Thomas Merton: a poster boy?

Often works of biography reveal more about the author than about his subject. Mark Shaw's recent book about Thomas Merton strikes me as a case in point. Here is the review I wrote for the Winter issue of The Merton Seasonal.

Jim

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Beneath the Mask of Holiness:
Thomas Merton and the Forbidden Love Affair That Set Him Free
by Mark Shaw
Palgrave Macmillan, 256 pages, $27

review by Jim Forest

While still a young, aspiring writer who had not yet set his sights on becoming a monk, Merton lamented his latest rejection letter in a journal entry with which any writer can identity: "Other people's bad books get published," he noted in his journal. "Why can't my bad book get published?" Mark Shaw has much to celebrate. Despite (or perhaps because of) his purple prose style and sensationalist approach to the life of Thomas Merton, his particular bad book has gotten published.

The book centers on what Shaw presents as shocking revelations of closely-guarded secrets. The reader learns that, while a college student in England, Merton had a sexual liaison that resulted in the birth of an out-of-wedlock child; and then later in life, long after becoming a monk, fell in love with a nurse he met while recovering from surgery.

Is there anyone with the remotest interest in Merton's life who is unaware of Mark Shaw's headline news? Soon after Merton's death in 1968, his friend Ed Rice became the first to write, in The Man in the Sycamore Tree, about Merton fathering a child while at Clare College, Cambridge. No subsequent biographer has ignored the event. As for his affair with the nurse when he was 50, it was first described a quarter century ago by Michael Mott in The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton. It is now more than a decade since Merton's journals about the affair, included in Learning to Love, were published.

Shaw is indignant that Merton's autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, published in 1948, referred in only "watered down" terms to the more serious sins he committed before he became a monk. This is nothing less than intentional misrepresentation, Shaw asserts, "the result of a concerted effort to disguise a tormented sinner as some sort of plastic saint rehabilitated through monastic practices." (21) The real Merton was transformed into a Catholic "poster boy." (p vii)

Continuing in the same vein, Shaw sees the lack of detail as nothing less that the result of "a quiet conspiracy, a cover up, if you will, by not only Merton, but also the Catholic Church hierarchy stretching from the United States to the Vatican, Abbot Frederic Dunne [Merton's abbot when he wrote the book], Merton's literary agent, and his publisher, none of whom did anything other than promote the book as factual even though critical parts did not disclose the whole truth. Strict censorship, in effect, issued a restraining order on Merton's true story, omitting crucial information about him, and readers were hoodwinked and misled into believing that while Merton may have been a sinner prior to entering Gethsemani, he was not 'that bad' a sinner." (21)

Thus the book's title: Beneath the Mask of Holiness. Shaw sees "holiness" as a disguise that the Catholic Church and the Trappist Order managed to squeeze Merton into. But, thanks to his affair in 1965, Merton finally discovered what life was all about and thus was no longer "a schizophrenic persona, passive on the outside while pangs of anguish and fear patrolled within him." (9)

If such over-heated sentences appeal to you, either for content or prose style, I urge you to rush out and buy a copy. Otherwise save your time and money for a better book.

Perhaps it's not entirely accidental that the reader is reminded of Dan Brown's novel, The Da Vinci Code, populated by evil Catholics whose goal in life is to conceal the truth. In Shaw's book, Merton is assigned the starring role in an anti-Catholic tract. (In the book's last chapter, Shaw speculates that Merton may have been murdered, in which case "the logical suspects would be directives hired by the Catholic Church hierarchy, who were afraid of a scandal if Merton were to return to his lover or leave Gethsemani." [213-4])

If you want to know about actual Merton's life, including those events that he brought to confession, read Merton himself or one of his less conspiracy-minded biographers.

Regarding his year at Cambridge, Merton asked aloud in The Seven Storey Mountain, “Shall I wake up the dirty ghosts under the trees of the Backs and out beyond the Clare New Building and in some rooms down on Chesterton Road?” He decided to let the ghosts slumber. “There would certainly be no point whatever in embarrassing other people with the revelation of so much cheap sentimentality mixed up with even cheaper sin," as he put it in an earlier draft of the autobiography. It was characteristic of Merton to take pains not to embarrass others.

What Merton makes crystal clear in The Seven Storey Mountain, as published, is that it was a hellish interval in his life, “an incoherent riot of undirected passion,” as he put it — a time of “beer, bewilderment and sorrow,” in the words of his friend, Bob Lax. “I had fallen through the surface of old England," Merton wrote, "into the hell, the vacuum and the horror that London was nursing in her avaricious heart.” He remembers reading Freud, Jung, and Adler, struggling to understand “the mysteries of sex-repression.”

Though clearly something dreadful occurred, the reader was left guessing exactly what actually happened — something to do with the mysteries of sex-repression, clearly, but what? On the other hand, what Merton shared with his readers is a great deal more than is provided by most authors of autobiographies. In Charlie Chaplin's autobiography, to give one typical example, Chaplin simply skipped over some of the more painful or humiliating moments in his life, while inventing or radically revising others.

