Communion

On Saturday afternoons, my son Michael does volunteer work at a hospital in Brick, NJ, an area that was hit badly by Hurricane Sandy.  This past Saturday, my son asked if we could eat supper in Brick, after he was done at the hospital, and he asked if we could have Mexican food. It just so happens that we always pass a small Mexican restaurant in Brick, called Mexico Lindo.

The place looked a little rough around the edges, but we went in anyway.  We were greeted by a vivacious woman told me that they were having a surprise birthday party for her daughter's 24th birthday.  In Spanish, she told an elderly woman with a small child who were seated at a particular table to move to another so that we could be seated there. It turns out the woman was her mother. I felt awful that we were usurping them, and I apologized.

My son and I were the only paying customers. The others were there for the party--the birthday girl hadn't arrived yet, and family and friends kept arriving in advance of the surprise. There were balloons all over, and several of the guys were drinking Coronas. The girls were all talking, smiling, and clearly enjoying the warmth of familiar company.

No one seemed to mind that my son and I were present. The menu was a mystery of things Mexican, most of which neither my son nor I had never heard of before. The salsa sauce that came with the freebie taco chips sang and danced with joyous flavor. I know what fresh cilantro tastes like because we grow it in our backyard-- and this was fresher than any that I had ever tasted. The chile itself, or whatever, was awesomely flavorful. It only served to stoke our appetite in anticipation of what was to come, and we were not disappointed. From the menu, we picked at random, huaraches for an appetizer, a chimichanga, and taquitos.  Overall, the appetizer and main dishes were a memorable eating experience. My son and I were both struck by how good the re-fried beans were. My son loved the red rice.

Look--I know it was a birthday party--but as I looked and listened and absorbed the atmosphere, I could not but see and hear that these people--in this town that is just beginning to recover from the devastation of Hurricane Sandy--were all happy and joyous.

And I'm thinking that these people are probably all Catholics, like myself. And I know intellectually--because we study this stuff in the Communion and Liberation Movement and in C.S. Lewis, etc.--that Christians are supposed to be joyous. But most Catholics that I know (of Irish/German/Italian/Polish extraction) including myself, are more often miserable creatures. At the birthday party, it dawned on me that this is what Christian joy looks like.  

These Mexican-American Catholics have something important to teach us repressed Irish-American Catholics. After I went home, I thought to myself, if this is what Mexican culture looks like, then sign me up.

Hurricane Sandy

I'd like to express my appreciation and thanks to all of the first responders--police, fireman, EMT, Coast Guard, but especially the utility company workers, repairmen, dispatchers, truckers delivering supplies, etc. who are working around the clock to serve the rest of us.

On Monday afternoon, I lost power, network, land line and cell phone service. My wife has been in Hong Kong. At home, my wife likes to buy things in bulk in case of emergency, but that doesn't mean that we know where anything is. Michael knew where one flashlight was, and the other was in my backpack. By chance, Michael found the bag in the basement with my wife's horde of batteries. Michael remembered that he had a battery operated Sony radio in his dresser. He connected two PC speakers to it, and it worked perfectly. Thanks to my wife's habit, of buying things in bulk and only on sale, we had enough food in the house for at least a month, if not three. We had a sizable cache of candles which my wife had bought fifteen years ago, in case of power failures. Over four days, with no contact with the outside world other than our neighbors and whatever was in walking distance, Michael and I listened to the news of the disaster on the radio. At night, we played chess by candle light.

I live about three miles from Raritan Bay. The Northern part of my town, Hazlet, had been evacuated early in the storm. We go to church in Union Beach. The town of Union Beach sits between Hazlet and the bay--the Union Beach border is about two miles away, with about another mile before you get to the bay. From the radio, we learned that 200 houses in Union Beach were completely destroyed, and one person died as a result of falling off his roof into the water.


During the summer, I had visited the beach at Mantaloking (near Brick/Lakewood). From the radio, I learned that the entire town was under water and that ten homes had caught fire from gas mains. Even after the homes had burned down, the gas main fires continued to burn. Utility workers were unable to get to Mantaloking because it was surrounded by flood waters. Essentially, as per other reports, plus the governor, the entire Jersey shore is gone.


