Season of Desire

For anyone who has read deeply in Thomas Merton – who has had his life changed by Thomas Merton, as some of us have – the Advent season brings to mind the Advent sequence from The Seven Storey Mountain, in which Merton gives away his possessions and writes farewell letters to friends and sets out from the Franciscan college of St. Bonaventure in upstate New York and takes a long train ride south and disembarks in Kentucky and catches a ride out to the country and goes to the gate in the wall (where it seems a monk has been waiting for him) and enters the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani – and becomes a Cistercian, a k a a Trappist.

Seventy-some years later, Merton’s account of his first few days in the monastery is an Advent reflection to beat all: the sometimes schematic piety offset by the vigor of the writing, the monk’s ritual life made real and actual by the clear, tough description of a Kentucky winter (and by a perfectly apt piece of poetry):

“Liturgically speaking, you could hardly find a better time to become a monk than Advent. You begin a new life, you enter into a new world at the beginning of a new liturgical year. And everything that the Church gives you to sing, every prayer than you say in and with Christ in His Mystical Body, is a cry of ardent desire for grace, for help, for the coming of the Messiah, the Redeemer.

“The soul of the monk is a Bethlehem where Christ comes to be born – in the sense that Christ is born where his likeness is reformed by grace, and where his Divinity lives, in a special manner, with His Father and His Holy Spirit, by charity, in this `new incarnation,’ this `other Christ.’

“The Advent liturgy prepares that Bethlehem with songs and canticles of ardent desire.

“It is a desire all the more powerful, in the spiritual order, because the world all around you is dead. Life has ebbed to its dregs. The trees are stripped bare. The birds forget to sing. The grass is brown and grey. You go out to the fields with mattocks to dig up the briars. The sun gives its light, as it were, in faint intermittent explosions, `squibs,’ not rays, according to John Donne’s conceit in his Nocturnal on St. Lucy’s Day …

“But the cold stones of the Abbey church ring with a chant that glows with living flame, with clean, profound desire.”

• 18 December 2013
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