For all its sorrows, Merton’s year at Cambridge wasn’t a total loss. Perhaps the high point was Professor Edward Bullough’s class on Dante. Canto by canto, Merton read his way to the frozen core of hell, finally ascending through purgatory toward the bliss of heaven, a "slow and majestic progress of ... myths and symbols." It was purgatory’s seven storey mountain that provided Merton with the metaphor for his autobiography.

While Shaw provides a compact if voyeuristic chronicle of how Merton fell in love with a young nurse and what occurred between them in the weeks that followed, by far the best and most vivid and three-dimensional account of the same story is related by Merton himself in Learning to Love. Here the reader gets both a day-by-day history of what happened as well as a poignant account of his struggle to make sense of what all this meant, his justifications side-by-side with his self-recriminations. Here one can also can read about the very human community Merton was a part of and his frustrations with his abbot, James Fox – and then hear him express his gratitude for both.

Unfortunately, Shaw seems to have no understanding of or sympathy with Merton's basic choices: to become a Christian, to be baptized in the Catholic Church, and then to embrace monastic life in a penitential order. It was ultimately because of Merton's renewed realization that he had a monastic vocation, not a vocation to marriage, that made him end the affair.

It wasn't, in my opinion, Merton's finest hour. Many priests suffer from extreme loneliness and have affairs which, in most cases, end as Merton's did. I have known several women at the other end of similar stories who felt abandoned, suffered from a deep sense of rejection for years afterward, and even wrestled with thoughts of suicide. The fact that this particular story involves Thomas Merton doesn't make it better and mean that, thanks to the special magic of the Merton factor, it became an encounter sprinkled with pixie dust for the young woman who so desperately loved him.

"God writes straight with crooked lines," says a Portugese proverb. After the affair, Merton realized he needed not only a hermitage but also vital relationship with several Kentucky families he had begun to know. Never a hard-hearted man, he became even more compassionate. One hopes the nurse he loved was also able to make good use of the intense relationship she had with Merton in that period of her life. (In the past, biographers have shielded her identity, either using the initial "M," as Merton did in his journals, or her first name, Margie. To his shame, Shaw reveals her family name.)

One could write much more about Shaw's book and its thesis that it was only thanks to his affair that the true Merton at last emerged from hiding rather than remaining a masked counterfeit coined by the Catholic Church. But then I would have to discuss every chapter, the reading of which is a penance I leave only to those who find ordinary penances inadequate.

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Zen lessons

A Christian friend in Thailand, Lance Woodruff, sent the following question:

Jim, as one of Thomas Merton’s biographers, do you have questions or comments which come to mind as a Christian encounters the sacred in other religions? Have you received insight or inspiration from Buddhism or other religions which you might share with me?

Here is the main part of my response:

In my own life, a close relationship with Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk, has been an immense blessing.

In that regard, Thomas Merton set a good example for me. There was never any question in his mind about how much we Christians have to learn from others of any of the principal (and often some of the minor) religious traditions. Merton had a particular affinity for Buddhism, but also had important relationships with Jews, Hindus, and at least one Moslem of the Sufi tradition. (One might add, in a time when inter-Christian dialogue was exceptional, he had close ties with both Orthodox and Protestant Christians.)

Here is an extract from my biography of Merton, Living With Wisdom, about the meeting Merton had with Nhat Hanh in 1965:

Merton immediately recognized Nhat Hanh as someone very like himself. It was like meeting Chuang Tzu in the flesh. As the two monks talked, the different religious systems in which they were formed provided bridges toward each other. “Thich Nhat Hanh is my brother,” Merton wrote soon afterward. “He is more my brother than many who are nearer to me in race and nationality, because he and I see things exactly the same way.”

When Merton asked Nhat Hanh what the war was doing to Vietnam, the Buddhist said simply, “Everything is destroyed.” This, Merton said to the monks at his Sunday lecture, was truly a monk’s answer, revealing the essence without wasting a word.

Merton described the rigorous formation of Buddhist monks in Vietnam and the fact that instruction in meditation doesn’t begin early. “Before you can learn to meditate,” he said, quoting Nhat Hanh, “you have to learn how to close the door.” The monks laughed; they were used to the reverberation of slamming doors as latecomers raced to church.

Here’s a Nhat Hanh story I told in The Road to Emmaus: Pilgrimage as a Way of Life:

... It was from Thich Nhat Hanh that I first became aware of walking as an opportunity to repair the damaged connection between the physical and the spiritual.

In the late sixties, he asked me to accompany him on his lecture trips in the United States. He spoke to audiences about Vietnamese culture and what the war looked like to ordinary Vietnamese people. At times he also spoke about the monastic vocation and meditation.

In conversation, Nhat Hanh sometimes spoke of the importance of what he called “mindful breathing,” a phrase that seemed quite odd to me at first. Yet I was aware that his walking was somehow different than mine and could imagine this might have something to do with his way of breathing. Even if we were late for an appointment, he walked in an attentive, unhurried way.