Late Tuesdays night, I had a hunch that if we drove towards Rutgers, where Andrew is, we might pick-up cell phone service and be able to contact family members. Sure enough, as we approached the Raritan River, we got cell phone service. My son at Rutgers was very happy to hear from us. He said he had been trying to contact us for more than two days. To get to Andrew's campus, I had to drive around two roadblocks, but it was late at night and no one was around. Andrew is a new dorm that was built with backup generator power. Michael and I charged up our cell phones in his dorm room. And from there we phoned my wife in Hong Kong. Once she finished scolding, panicking, reprimanding, and trying to micromanage us all the way from Hong Kong on how we should be doing in the outage, Michael asked her where the third flashlight was. She did not know, but she told us where we could find an unopened package of three flashlights from Costco (with batteries already in them!). With that we would be O.K. in the dark for a few weeks at least.

We had gas and water throughout. My son and I are very glad that we had each other for company. Rather than being plugged into the Internet, cell phones, or T.V., we had each other to talk to. We did a lot of planning and preparation. It was an extremely relaxing time playing chess and just talking to him in the dark. However, on the very first night, right after the sun went down, we both said to each other, almost simultaneously, that this could get very boring, very fast. But it never did. I got to know and appreciate my son Michael better during this time, and I found that fascinating and eminently worthwhile.

P.S.

We won't be back to normal until we can buy gasoline. As luck would have it, my wife's car had a full tank of gas in it.

The unexpected thing about the storm was how little rain it had.Yes, it rained for 24 hours straight, but it was very light, not the torrents we have had in previous storms. Michael and I spent considerable time laying out and weighing down a tarp to guide falling water away from one of the basement windows, but it was unnecessary. Of course we took everything in the yard & porch and brought it in the garage including garbage cans, grill, Halloween decorations, bird feeder. We also quickly took down all the trellis' in the vegetable garden. after the storm I actually found 3 bell peppers that were able to be harvested. and this is November.

11/2/2012
Things are still bad around here.  I just received a robo call from my town's emergency services office.  They announced that at the Catholic Grammar school in Union Beach that my sons had attended, the NJ National Guard will again be distributing drinkable water and ice, as they were yesterday.  At Maranatha Baptist Church (within walking distance) they are asking for donations of clothing and blankets, for distribution, as is St. Benedict's church (the Catholic Church in the other direction.)

11/4/2012

Perhaps you had to be here, but I was amazed by this. There is a little strip mall about a quarter of a mile from our house, with a little Chinese restaurant called Liu's Garden. We get a discount there because my wife is friends with the owner (and we always pays cash!). Like us, they only had water and gas from Monday PM to Thursday. I drove by at night, and inexplicably, the parking lot was packed. My son said, "Liu's Garden is open!" I looked through their window. It was dark, but I saw a glowing light in the back of the restaurant, from the kitchen area. It was the glow of the gas flames under the woks. As my eyes adjusted, I then noticed the silhouettes of a lineup of the backs heads of customers waiting at the counter. The restaurant was packed with customers! Obviously, they stayed open solely for business reasons, but I think they should get some recognition for providing food service during the outage.


11/5
By executive order of the governer himself, today is Halloween in New Jersey, but we have had no Trick or Treaters! Sandy is the devil that stole Haloween. I was able to get gas locally yesterday. There were less than 10 cars on line, but they only had high test, and I had to pay cash. I went to my local Pathmark Supermarket, and they still have no food that requires refrigeration. Shoprite Supermarket had milk, orange juice, bacon, etc. but most of the lights in the supermarket were out. The cashier, acting very happy, said that her house is still without power, that she has forgotten what it's like to have power. Next, I went to the local bakery. There were two college girls on line in front of me who asked the cashier for donations of unsold goods at closing time, for relief efforts. The cashier, who also seemed quite happy, said that she understood because she lived in Union Beach (which had been declared a disaster area and required to evacuate). She told me that her house was intact but still without power. My in-law in Old Bridge are still without power as well.

