Today two women are honored on the Roman calendar. My observation over the years has been that in English speaking countries, Queen Margaret of Scotland - 11th Century Anglo-Saxon refugee, reformer of Christian life in her adopted country, and apostle to the poor - is usually the chosen option for the Mass and Liturgy of the Hours of the day. This is understandable and entirely appropriate.
But when I was 18 years old (in the Spring of 1981) I happened upon a book on my parents' bookshelf, started perusing it, and was drawn into a compelling and astonishing reading experience that turned my life upside down. The book was
The Seven Storey Mountain. In those days, Thomas Merton's famous
conversion-vocation-witness-/-literary-masterpiece still also had a certain level of cultural proximity and relevance (especially for an intellectual, curious, perplexed, adolescent "bad Catholic" such as I was at the time).
It blew me away.
In fact, it had been doing that to its readers - especially young Catholic men - for two generations. More than a few ran off to monasteries themselves after reading it (some persevered, many others left during the turbulent days of the 1960s). Merton's own unusual monastic life and legacy - with all the complexities surrounding it (these may be topics for other blog posts) - if anything extended the interest in his 1948 classic well into my post-Vatican-II generation. No doubt it will continue to be read and to touch hearts, but in my youth it had some lingering flavor of something "modern" and "contemporary," of recently living persons and events of a historical period that was not entirely "the past." I don't know how to express this precisely, but I think it is one element of the special impact this book had on my life.
The later Thomas Merton was (and still is) often misunderstood. Unconventional, brilliant, flawed as he was, he remained faithful to the Church and to his vocation to the end, in sometimes difficult but genuine obedience to his superiors and with remarkable charity and affection for his brothers at Gethsemane Abbey in Kentucky. It was this real devoted love and sense of belonging that he expressed in a letter to his own community two days before his accidental death in 1968 at an international monastic conference in Thailand, ten thousand miles away - a journey he made with the approval of his abbot.
In any case, I knew little or nothing of this in 1981, when I encountered the early Merton through his honest testimony, his vivid and compelling story, his masterful prose and singular poetic sensibility, and above all the graces of God that accompanied my first reading of
The Seven Storey Mountain so many years ago.
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| Thomas Merton |
And though I didn't run off to enter a Trappist monastery, it was the beginning for me of an ongoing and appreciative relationship with the Benedictine spiritual tradition. We have Cistercians in the Shenandoah Valley (at Holy Cross Abbey in Berryville) and they have been a great help to me at various points in my life. Among other things, I have learned to love their saints.
As I noted at the beginning, two medieval women are commemorated on the Roman calendar today. One or the other (but not both) may be chosen for the proper prayers of the liturgy. But for Benedictines the world over, worthy Saint Margaret's memorial is tomorrow. Today is always observed as the
proper Feast Day of that other amazing woman, known to history as Saint Gertrude the Great. She was a 13th Century German Benedictine nun, a scholar and counselor to many, and a mystic enraptured by the merciful and loving heart of Jesus.
Thomas Merton studied and wrote about medieval Benedictine and Cistercian monastic life, and helped inspire a renewal of interest in its saints. He was no stranger to Gertrude, nor was she to him, as is clear enough in his conversion story. Today happens to be the 81st anniversary of his baptism, first communion, and reception into the Catholic Church, which occurred at Corpus Christi parish - home of the Catholic chaplaincy for Columbia University in New York City - on November 16, 1938.
In
The Seven Storey Mountain, Merton indicates that on the day itself, he was joyfully aware that it was Saint Gertrude's feast. No doubt, she was also very much aware of him.
Gertrude isn't called "the Great" for nothing. She was something of a phenomenon in her own time, and has remained a special heavenly friend down to the present day. The Benedictines and Cistercians have always known this. "
Gertrude had the power to stay the clouds of heaven as also to open its portals, for her tongue had become the key of heaven," proclaims the antiphon from today's Benedictine office for Morning Prayer. These words correspond to a powerful witness that still speaks to us after 800 years. We have only a few of the many texts she wrote during her lifetime, but they testify to her transcendent, personal relationship with Jesus, which she attributed to His boundless love overcoming her own weakness and incoherence.
In her
Spiritual Exercises - which were called "a rare jewel of mystical spiritual literature" by that most German and most "Benedictine" of Popes, our own recent and much beloved Pope Benedict XVI - Gertrude continually calls our hearts back to the memory of the love of Jesus for us:
"Ah! Wake up, o soul! How long will you sleep? Hear the word that I announce to you. Above the heavens there is a king who is held by desire for you. He loves you with his whole heart, and he loves beyond measure. He himself loves you so sweetly and he himself cherishes you so faithfully that, for your sake, he humbly gave up his kingdom. Seeking you, he endured being seized as a thief.... For you, he cheerfully surrendered his flower-like body to death" (Saint Gertrude the Great,
Spiritual Exercises).
Gertrude experienced the deep tenderness, but also the power and mysterious relentlessness of Infinite Love who draws close to us:
"O devastating coal, my God, you who contain, radiate, and brand with living heat!...O powerful furnace..by whose operation dross is transformed into refined and choice gold when the soul, wearied by deceit, at long last blazes with an inner and insatiable desire to track down what belongs to it, and which it may receive from you alone: the very Truth" (from Gertrude’s
The Herald of Divine Love).
Gertrude knew intimately the One of whom she spoke. She recorded (or confided to her sisters in the medieval abbey of Helfta) many special visions of Jesus, which formed in her an intense awareness of God's compassion. These testimonies remain a source of great encouragement for us, a witness to just how much, how beyond measure, is God's love for us and His wanting to be with us.
On one occasion, she reported these words from Jesus:
"My Divine Heart, understanding human inconstancy and frailty, desires with incredible ardor continually to be invited, either by your words, or at least by some other sign, to operate and accomplish in you what you are not able to accomplish yourself. And as its omnipotence enables it to act without trouble, and its impenetrable wisdom enables it to act in the most perfect manner, so also its joyous and loving charity makes it ardently desire to accomplish this end” (ibid).
We must trust in Jesus. Whatever may be the trials or the darkness of this life, He is with us. He wants, with all the ardor of His Heart, to be with us, to love us, to save us, heal us, and transform us. Saint Gertrude, pray for us to remember His presence and His love, and to call upon Him with confidence.