It wasn’t until we climbed the steps to my sixth floor apartment in Manhattan that I began to take his example to heart. Though in my late twenties and very fit, I was out of breath by the time I reached my front door. Nhat Hanh, on the other hand, seemed rested. I asked him how he did that. “You have to learn how to breathe while you walk,” he replied. “Let’s go back to the bottom and walk up again. I will show you how to breathe while climbing stairs.” On the way back up, he quietly described how he was breathing. It wasn’t a difficult lesson. Linking slow, attentive breaths with taking the stairs made an astonishing difference. The climb took one or two minutes longer, but when I reached my door I found myself refreshed instead of depleted.

In the seventies, I spent time in France with Nhat Hanh on a yearly basis. He was better known then -- his home had become for many people a center of pilgrimage. One of the things I found him teaching was his method of attentive walking. Once a day, all his guests would set off in a silent procession led by him. The walk was prefaced with his advice that we practice slow, mindful breathing while at the same time being aware of each footstep, seeing each moment of contact between foot and earth as a prayer for peace. We went single file, moving slowly, deeply aware of the texture of the earth and grass, the scent of the air, the movement of leaves in the trees, the sound of insects and birds. Many times as I walked I was reminded of the words of Jesus: “You must be like little children to enter the kingdom of heaven.” Such attentive walking was a return to the hyper-alertness of childhood.

Mindful breathing connected with mindful walking gradually becomes normal. It is then a small step to connect walking and breathing with prayer.

In correspondence with a friend, I was recently reminded of this one:

I recall going with Nhat Hanh and Phuong to one of the Paris airports to pick up a volunteer who was arriving from America. On the way back, the volunteer stressed how dedicated a vegetarian she was and how good it was to be with people who were such committed vegetarians. Passing by a poelier in Paris, Nhat Hanh asked Phuong to stop. He went inside and bought a chicken, which we ate that night for supper at our apartment in Sceaux. It’s the only time I know of when Nhat Hanh ate meat.

Finally, here’s a story Nhat Hanh tells about me in one of his books, The Miracle of Mindfulness:

I have a close friend named Jim Forest. ... Last winter, Jim came to visit. I usually wash the dishes after we've finished the evening meal, before sitting down and drinking tea with everyone else. One night, Jim asked if he might do the dishes. I said, "Go ahead, but if you wash the dishes you must know the way to wash them." Jim replied, "Come on, you think I don't know how to wash the dishes?" I answered, "There are two ways to was the dishes. The first is to wash the dishes in order to have clean dishes and the second is to wash the dishes to wash the dishes." Jim was delighted and said, "I choose the second way -- to wash the dishes to wash the dishes." From then on, Jim knew how to wash the dishes. I transferred the "responsibility" to him for an entire week.

If while washing dishes, we think only of the cup of tea that awaits us, thus hurrying to get the dishes out of the way as if they were a nuisance, then we are not "washing the dishes to wash the dishes." What's more, we are not alive during the time we are washing the dishes. In fact, we are completely incapable of realizing the miracle of life while standing at the sink. If we can't wash the dishes, the chances are we won't be able to drink our tea either. While drinking the cup of tea, we will only be thinking of other things, barely aware of the cup in our hands. Thus we are sucked away into the future and we are incapable of actually living one minute of life.

One important sentence Nhat Hanh left out of his account is this: "When you wash the dishes, wash each dish as if it were the baby Jesus.” A very important sentence in my life! I learned from those few words not only something about the potential sacramentality of dirty dishes but of anything we touch and also how times of irritation can easily be transformed into times of meditation and prayer.

I could tell stories about ways Nhat Hanh has influenced my life from now until the next year and perhaps have a few still to tell, but for today this is all I have time for.

Jim

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Here’s a story that Nancy tells about her first encounter with Nhat Hanh.

My first Zen lesson

I came to the Netherlands in April of 1982 with my daughter Caitlan, who was five years old at the time. Jim and I were married shortly after that. We had been friends for many years in the US. Both of us worked together at the headquarters of the Fellowship of Reconciliation in Nyack, New York, and Jim move to Holland in 1977 to serve as general secretary of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation (IFOR). We had kept in touch during those five years. Jim was Cait’s godfather.

Shortly after I had moved here, Jim told me Thich Nhat Hanh would be coming to Alkmaar to visit. I had never met Nhat Hanh, but of course I had heard a great deal about him, and I knew how close Jim and Nhat Hanh had been over the years. Jim said Nhat Hanh would be coming to our house, and that the IFOR staff would be coming over as well to meet with him.

It was a beautiful day in May. First the staff arrived and took seats in our living room, then Nhat Hanh himself arrived, dressed in his brown robe. A hush fell over the staff members, and everyone was apparently in awe of this man. I remember feeling nervous that he was coming to our house, nervous about hosting this event. After he had sat down a sort of Zen silence fell on the room. It was hard for me to tell what to make of the atmosphere in the living room that day, but it made me uncomfortable.