A Reflection after attending The New York Encounter

This past weekend the Communion and Liberation Movement held its annual gathering, called, The New York Encounter, at the Manhattan Center, on 34^th Street.

I was only able to attend the New York Encounter on Sunday.  The opportunity to meet and talk with people from the Communion and Liberation Movement, from all over North America, and from all walks of life, was like fresh air in my lungs. One of the people that I chatted with, a young man from Milan, Italy, asked me how I found out about the movement, which I related to him.

I also said,

"At the time when I discovered Luigi Giussani and the Communion and Liberation Movement, my spiritual growth had been blocked for a long time, perhaps a decade. My growth as a person was equally blocked as well. The most beautiful thing about the teachings of Father Giussani and CL, is that I am learning to become more human.

"I assume that what Giussani teaches about being human was always implied or assumed in the Christian tradition. I suspect that over time, with modern society and the positivistic attitude that has become so pervasive, we are losing sight of what once had been obvious. We needed a genius like Giussani to come along and make explicit those things which were once common sense. And I confess to being an individual with an extreme deficiency of common sense.

"Throughout my grammar school Catholic education, we were told over and over again that Jesus was both full human and fully Divine. Contemporary psychologists say that spiritual and psychological growth tends to occur in parallel. But there is a theory in physics that says parallel lines converge at infinity. Don Giusanni liked to quote the ancient Roman rhetorician Marius Victorinus, who said, 'When I encountered Christ, I discovered that I was a man.'  But I think that this can be paraphrased as, 'When I encountered Christ, I discovered what it means to be a human being.' It is in following Christ that our humanity and spirituality converge.

A Christian Approach to Politics

"Thus the first service to politics rendered by the Christian faith is that it liberates man from the irrationality of political myths, which are the real threat of our time.Taking a stand for sobriety, which does what is possible and does not cry with an ardent heart for the impossible, is of course always difficult; the voice of reason is not as loud as the cry of unreason. The cry of the grandiose project has the cachet of morality; restricting one's self to what is possible, in contrast, seems to be the renunciation of moral passion, mere faint-hearted pragmatism. But as a matter of fact, political morality consists in precisely of resisting the seductive force of the big words for which humanity and its chances are being gambled away. The moral thing is not adventurous moralism, which tries to mind God's business, but rather honesty which accepts man's limits and does man's work with them. Not the uncompromising stance, but compromise is the true morality in political matters."

- from the book, Church, Ecumenism, and Politics: New Endeavors in Ecclesiology, by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI), pp144-145.

Openings

From, The Religious Sense (pp. 118-119), by Luigi Giussani

 Openings

What we have just said explains why all of humanity's authentic religious traditions have referred to mystery, that is to say, spoken about God in negative terms: in-finite, im-mense, im-measurable, in-effable, that which cannot be spoken, unknown, that unknown god to which the Athenians had consecrated an altar. And even if certain words do seem positive -- for example, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent -- they are in fact, negative from the standpoint of experience because they do not correspond to anything in our experience. They are positive only in a formal way and to understand them we must negate our own way of being powerful, or of knowing. Likewise, we use certain phrases: God is goodness, God is justice, God is beauty. They are starting points which, if multiplied, enrich the presentiment we have of this ultimate Object. But they cannot be definitions of this Object, because God is goodness, but he is not goodness in the way that we know goodness; God is love, but not love as we know it; God is person, but not as we are persons. However, these are not meaningless, purely nominalistic terms. Rather, they are expressions that intensify the way we relate to, draw closer to the Mystery. They are the openings to the Mystery.

Thomas Merton the Fallen

With all of my implied hagiography, I am aware of the fallen Merton.  As a young man in pre-World War II London, Merton fathered a child. He did not assume responsibility for the mother or child, and that leaves me stone cold. After the war, and after he had become a priest, from the monastery, Merton sought to inquire about them. He discovered that mother and child had been killed in the blitz.

