christ paintings, following The Angel Gabriel appearing to Zacharias, which is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and preceding The Adoration of the Magi in the Brighton Museum and Art Gallery.  In The Nativity, Joseph supports the unconscious Mary as she gives birth.  The child, his arms outstretched in a cruciform position, flies toward the outstretched hands of Elizabeth.  An infant John the Baptist sits in the lap of Elizabeth.  Behind Elizabeth, oxen contentedly feed from a trough.  The star of Bethlehem—cruciform, like the baby—shines through the window.

Throughout the ages, most Gnostic sects have professed a belief that the material world we live in is flawed beyond redemption and that secret knowledge is needed to unite the soul with the perfection of God’s spiritual realm.  This type of belief can become very dualistic, with earthly and human life viewed as untouchable.  A belief of this sort tends to rule out an understanding of Jesus as wholly Man as well as wholly God (a basic paradox of mainstream Christianity).  In most Gnostic sects, the earthy childbirth described in Pastor Rhea’s sermon would be altogether too yucky to apply to the spiritual being of Jesus.  Therefore, Blake paints a pristine, miraculous, and apparently pain-free birth.

Blake painted The Nativity in tempera, laying the paint over a mixture of whiting and carpenter’s glue adhered to a copper surface.  While he adopted this technique in the hope of preserving the original colors, his method failed, resulting in two centuries of darkening and surface cracking.  It’s not what Blake wanted, but I love the effect.  It brings out an other-worldly, archaic beauty in Blake’s vision that can’t be easily dismissed.  It’s hauntingly weird.

Detail, The Nativity
by William Blake,
Philadelphia Museum of Art

Reference Sources

Blake as an Artist by David Bindman
William Blake:  The Seer and His Visions by Milton Klonsky
Genius by Harold Bloom
Philadelphia Museum of Art Collections

© 2014 Lee Price