In the meantime, Cait, who had just been given her first bicycle and was practicing riding it in the parking lot behind our house, kept running in to tell me how far she was advancing. So you have this room full of awestruck adults sitting there with what appeared to me glazed looks on their faces, and my little daughter running in, breathless with excitement.

After Nhat Hanh finished speaking with the staff, Jim came up to me and told me he had invited him to dinner. This was a little more than I could handle. I went into the kitchen at the back of the house and started chopping vegetables. I remember feeling that I really had to get out of that living room, that there was something definitely weird about what was going on there. It didn’t feel genuine, while the vegetables were certain genuine and so was Cait.

After a few minutes, Nhat Hanh came into the kitchen and, almost effortlessly, started helping me with the vegetables. I think he just started talking to me in the most ordinary way. He ended up telling me how to make rice balls -- how to grind the sesame seeds in a coffee grinder, to make the balls with sticky rice and to roll them in the ground sesame seeds. It was lots of fun and I remember laughing with him. The artificial Zen atmosphere was completely absent. Cait kept coming in, and Nhat Hanh was delighted with her.

This was my first Zen lesson.

Nancy

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note: The photo of Nhat Hanh is one I took is Paris in 1975. It is copyrighted and may not be used without written permission.
-- Jim Forest
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We Will All Be Changed

I got back yesterday from a two-week lecture trip in British Columbia. Here is the text of a sermon on the Transfiguration that I gave in Vancouver the Sunday before last.

Jim

PS While in Canada, I kept a photo journal: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/sets/72157614656929699/

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[a sermon given 8 March 2009 at the Canadian Memorial Church & Center for Peace in Vancouver]

We Will All Be Changed: Reflections on the Transfiguration

by Jim Forest

[Mark 9:1-8]

As is usual in the shortest of Gospels, Christ’s Transfiguration is described by Mark with great economy — one prefatory verse with Jesus saying that some of those who were present would see the kingdom of God coming in power before they die, then seven verses on the Transfiguration. Not a wasted word, yet the importance of the event is not diminished. Both Matthew and Luke provide similar accounts of the same event.

In the Orthodox Church, to which my wife and I belong, a great deal of attention and reflection is focused on the Transfiguration. I doubt there is an Orthodox Church anywhere in the world in which you will fail to find a Transfiguration icon. The celebration has its own special day on the calendar, August 6. It’s one of the more important commemorations. There is a custom, dating from the early Church but with Jewish roots, of bringing grapes, dates, figs, wine and bread to the church that day for a special blessing after the Liturgy — then everyone shares in the food that was blessed. If grapes are not available locally, apples and other fruits are brought instead.

Here are a few examples of the Transfiguration icon. The first is modern, the others mainly Russian examples that dates from the 16th Century, but also one Coptic icon. While there are many variations of the Transfiguration icon, the basic elements are always the same. On either side of Jesus are the prophet Elijah and the law-giver Moses, the three standing on top of a mountain, and in the foreground the three apostles who are witnesses — John, James and Peter — each shown responding in a different way. In every version, there a suggestion of blinding light emerging from Christ. Some iconographers show this one way, some another. Occasionally black is used — one way of suggesting that the light is not the sort of light we’ve ever seen before. The Orthodox theological term is “uncreated light,” the light of divinity.

The challenge of iconography in general is to create an image that exists on the razor-thin border dividing “realistic” art from “abstract” art. In that sense, this oldest form of Christian art has become quite modern. It’s a tradition that inspired some of Chagall’s most well-known paintings in the last century — a world where lovers are no longer subject to gravity and where the rules of perspective are ignored or even tuned inside out.

Icons are intentionally two-dimensional. This helps the viewer realize that the event or person portrayed cannot be portrayed as in a snapshot. There is a conscious avoidance of any suggestion of motion — on the contrary, there is absolute stillness, profound silence and timelessness. What one “sees” in an icon is as much a mystical experience as it is an historical event.

In this instance, Jesus has allowed his three closest followers to have a revelation of the Kingdom of God even though they haven’t died. And what is the kingdom of God about which Christ has spoken so often throughout his ministry? It’s being permitted to see, even if only briefly, who Jesus Christ really is. Implied in the event is not only seeing Christ with eyes wide open, eyes freed for a time to see things more truly, but being made aware of own transfiguration and the transfiguration of all matter.

It’s a bit like the resurrection. In Christ’s resurrection, we see our own resurrection, just as the first light of dawn prefigures noon. It isn’t only Christ who is transfigured. We are intended to share in it. It isn’t only Christ who rises from death. We are intended to share in that as well.

Both the three Gospel accounts and all the Transfiguration icons are about the discovery that the “reality” we think we are seeing so completely day after day is actually only a faint, incomplete, fog-shrouded sketch of reality — reality that is seen, in St Paul’s phrase, “through a glass darkly.” No matter how acute our eyesight, in fact we are living most of our lives on the frontier of blindness. Like the disciples Peter, James and John, there is so much we don’t see, so much we don’t hear.

