Extract From WE ARE ALREADY ONE: THOMAS MERTONS MESSAGE OF HOPE:

Reflections in Honor of His Centenary (1915 2015)

Edited by Gray Henry and Jonathan Montaldo (Fons Vitae, 2014)

ANOTHER SONG FROM NOBODY Gary Hall

How to begin? Whom to address? A simple dilemma reveals the peculiar giftedness of Thomas Merton. The strange familiarity of his abiding presence prompts a desire to address the dead monk-writer directly, as though writing him a letter, as though he were as alive as when those thousands of other letters poured into Gethsemani. He seems, still, to invite conversation, though all we have is what he once described as his paper self in what he dismissed as a strange land of unreal intimacy. A paper self, a life hammered out on that rightly Royal typewriter or scrawled in heart-leaning cursive, can over time begin to feel like a real presence in our midst. Perhaps this is a cumulative effect of the kind of attentive reading he draws readers into, leading us by the hand to a place apart, yet never really apart. In fact, the opposite. That authorial presence - not like a ghost, or some lonely childs invisible friend remains as (here Im groping for a metaphor) a beacon, perhaps? A homing beacon, by whose intermittent radiance readers orientate themselves towards the burning love of Christ and feel again the pulse of a more vibrant world, in all its glory and fragility. Along the way readers seem to discover one another, and we get some sense of how his writing goes on working, how it goes on communicating and stimulating the kind of communication which just might lead to a communion beyond words.

If we who never knew Merton in that flesh-and-blood way of friendship or companionship can discover one another through him, this is no more remarkable than our joining company with sundry saints and martyrs, artists and activists, oddballs and passers-by who populated his world, along with his friends and correspondents whose lives we can hardly avoid intruding upon. Mertons world and their worlds merge with our own worlds until the realization dawns on us that (as he told us) we cannot be alien to one another, that separateness is illusory. In following his paper trail we, time and again, stumble across some overgrown path leading away from manufactured worlds into ancient forests which remember an older unity; where the breeze, however ancient, is a new testament; where whispering rain becomes rivulets forming pools from which, if only now and then, our thirst is slaked.

Thats one way of putting it, anyway. Other days, less poetic, are laced with

foreboding. Then only seeds of destruction and engineered fruit seem to flourish in

deforested wasteland, irrigated by the poisons of soulless industries which merrily go on manufacturing consent and distraction. Prometheus is fracking now and Eichmann is reinstated. Merton provides the script, whilst other voices keep on suggesting that the prophetic longings he conjures so eloquently are no foretaste of paradise, merely nostalgia. More Forrest Gump than John of Patmos. The bluegrass hermit with his deceptively simple ways simply had to die. Killed by electricity (of course) before Reagan and Bush presided over Cold War games, before Cruise missiles were replaced as weapon of choice by an armoury of militarized finance. Merton left these shores before the Fat Man with his digitized matrix turned to spying on email and digi-text (forget those indiscrete phone calls from the cellarers office) or could watch from satellite and drone, making mockery of twenty-feet-thick walls and putting an end to any prospect of wilderness. Merton knew nothing of these details, and we cannot but wonder how he might have borne any more than half of this past bloody century.

But these are supposed to be variations on a theme of hope, a theme which

perhaps needs to be made more explicit. Thomas Merton taught us to eschew that cheerful optimism which works so hard to suppress the tragic realities which naked minds and tendered hearts simply cannot - will not - avoid. Deep joy will always be prone to flip over into sorrow, just as love risks pain, and delight in beauty becomes grief at its destruction. Hope, like love and faith, bears all these. Mertons joyful Advent faith in the promise and the presence of Christ carried him on his own Advent journey beyond the misty realm of slogans and petty comforts, of accolades and commentaries. Only captured words remain, inviting us to our senses, restoring confidence in the life-giving activity of proper speech.

I love that he made no money from writing, nor wanted to. I love that he

stayed the course, loyal unto death, despite the storms and the options. I love that, despite ambition, he cared little for office or rank, but craved only enough solitude for hospitality, silence and communication. And the occasional beer. I love that he knew his need to be noticed and didnt hide his foibles; that in the end he knew love to be more than sufficient. Sometimes overly assertive yet never too sure of himself, Merton unmasked his own contradictions and fractures, so we might dare to do the same.

It would seem strange for those of us who never knew him to say that we miss him. An occasional sense of loss nevertheless lingers. Perhaps these are innate memories of the primordial paradise Merton evokes, though the feeling is not so much about a lost world as his way of seeing it and telling it. So serious yet un-serious, a transparent blaze of paradox and integrity, disciplined and assiduous yet as playful as a child who just wants to see what happens when he points out that the emperor is naked. Gazing into the abyss or reeling in wonder at the incandescent glory of the human race, brooding beneath stormy skies or singing like birds granted permission to be, he waited and prayed, relentlessly making his art and his confession, pouring out silent words then blending the best of them on the canvas of so many hearts. So, in the end, his way of seeing and telling is far from lost, but continues to evolve amongst readers who recognize their Virgil, and wend their way back into the heart of this present moment where nothing is final. The game is never over.