22nd December, 2024
Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography (Mariner Books, 2001), 16.
Image: Azzedine Rouichi, Zurich, unsplash.com/@rouichi
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'In Confessions of A Guilty Bystander Thomas Merton writes of visiting Louisville on an errand for his monastery: “At the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the centre of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers.” I’ve come to see, as Merton says, that “it is the function of solitude to make one realize such things,” and that it is the separateness of the Plains, like the separateness of the monastery, that teaches me when I am in the city, “there are no strangers,” and that “the gate of heaven is everywhere,” even at Penn Station on Labour Day weekend.
Silence is the best response to mystery. “There is no way of telling people,” Merton reminds us, “that they are all walking around shining like the sun.” New Yorkers are told a great many things by strangers on the streets, holy fools and mad alike. But the monk’s madness is one that shows in the quiet life itself, with its absurd repetition of prayer and liturgy. It is “the madness of great love,” in the words of one monk, that “sees God in all things,” which nevertheless may be safely and quietly carried out of the monastery, into the world, and back again. As Cardinal Basil Hume, a Benedictine, has remarked, the monk is safe in the marketplace because he is at home in the desert.
... It was the Plains that first drew me to the monastery, which I suppose is ironic, for who would go seeking a desert in a desert? Plains and monasteries are places where distractions are at a minimum and you must rely on your own resources, only to find yourself utterly dependent on forces beyond your control; where time seems to stand still, as it does in the liturgy; where your life is defined by waiting.
The deprivations of Plains life and monastic life tend to turn small gifts into treasures, and gratitude is one of the first flowers to spring forth when hope is renewed and the desert blooms.'
Pages 16 & 17-18.