It’s a little like one of my favorite scenes in the film “E.T.” A visitor from a distant planet is in the kitchen along with mom and her two children. The kids are well aware of the presence of this extraterrestrial botanist — but not mom. There this very odd-looking visitor stands, right next to the refrigerator. Mom, her arms full of groceries, opens the refrigerator door and in the process knocks E.T. over — thud — but she is too preoccupied to notice. There is an amazing visitor in the house, odder than odd, but she doesn’t see what, as far as she is concerned, couldn’t possibly be there. What can’t be isn’t. E.T. is off her radar.

The principal theologians of the early Church saw in the Transfiguration a promise. In the words of St. Athanasius, “God became a human being so that we human beings might become God.” The Greek word is “theosis.” We could translate that as deification. We are intended to enter more and more deeply into the sacred, into holiness. We are called to participate in Christ’s divinity. It’s an astounding idea. We are not just window-shoppers who get to look though the plate glass and see Christ on the other side, close but untouchable. We are meant to cross what seems to be an uncrossable barrier — to rub the glass so thin it isn’t there any more. Through God’s grace and our God-given longing, the glass wall evaporates, sometimes slowly, sometimes in a flash. It’s what St. Paul means when he speaks of how “we will all be changed, in a moment, in the blink of an eye.”

One of the most important texts in the Book of Genesis is the declaration that Adam and Eve, the fountainhead of the human race, were made in the image and likeness of God. Part of the way our transfiguration occurs is in our becoming more and more capable of seeing the image of God in other people, and not just in the attractive people, the people whose company we seek out, but in people we don’t especially like or even dislike, people whom we avoid, unattractive strangers, potentially dangerous people, people whom we might think of as our enemies.

Let me give you an example of what that conversion of vision looked like in the life of one person, Thomas Merton. You may have heard of him or even have read one or two of his books. You may even guess the story I am thinking of. It’s often called the Epiphany at Fourth and Walnut.

Fourth and Walnut is a busy intersection in downtown Louisville. It’s the spring of 1958. Here’s Thomas Merton, in the city on an errand, one of many people waiting for the light to change. He’s not in his monk’s robes — these would only be worn at the monastery where he has been living since 1941. He’s inconspicuously dressed in the black clothing of a Catholic priest. He appears to be no one special — in Louisville there are many Catholic priests — but probably a few people in the crowd would have recognized his name and perhaps have read his autobiography, The Seven Story Mountain. It’s a book in which Merton described growing up in a artistic, bohemian family, his eventual conversion to Christianity in its Catholic form, and finally his becoming a Trappist monk who left the world with a slam of the door.

Here’s what Merton has to say about what happened to him while waiting for the light to turn green:

“In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness. The whole illusion of a separate holy existence is a dream….

“This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud…. It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes many terrible mistakes: yet, with all that, God Himself gloried in becoming a member of the human race. A member of the human race! To think that such a commonplace realization should suddenly seem like news that one holds the winning ticket in a cosmic sweepstake….

“There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun…. There are no strangers! … If only we could see each other [as we really are] all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed…. I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other….

“At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us. It is so to speak His name written in us, as our poverty, as our indigence, as our dependence, as our sonship. It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely.

“I have no program for this seeing. But the gate of heaven is everywhere.”

Think about it. We all know what’s it’s like to be waiting for a light to change. Probably you’re not in the best of moods. You may even be irritated — you have places to go and things to do and not much time and the bloody light is red. It’s not a condition of mind that would seem to clear the way for a mystical experience. Yet somehow it was the right moment in Merton’s life for a transfiguration. It might have taken just ten or twenty seconds, maybe less. Time seemed to stop. He wasn’t standing in expectation of something special occurring that day. But then the fog suddenly lifted and he saw something he had never seen before. It’s wasn’t a pious thought or fantasy but an intense experience of God-illumined reality.

It’s a vision to long for. All these people, none of them known to you by name, none of them familiar, none of them out of the ordinary — and we see them as bearers of the image of God.

One of the phrases Merton uses in his description is that “it was like waking from a dream of separateness.” All the barriers that we imagine separate us from each other — gone.

It’s an experience not just of the other as a person known to God and beloved of God, but an experience of God. To see God’s image in another is to be aware that we are, here and now, in the presence of God.

Here’s how one of the monks of the early Church, St. Dorothea of Gaza, put it. “Be aware. The further we are from each other, the further we are from God. The closer we are to each other, the closer we are to God.”

In Merton’s case, while waiting for the light to turn green, he was freed from the illusion that, by virtue of his monastic vocation, he belonged a category of people — holy monks — who were dearer to God than those with more ordinary vocations.

What happened to Merton afterward was a great turning toward the world. Not that he was less a monk. Not at all. But Merton began to better understand that monastic life is not a life that exempts the monk from love of neighbor so that he can concentrate more single-heartedly on love of God. Merton was 44 that day. He was totally unaware that he had only ten years left before his death. 1968 would be his last year of life in this world.

