Stephen looked intently

Stephen looked intently

Wednesday, December 26, 2018

Stephen looked intently up to heaven and saw the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God, and he said, “Behold, I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.” – From Acts 6

I have been thinking about typewriters. One of my several-friends named Christopher (which means “the Christ-Carrier”) showed me a picture of his new (and first) typewriter – a Remington built in 1923. Chris hopes the click and clack will be a subtext for his contemplative dialogues with God next year. Like Wendell Berry, Tom Hanks, and David Attenborough, he wants to slow down, he’s movin’ too fast. Listen for the warm. No more screens, the fire next time.

Christopher has yet to type over 50 words per minute, but why worry? Go slow. Let the words of my mouth be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord. Careful now. There is no hurry.

Thomas Merton typed. Thousands of letters, hundreds of journal pages, poems, stories, essays … Fr. Louis’ (Merton’s monastic name) typewriter calls to all us pilgrims from the Gethsemani guesthouse mural. When I peered through the windows of his hermitage in Kentucky a few years ago, I imagined him typing away.

Today is Boxing Day, a day of generous giving to mark the Feast of Stephen. Good King Wenceslas and all the rest of us place our feet in the footprints of Christ and pay it forward: “Therefore, Christian men, be sure, wealth or rank possessing, ye who know will bless the poor shall yourselves find blessing.”

Stephen saw the heavens opened.

The words Stephen spoke reflected the words he heard from heaven. In his “Firewatch: July 4, 1952,” Thomas Merton put words on God’s thoughts, and his own. His words, typed in solitude, help me celebrate so many of the ways we remember Stephen’s death, martyrdom, and eternal life:

God, my God, God Whom I meet in darkness, with You it is always the same thing! Always the same question that nobody knows how to answer!

While I am asking questions which You do not answer, You ask me a question which is so simple that I cannot answer. I do not even understand the question.

This night, and every night, it is the same question.

Merton will not quite tell us what it is. He walks through the monastery building, checking fuses, and reaches the roof.

The door swings out upon a vast sea of darkness and of prayer. Will it come like this, the moment of my death? Will You open a door upon the great forest and set my feet upon a ladder under the moon, and take me out among the stars?

The voice of God is heard in Paradise: “Have you had sight of Me, Jonas my child? Mercy within mercy within mercy. I have forgiven the universe because I have never known sin. What was poor has become infinite. What is infinite was never poor. I have always known poverty as infinite: riches I love not at all. Prisons within prisons within prisons. No more lay hold on time, Jonas, my son, lest the rivers bear you away.”

Dawn rises; the sun begins to appear at the end of Merton’s firewatch.

“What was fragile has become powerful. I loved what was most frail. I looked upon what was nothing. I touched what was without substance, and within what was not, I am.”

Merton comes back down to the ground. While he typed, and while I type these words, and while you read them, even as Stephen feels the cursed stones crush his head, God creates all things new.

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.

*   *   *

Lord, often I put my hand behind me to cushion my aching back. Give me good posture when I pray. And give me stopping points today, Lord, when I can listen for the question you have for me. If any stones are flung, let me see your face behind them, and hear your voice calling, “Come!”

Thomas Merton, “Fire Watch, July 4, 1952,” from The Sign of Jonas, pp. 352-362, 1953. “Fire Watch” is also part of Merton’s second of seven journal volumes, Entering the Silence, pp. 477-488, 1997

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