I know of conservative Catholics who make the accusation that Merton was going to convert to Buddhism.  One friend of mine even asserted that that is what prompted his trip to Bangkok (where he died from an accidental electrocution.) That is nonsense.  He simply had a very intense intellectual and experiential interest in the Eastern religions. Merton was no fool. He knew who he was. 

I just discovered an interesting book titled, Thomas Merton’s Art of Denial: The Evolution of a Radical Humanist, by David D. Cooper, which I must read next. The book is supposedly about the conflict that Merton experienced between being an anonymous monk with vows of silence and stability, and that of being a world famous, best selling writer and intellectual. Some accuse him of not being sufficiently obedient to his role and vows as a monk. That is nonsense.  We all struggle in life and monks are no different. As per reviews, in his middle years Merton struggles with the fact that his experience of monastic life is not the way he imagined it when he was young. He ultimately resolves this conflict by turning his formidable intellect and writing talent towards writing against war—all wars, but especially the Vietnam War, and against the Atomic arms race.

When Merton was an older man and world famous, while being hospitalized for an illness, he became friends with one of the nurses. Afterwards, they maintained a relationship. I do not hold that against him, but most people consider it to have been a violation of his monastic vows. No one knows if it was a sexual relationship or not and some people have said that it would not have been.  It doesn’t matter now, as God forgives, but the relationship is what is preventing his cause for sainthood from moving forward.

Thankful for Grace this Thanksgiving

I am thankful to God for all of the good in my life, and it has been overwhelmingly good. I had read Thomas Merton's, The Seven Story Mountain (1948), when I was in my early twenties. It did not move me or make much of an impact on me at the time. I was taken in more by how well it was written than by the content.  In my twenties, I had not had enough experience of life--no experience at all really, for me to be able to appreciate it.  The single thing that I remember from the book was Thomas' fear of being drafted to fight in the impending world war, his desperate relief upon entering the monastery to become a Trappist monk, while reading the sign above the monastery entrance which read, "Peace to All Who Enter Here." Nothing else in the story registered with me at the time, but now, re-reading the book 30+ years later, I can appreciate every word.

On Facebook last year, some Catholic friends had an exchange about The Seven Story Mountain, and I realized that I had missed something good--the book had gone right through my brain, while leaving only the faintest of impressions. So, I went to Barnes and Noble and bought a copy of the Fiftieth Anniversary edition.

I couldn't read it straight through. The beginning chapters were dull. And so, I just stashed the book in a drawer. I have a habit of needing to read something before I go to sleep.  And so lately, after laying down in bed, I've been opening the book at random and reading sections, and in that mode, have found it illuminating and evocative. Again, I can't help but admire the expressive clarity of his writing. It is as formal as it is clear, without being stilted or phony. And his use of imagery is as good as the best poets. But the difference this time around is that I can see how Grace was constantly prompting him and propelling him forward.

I should stop here and state that I have read probably about a dozen books by Merton--some straight theology (dry); material on the monastic and contemplative life (a bit abstract); all of his essays on social justice (utterly fantastic); his published journals (for the true Merton junkies); of few of his poems, but especially, the fantastic, "Original Child Bomb," (for the pacifist and anti-nuclear activist in you); as well as many critical and biographical things about him; including the outstanding biography, The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton. I read all of this in my twenties.

If anyone had a calling to become a monk, it was Merton, and becoming a monk freed Merton to be able to look at things with an incredible spiritual objectivity. One of the things that keeps readers going back to read more and more of Merton are his incredibly penetrating insights into the nature of things. He can look at an ordinary situation in the world, describe it for the reader, but then turn it inside-out, to show us the actual spiritual truth, which most of us have been unable to see.

Merton filled me with romantic notions of the monastery and of the spiritual life, but it also sharpened my understanding of social justice and gave me a desire to be a writer just like Thomas Merton (which I obviously failed at). Merton helped me to not look down on people as much or as often as I did, and he helped me to be less morally judgmental of others than I would have been. In the town in which I had grown up, there was a monastery of Augustinian Recollects. Strictly speaking, they were friars not try monks, but I was fascinated by them none-the-less as well. Needless to say, the reality was that I did not have a calling to monasticism or the priesthood.