What he did in that last decade of his life had a great deal to do with responding to his eye-opening moment at Fourth and Walnut. He began corresponding with a lot more people. One of them was Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker movement with its many houses of hospitality for street people. She was also editor of a newspaper that challenged its readers to live lives of hospitality with all that hospitality implies, a life built on seeing Christ in the least person. Merton began to see that all the preparations for nuclear war that had been going on since the end of World War II posed an issue which he, as a Christian writer, could not ignore.

The lead article in the October 1961 issue of The Catholic Worker was the first of a series of articles by Merton on the our duty as Christians to strive with all our power and intelligence, with all our faith, all our hope in Christ, and love for God and neighbor, “to do the one task which God has imposed upon us in the world today. That task is to work for the total abolition of war.”

In 1961, the Cold War being arctic cold, there were many people not at all pleased that Thomas Merton was writing about such matters — a monk criticizing his nation’s military policies, a monk protesting nuclear weapons, a monk condemning war. Who does he think he is? Write about the rosary, please, not about war. The consequences made the years that followed far from easy for Merton. Six months later, he was forbidden to publish a book he had written, Peace in the Post-Christian Era. It finally got into print just a few years ago, more than four decades after it was written.

Even so, when one door is locked, another opens, and one door leads to another. Merton’s peace work continued if much of it in a more intimate form. By the time Merton died, he had become one of the rare Catholics of the time who were in frequent contact with all sorts of people Catholics in those days — not to say Catholic monks — would ordinarily ignore and avoid: Protestant and Orthodox Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Moslems, believers and non-believers, even a fellow writer in Russia, Boris Pasternak.

Merton became one of the great letter writers. Happily, a great many of his letters are now available in books. Merton has died but not his voice. His letters are still being delivered to anyone who wishes to receive them.

The point here is not to single out Merton as one of those rare souls who gets to see something many of us can hardly imagine exists, but rather to stress the point that all of us are intended to see the world around us more clearly than we do, and that means seeing in others the presence of God no matter how thoroughly it may be hidden.

Consider ordinary moments on ordinary days and how much we look at the people around us through narrowed eyes.

You’re walking down a street and see a man in stained clothing sitting on the pavement, a paper coffee cup in front of him. As you pass by, he asks if you could contribute something toward his next meal. Though unshaven and in need of a shower, he’s young and muscular, apparently healthy and capable of working. You’ve just walked past a dozen help-wanted signs. What thoughts pass through your mind? What do you see? Who do you see? How do you respond?

As the sun is setting you notice several teenagers down the street, speaking abusively in voices that can be heard 50 yards away. They seem to be looking for trouble. What do you think and feel as you look at them? Do you continue on the same path or find an alternate route? What do you see? Who do you see? How do you respond?

You turn on the news and hear a report concerning the murder of a young woman. There’s a photo of her taken from her high school year book — a beautiful face and bright smile, a face full of life and promise. She reminds you of your own children. Based on information from witnesses, a drawing of a man seen running from the crime scene is shown along with a telephone number you should call if you have seen anyone resembling the suspect. You are warned not to approach him as he is regarded as armed and dangerous. The drawing lingers in your mind. What are your thoughts about the man being sought? When you look at his picture, what do you see? Who do you see? How do you respond?

It is in such ordinary moments that we need transfigured eyes — not only to see the ruined state of so many people around us, but that hidden person who, for all that has gone wrong in his or her life, is beloved by God but probably hasn’t been very fortunate in being loved and cared for by human beings.

Maybe this is something we need to pray for, even on a daily basis. Let me leave you with this brief prayer:

Lord, please give me transfigured eyes. Give me a readiness to see in others a little of what you see in them, so that I might respond in such a way that your love may be more evident, and that my fear will not get in the way of your love.

Amen.

* * *
photos of several Transfiguration icons are in this folder:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/sets/741533/
* * *

New! Improved!

The first copy of the revised edition of Living With Wisdom, my biography of Thomas Merton, arrived in a special delivery packet from Orbis earlier today.

It’s amazing how different a book is when it’s in print. I know the text backwards and forwards and have looked at several PDF files of the book at various stages of its design, including the final layout, yet the end result seems as surprising as a newborn child. (This “child,” however, looks quite a bit different than the last one of the same name — bigger by nearly 50 pages, with many more photos, a better cover, and ivory-colored rather than hospital-white paper.)

Living With Wisdom was first published in 1991 and has gone through at least ten printings since then. It never seemed dated to me, but when an invitation came from Robert Ellsberg, publisher of Orbis Books, to revise it, my positive response wasn’t long in coming. In the past eighteen years, much important Merton material that wasn’t available in 1991 has been released, including all of Merton’s journals plus volume-after-volume of his letters.

While I prefer recommending books by other authors to pushing my own, I can’t help saying I’m hugely pleased with what Orbis has done and hope it will reach many readers.

The official publication date in November 30, but I see the book is already available for pre-order from Amazon. Here’s the web page:

http://www.amazon.com/Living-Wisdom-Life-Thomas-Merton/dp/1570757542/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1227627339&sr=1-1

Attached is an extract from the book’s preface, the title of which is “Meeting Merton.”

