Monday Morning with Merton: One Note; One Syllable
gabrielle April 6th, 2008
An unexpected but happy discovery - a podcast of approximately one year ago at Easter time, in which podcaster Ivan M. Granger recites Thomas Merton’s powerful poem, The Sowing of Meanings. Just click the link to listen.
The Sowing of Meanings
See the high birds! Is their’s the song
That dies among the wood-light
Wounding the listener with such bright arrows?
Or do they play in wheeling silences
Defining in the perfect sky
The bounds of (here below) our solitude,
Where spring has generated lights of green
To glow in clouds upon the sombre branches?
Ponds full of sky and stillnesses
What heavy summer songs still sleep
Under the tawny rushes at your brim?
More than a season will be born here, nature,
In your world of gravid mirrors!
The quiet air awaits one note, one note,
One light, one ray and it will be the angels’ spring:
One flash, one glance upon the shiny pond, and then
Asperges me! sweet wilderness, and lo! we are redeemed!
For, like a grain of fire
Smouldering in the heart of every living essence
God plants His undivided power –
Buries His thought too vast for worlds
In seed and root and blade and flower,
Until, in the amazing light of April,
Surcharging the religious silence of the spring,
Creation finds the pressure of His everlasting secret
Too terrible to bear.
Then every way we look, lo! rocks and trees
Pastures and hills and streams and birds and firmament
And our own souls within us flash, and shower us with light,
While the wild countryside, unknown, unvisited of men,
Bears sheaves of clean, transforming fire.
And then, oh then the written image, schooled in sacrifice,
The deep united threeness printed in our being,
Shot by the brilliant syllable of such an intuition, turns within,
And plants that light far down into the heart of darkness and oblivion,
Dives after, and discovers flame.
Wonderful! God knew what He was doing when he made the world, the seasons and the flowers., and us of course to enjoy them.
This poem is a beautiful celebration of it all - joy found in the simple things
‘Then every way we look, lo! rocks and trees
Pastures and hills and streams and birds and firmament
And our own souls within us flash, and shower us with light..’
Perfect timing, Gabrielle.
What a difference it makes hearing a poem read! The music of it all!
I read it from the blog and got nearly half the inspiration that I did hearing the audio link. Thank you for posting the audio.
‘Where spring has generated lights of green
To glow in clouds upon the sombre branches?
Ponds full of sky and stillnesses…’ I LOVE IT!
Please continue to post Merton Mondays.
Ann, I just love the image in the third-last stanza, of creation finding the pressure of God’s eternal secret too much to hold inside, and so everything just bursts forth in springtime! The unstoppable gift of life! But my favourite is the last verse, where Merton speaks of the Holy Trinity, “The deep united threeness printed in our being”.
teresa, I felt the same way. I found the poem first and read it a few times, then stumbled upon the podcast and was thrilled!
This poem has nudged me to pull a little book by Fr. Louis out of my case for a little ‘in home ‘ retreat this week.
Thanks for the inspiration.
I don’t like to hear poems, perhaps because sometimes I parse a line for a long time, as we do with Scripture. And yet, I must’ve read this 300 times one night.. ok, twice, and still couldn’t make heads nor tails of it. I read it the next day, and apparently it was still noisy in the world, so again, it was like falling down a softly padded ladder from a loving “You’re not ready” push. Honestly, one must wonder why I love poetry if I cannot read it!! Anyway, I looked at it again today, in a moment when I dunno, maybe Jupiter was aligned with Mars, and it struck me like padded lightning. It was like opening my eyes in Ireland. omg, how beautiful!
Wonderful, teresa. (Especially since we are all frequently the beneficiaries of your retreats.) I just picked up a second-hand copy of The Sign of Jonas a few days ago, which I’m reading for the first time, and I know there will be many jewels in it to share.
Carol, isn’t that just like the Lord’s mercy - those moments of padded lightning throughout our lives. (and mercifully, they are padded).
Indeed, the Lord’s mercy — your phrase made me think there’s a long drawn out lightning strike in giving birth, but indeed, it is Padded (and only momentarily fleeting) with the knowledge that such suffering brings forth the utmost, the absolutely utmost on earth: human life! The Lord’s own giving birth was padded similarly (as was Mary’s, due to her knowledge from Gabriel), but so much more total.
What is the Sign of Jonas about?
Oh, teresa, wouldn’t it be nice to have one or two very very quiet souls in for such as an in-home retreat? I’d give anything for that.
This Spring, this beautiful Spring of His lent to us.. I haven’t missed much of, this year! This morning at 5 I heard one little bird in the pitch-black see-your-breath quiet, and that’s all it takes to jump-start everyone else. That was preceded by hearing the very first peepers late, late last night. It began with one, then two more joined in. (They were likely yelling for blankets!) And I am keeping an eye on every bud in my little borrowed domain, every bud…and I am happy to report that every living bud is doing something for God. (And for us, at God’s happy wide-open command.)
I wrote a friend that I hoped there was a tiny chickadee out his way who favors him. There’s a sassy little one here who defies the cat to tilt his little head at me. (Maybe he’s just trying to see if he could take me.) I’ve watched crow dramas (the 3rd crow is a heartbreaking sight; he hangs on long after the two have started collecting twigs..), a great blue heron flew by shortly after the mallard pair, the Canada geese are noisily returning to town here, and there’ve been a whole new group on ducks on the river. I think they’re of the Merganser family. One morn early, I stood on the deck waiting for lilacs, but heard a beaver-tail splash. I looked down over the embankment and saw the beaver swimming downriver, while a black tiny thing ran alongside –was it a beaver youngin’? Was it a muskrat? *sigh.. to think Heaven is even better!
I bet it was a baby beaver. So cute. So far, I have seen quite a few cardinals in the backyard, and two or three robins, plus the chipmunk that I haven’t seen since last fall.
Hubby says if the lilac tree doesn’t bloom again this year (it hasn’t bloomed in about six years, and we’ve tried everything every good gardener has told us) he says he’s going to pull it up, but I said no, the birds like to sit in it.
The Sign of Jonas is, “the day by day experiences and meditations of Thomas Merton from the time of The Seven Storey Mountain to the present” (which I think was 1953). It’s a journal format, and I’m just loving what I’ve read so far.
The lilacs have been waiting for a sweet-talker to come along and urge them to bloom –I’m almost positive of that. But yes, birds are enough reason to leave it be.
Wow.. “Jonas” sounds good. I know it’s not at my library –they only have a handful of Merton books..but perhaps they can locate one for me.
I’m so glad your big thaw has begun up there, and that you’ve seen some old friends coming ’round again. Spring is the thing with feathers.
May all here have a wonderful weekend–it’s a good time for it.