Merton was a contemporary of Jack Kerouac, and I see him as the monastic version of Kerouac. They were both pillars, even founding fathers, of some of the social movements of the 1960's.  But the comparison goes much further.  Merton and the beats were both writers. Both had French roots. Both liked jazz. Both were interested in and wrote about Buddhism. Merton and Kerouac (as well as Ginsburg) were students at Columbia University. Kerouac and Ginsburg had attended Colombia shortly after Merton.  Much of Merton's conversion took place while he was an undergraduate at Colombia. With Kerouac and Ginsburg, Colombia  was the embryonic environment within which the Beats were formed. Merton had studied Shakespeare under the legendary professor Mark van Doren. Merton says that he was the most influential and memorable professor that he had at Colombia. The straight-laced, uber-Catholic thinker, MarkVan Doren was also a major influence on Kerouac and Ginsburg.

I have a friend who opines that Merton was overly self-absorbed.  Perhaps that is a risk of becoming a monk. That may be true of some of his writing, but I did not find that to be the case all the time, especially not of his essays on social justice. I am disappointed in Merton in that I did not find the level of introspection that I would have liked, for example, of the sort that one finds in Saint Augustine. We have to accept the fact that Merton was a man from a certain age and background.

For sure, some would say that this journal entry is extremely self-absorbed!  And I confess that the issue of being self-absorbed is a sensitive one for me, because I sense that often I have been overly self-absorbed.  If you perceive me so, I prefer to think that it has been the result of trying to find myself and to save myself. I think that there are complex ironies and paradoxes in the process, which are too much of a tangent to go into here.

But back to the book.  Merton's father, Owen, an artist, died when Merton was 18.  Afterwards, while in Rome, Merton had a powerful religious experience while viewing a Byzantine mosaic of Christ at the church of St. Cosmas and Damian. These events were the beginning of an intense, life-long inner churning and search for meaning, truth and beauty. The most intense and most fruitful time period of his journey was the time starting from when he was a student at Colombia, up until he entered Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky.  What is different in my reading of the book this time around is that I am able to perceive these events in Merton's life as actions of Grace.  And it is amazing that Merton was open to them. One of my favorite expressions lately is, "Grace works through nature" (from Thomas Aquinas). It explains a lot, if not just about everything. And in Merton's life at this time, one can see Grace, constantly acting through nature, impacting on Merton through numerous people and events. I will cite a tiny sample.

During his undergraduate years at Colombia, Merton encountered and befriended quite a number of fellow students who were deeply engaged with life and pursuing a spiritual journey. Many were attracted to Catholicism. While an undergraduate, Merton decided to become a Catholic and received instruction from a few priests in Manhattan. How different college life was back then!  But this was also a time when Catholicism was on a steep ascendancy in America (unlike today).

The previously mentioned Mark van Doren was well read in contemporary scholastic philosophy. Merton says that van Doren's scholastic perspectives prepared him for the study of scholastic thought at the monastery.  (Van Doren has been cited by numerous intellectuals and writers who attended Colombia, as a formative influence. I should mention that Merton's good friend, the poet Robert Lax was in the same Shakespeare class with Merton. Merton speaks very highly of the Jewish Lax, as intellectually brilliant, of vast, complex emotional depths and very, very spiritual.  (Incidentally, Kerouac called Lax one of the great original voices of our times.) But Lax was only one of a group of friends that Merton made at Colombia that he remained friends with for the rest of his life. Another friend was Robert Giroux who also studied under van Doren and who went on to become one of the most influential editors and publishers of the twentieth century, having edited some of the most influential writers of the time, including 7 Nobel Prize lauretes. Another important friend was Ed Rice who also went on to a hugely successful career as a writer, editor and publisher.  Ed Rice was the sponsor for Merton and Lax when they became Catholics. Another member of the group of friends was the abstract painter Ad Rheinhardt. After Merton joined the monastery, his old friends used to drive down from New York in a group to Kentucky to visit him.