— Jim

* * *

In December 1961, Merton suggested that perhaps I would like to come to the monastery for a visit. There was never any question in my mind about accepting, but first there was an issue of The Catholic Worker to get ready for publication — I had recently become the paper’s managing editor — and also a night class in English Literature at Hunter College to complete. I put off the trip to Kentucky until the beginning of February 1962.

I had no money for such a journey. Volunteers at the Catholic Worker received room and board plus small change for minor expenses, subway rides and the like. I never dared ask even for a penny, preferring to sell The Catholic Worker on street corners in Greenwich Village, keeping a small portion of the proceeds for my incidental expenses (mainly bread, cheese, orange juice, beer and an occasional book), giving the rest to the community.

Confronted with a nearly empty wallet, I opted to travel by thumb. A companion on
the Catholic Worker staff, Bob Kaye, joined me. Before sunrise one cold winter morning, we loaded up on Italian bread still warm from the oven of the Spring Street bakery and set off.

The going was slow. I recall standing in nighttime sleet at the side of a highway somewhere in Pennsylvania watching cars and trucks rush past, many of them with colorful plastic statues of an open-armed Jesus of the Sacred Heart on the dashboard. Sadly, this image of divine hospitality seemed to have little influence on those at the wheel behind the statue. It took us two-and-a-half exhausting days to travel the thousand miles to the Abbey of Gethsemani.

Finally we reached the monastery. After the Guest Master, Father Francis, showed us our rooms, my first stop was the monastery church. There was a balcony in the church that was connected to the guest house. Surviving such a trip, I found thanksgiving came easily, but my prayer was cut short by the sound of distant laughter so intense and pervasive that I couldn’t resist looking for its source. I hadn’t expected laughter at a penitential Trappist monastery.

The origin, I discovered, was Bob Kaye’s room. As I opened the door the laughter was still going on, a kind of gale of joy. The major source was the red-faced man lying on the floor, wearing black and white robes and a broad leather belt, his knees in the air, hands clutching his belly. Though the monk was more well-fed than the broomstick thin, fast-chastened Trappist monk I had imagined, I realized instantly that the man on the floor laughing with such abandon must be Thomas Merton. His face reminded me of David Duncan’s photos of Pablo Picasso — a face similarly unfettered in its expressiveness, the eyes bright and quick and sure, suggesting some strange balance between wisdom and mischief. (Merton once remarked that he had the face of a “hillbilly who knows where the still is.”) And the inspiration for the laughter? It proved to be the intensely heady smell of feet that had been kept in shoes all the way from the Lower East Side to Gethsemani and were now out in the open air. If the Catholic Worker had manufactured a perfume, this would have been it.

After that week-long stay at Gethsemani, The Seven Storey Mountain became a new and different book. No wonder that Merton had twice mentioned the films of Charlie Chaplin in its pages. Not only did I become aware that Merton was someone capable of hurricanes of laughter, but I learned that he was far from the only Trappist who knew how to laugh, though no other monk seemed to exhibit this trait quite so readily and explosively as Merton.

The abbot, Dom James, though a most hospitable man, was not initially quite so positive about a visitation of ragged Catholic Workers. In those days most American men were tidily trimmed thanks to frequent haircuts, but, as far as Bob and I were concerned, haircuts were a massive waste of money. Merton apologetically explained that our shaggy hair did not please the abbot. If we were to stay on at the abbey, Dom James insisted we have haircuts. Merton hoped we wouldn’t object. No problem, we replied. On our second morning at the abbey, we took it in turns to sit in a chair in the basement room where the novices changed into their work clothes. (Merton in denims could have been taken for a New York City taxi driver.) The room also served as a barber shop. While the novices stood in a circle laughing, a good deal of hair fell to the concrete floor. Going from one extreme to the other, Bob and I were suddenly nearly as bald as Yul Brinner.

After the haircut Merton took me to the abbot’s office. I can no longer recall what the abbot and I talked about — perhaps about my conversion, or community life at the Catholic Worker — but I will never forget the solemn blessing Dom James gave me at the end of our conversation. I knelt on the floor near his desk while he gripped my skull with intensity and prayed over me. He had a steel grip. There was no doubt in my mind I had been seriously blessed. I have ever since had a warm spot in my heart for Dom James, a man who has occasionally been maligned by Merton biographers.

I recall another monk at the monastery who had much less sympathy for me and still less, it seemed, for Merton — or Father Louis, as Merton was known within the community. This was the abbey’s other noted author, Father Raymond Flanagan, whose books were well known to Catholics at the time, though they had never reached the broad audience Merton’s books had.

Merton and I were walking down a basement corridor that linked the guest house kitchen to the basement of the main monastery building. There was a point in the corridor where it made a leftward turn, and standing there, next to a large garbage container, was an older monk who was not so much reading as glaring at the latest Catholic Worker, which he held open at arm’s length as if the paper had an unpleasant smell. There was an article of Merton’s in it, one of his essays about the urgency of taking steps to prevent nuclear war. Father Raymond looked up, saw us coming his way, balled the paper up in his fist, hurled it into the garbage container, and strode away without a word, leaving a trail of smoke.

