Monday, July 1, 2024
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)Â
I die by brightness and the Holy Spirit
Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go.
The sun sets over Urbana, and the band Kalesa (which is also a horse-drawn carriage in the Philippines) plays on at Riggs Beer Company’s Summerfest into the night. As we discovered a week ago when we found a wonderful local songwriter and singer just a block or two away on a fine Friday afternoon, the music was wonderful, the folks friendly and the spirit sweet.
We rejoice at the friendships rekindled in Urbana, often accidentally, several today at Life Vineyard Church in Mahomet and then at the Riggs party. In between we drove across a covered bridge into Lake of the Woods park, watched an episode of The Chosen (see yesterday’s devotion), and took a too short nap.
Now, home again I am not sure how to write for tomorrow. But I am sure what Michael De Sapio writes is true:
Writing can simultaneously take a lot out of you—you feel pleasantly exhausted after firing off a big piece of work—and make you feel wondrously light and buoyant. How is this? I think it is because writing is simultaneously work and leisure, a mental strain and a contemplative joy.
As Michael points out, the joy of a vacation comes when we vacate the premises of our ordinarily margin-less life and re-discover contemplation, reflection, quiet and ease. And that is how I experience my own writing life, at each day’s beginning and generally at each day’s end. In between, however, there is always the blank page. I face up to it, it looks me right in the eye. I turn away, and then face up to it again.
He that offers praise as a sacrifice glorifies me; and to him that goes the right way I will show the salvation of God.
Richard Rohr began a new week of reflections on Sunday, and he gets at this idea when he envisions “the great art form, the integrative dance of action and contemplation.” Ten years ago we visited the Abbey of Gethsemani, where Thomas Merton spent the last 27 years of his life. I followed a solitary trail to his hermitage, empty for the moment, and sat for awhile on his front porch, watching the yellow spring flowers blooming everywhere.
Merton wrote letters, essays, journals and poetry. His writing drew him down lonely roads, invited him to brush the dust off dirty windows, and allowed for God’s endless encouragement to think and pray, pray and think, settling over and over into silence.
Rohr refers to a poem Merton wrote. “The Blessed Virgin Mary Compared to a Window.”
It is my life to die, like glass, by light:
Slain in the strong rays of the bridegroom sun.
This is not just any window; it is Thomas Merton’s window into the world he cannot otherwise see at all clearly. But his moments staring through the glass have their price.
For light, my lover, steals my life in secret.
I vanish into day, and leave no shadow
But the geometry of my cross,
Whose frame and structure are the strength
By which I die, but only to the earth,
And am uplifted to the sky my life.
So here I sit, slowly spellbound by the beauty of Thomas Merton’s poem. Rohr’s “great art form” requires “a strong tolerance for ambiguity, an ability to allow, forgive, and contain a certain degree of anxiety, and (most importantly, I think) a willingness to not know and … not even need to know.”
Call this mystery. Call it brightness, transcendence, your own personal Window. This is what’s behind all the best moments with friends and strangers, and this is what waits like a strong storm to burst our safe bubbles. Still, it’s welcome, and so we sing. Here is Thomas Merton again, who spent much of his time in very quiet, often very white rooms:
Therefore do not be troubled at the judgements of the thunder,
Stay still and pray, still stay, my other son,
And do not fear the armies and black ramparts
Of the advancing and retreating rains:
I’ll let no lightning kill your room’s white order.
And now, okay, it’s time for bed. Thank you, Thomas Merton, for the title of this reflection. Holy Spirit, come. Come, Lord Jesus.
I pray the Lord my soul to take.
(Amos 2, Psalm 50, Psalm 95, Matthew 8)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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