Of his friends from his time at Colombia, Merton says:

So now is the time to tell a thing that I could not realize then, but which has become very clear to me: that God brought me and half a dozen others at Colombia, and made us friends, in such a way that our friendship would work powerfully, to rescue us from the confusion and the misery in which we had come to find ourselves, partly through our own fault, and partly through a complex set of circumstances which might be grouped together under the heading of the "modern world", "modern society." But the qualification, "modern" is unnecessary and perhaps unfair. The traditional Gospel term, "the world," will do well enough. 

Merton talks in detail about numerous authors and works of philosophy and literature that he became engaged with and contributed to his conversion. He was heavily influenced by the contemporary scholastic philosopher Jacques Maritain. Merton talks about Aldous Huxley, especially a book called, End and Means.  Although Huxley was not a Catholic, but Merton describes the book as a tour-de-force of a Catholic worldview and having been an impressive influence on himself.  He also became very engaged with the poetry of the Jesuit priest, Gerald Manly Hopkins. After purchasing a newly published small book of poems from William Blake, Merton decided to write his master's thesis at Colombia on a scholastic perspective of Blake's poetry.

Besides Van Doren, Merton was greatly influenced by another professor, Dan Walsh, who taught scholastic philosophy. Walsh became a mentor and good friend of Merton's.

After Colombia, Merton taught for a summer and half of the next semester at St. Bonaventure, run by the Franciscan's,  in upstate N.Y.  While there, Merton became acquainted with the Franciscan charism first-hand. As much as Merton had not been raised as a Catholic, he had not been exposed to Catholic life like that, and he seems at times to act like a detached observer. Among other things, he also engaged in a private study of philosophy with one of the priests who was a philosophy professor. While Merton respected the Franciscans, he saw that becoming a Franciscan would not satisfy himself. It would seem that Merton's encounters and experience of the Franciscans (who strictly speaking are friars and not monks), had the effect of helping to point him towards pure monasticism.

During his time in New York, Merton had become aware of the work of the Catholic Worker movement. The founders, Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin were both alive and very active in New York during this period.

While at St. Bonaventure's, Merton recounts a riveting lecture from Baroness de Hueck, a Catholic activist and refugee from Bolshevism, about the need for the church to do much, much more for the poor.  It cannot help but remind a reader today of the issues of Liberation Theology. Merton and the Baroness became friends, and Thomas made plans to join her ministry in Harlem.

Merton's recounting of his Grace filled encounters and experiences during his Colombia years are expansive and detailed as they are interesting. The mature Merton is known, and sometimes criticized for his interest in Eastern religions, and we can see his intense interest in Eastern religions even during his Colombia years. Note his exposure to, and the acute attention that he paid to social justice, while being driven to monasticism. The depth of his engagement with literature is most impressive.

The affect of re-reading The Seven Story Mountain has been to cause me to look back and realize all of the similar kinds of actions of Grace that I have received in my own past life. All of it was, "Grace working through nature," and it was there in abundance. There were my parents; the Dominican sisters who taught in our grammar school; Fr. Joyce, one of our parish priests; the Salesians who taught at my high school; of the NY Archdiocese School of Spirituality; of the pilgrimage that I made to Israel in the 80's; and of all of the varied and wild and crazy books and magazines that I have read in my life; of Thomas Merton himself; of St. Augustine; of Fr. Oldfield of Tagaste Monastery and the Augustinian Recollects; and now of the Communion and Liberation Movement.  I should not have to mention the Bible. And I would be very remiss if I did not mention all of my Protestant, especially Evangelical friends, who I love dearly, including those I know mostly or only through the Internet. Even my atheist friends, who I also love, have helped me greatly on my journey to God.  They have challenged me and have caused me to further think through who and what I am and what my relationship to the ultimate reality is.  All of this has helped shape who I am.  It is all Grace, and I am thankful to God for all of it.