Once again, Merton’s response was laughter. Then he explained that Father Raymond had never had a high opinion of Merton’s writings and often denounced him at the community’s chapter meetings. “In the early days Father Raymond said I was too detached from the world, and now he thinks I’m not detached enough.” ( The tension between Merton and Father Raymond never abated. Just ten months before his death, Merton recorded in his journal a furious verbal assault by his brother monk, irate about Merton’s opposition to the war in Vietnam.)

During that visit I had my first glimpse of Merton’s openness to non-Catholics and, more striking, non-Christians. It happened the first evening I was there. There was a hurried knock on the door of my room in the guest house. Merton was standing there, but in a rush as he was late for Vespers. He wanted me to have the pile of papers in his hands, a collection of Jewish Hasidic stories that a rabbi had left with him a few days before. “Read these — these are great!” And off he hurried to Vespers without further explanation, leaving me with a collection of amazing tales of mystical rabbis in Poland generations before the Holocaust.

I recall another evening a day or two later when Merton was not in a hurry. He was in good time for Vespers and already had on the white woolen choir robe the monks wore during winter months while in church. It was an impressive garment, all the more so at close range. I reached out to feel it thickness and density. In a flash Merton slid out of it and placed it over my head. I was astonished at how heavy it was! Once again, Merton laughed. The robe met a practical need, he explained, as it was hardly warmer in the church than it was outside. Without it, the monks would freeze to death.

The guest master knew I was at the monastery at Merton’s invitation and thought I might be able to answer a question which puzzled him, and no doubt many of the monks. “How did Father Louis write all those books?”

I had no idea, no more than he, but I got a glimpse of an answer before my stay was over. A friend at the Catholic Worker had sent a letter to Merton in my care. He urged Merton to leave the monastery and do something “more relevant,” such as join a Catholic Worker community. (Over the years Merton received quite a few letters telling him that he was in the wrong place.) I was a little embarrassed to be delivering such a message.

What is most memorable to me about this particular letter was the experience of watching Merton the writer at work. He had a small office just outside the classroom where he taught the novices. On his desk was a large gray typewriter. He inserted a piece of monastery stationery and wrote a reply that seemed to issue from the typewriter at the speed of light. I had never seen anyone write so quickly, and doing it with four fingers. You will often see a stenographer type at such speed when copying a text, but even in a city news room one rarely sees actual writing at a similar pace.

I wish I had made a copy of his response. I recall Merton admitted that there was much to reform in monasteries and that monastic life was not a vocation to which God called many people, yet he gave an explanation of why he thought the monastic life was nonetheless an authentic Christian vocation and how crucial it was for him to remain faithful to what God had called him to. It was a very solid, carefully reasoned letter, filling one side of a sheet of paper, and was written in just a few minutes.

When I first met Merton, more than two years had passed since the Vatican’s denial of his request to move to another monastery where he might live in greater solitude. By the time of my visit, he was able to spend part of his time in a newly built cinderblock building that stood on the edge of the woods about a mile north of the monastery. It had initially been intended as a conference center where Merton could meet with non-Catholic visitors, but he saw it primarily as his hermitage. Merton had lit the first fire in the fireplace several months before, on December 2nd. There was a small bedroom behind the main room. Merton occasionally had permission to stay overnight, but it would not be until the summer of 1965, three years later, that it became his full-time home. At that point he became the first Trappist hermit in modern times.

When I came to visit, the hermitage already had a lived-in look. It was winter so there was no sitting on the porch. We sat inside, regularly adding wood to the blaze in the fireplace. There was a Japanese calendar on the wall with a Zen brush drawing for every month of the year and a black-on-black painting of the cross by Merton’s friend, Ad Reinhart. There was a bookcase and, next to it, a long table that served as a desk placed on the inside of the hermitage’s one large window offering a view of fields and hills. A large timber cross had been built on the lawn. On the table was a portable Swiss-made Hermes typewriter. Off to one side of the hermitage was an outhouse which Merton shared with a black snake, a harmless but impressive creature.

What Merton took the most pleasure in when he showed me the hermitage was a sheet of parchment-like paper tacked to the inside of the closet door in his bedroom — a colorful baroque document such as one finds in shops near the Vatican: a portrait of the pope at the top in an oval with a Latin text below and many decorative swirls. In this case it was made out to “the Hermit Thomas Merton” and was signed by Paul VI.

During that visit, the latest copy of Jubilee arrived. Jubilee was a monthly journal edited by Ed Rice, Merton’s godfather, with the collaboration of a small, committed staff of talented, underpaid colleagues, one of whom was Bob Lax. Merton was among the magazine’s advisors, cheerleaders and notable writers. In the years it existed, 1953 to 1967, Jubilee was unparalleled among religious magazines. There wasn’t a single issue that failed to be arresting — impressive photo features plus some of the most striking typography of the time. The content was wide ranging, with vivid glimpses of church life, portraits of houses of hospitality, profiles and interviews with remarkable people, and well-illustrated articles on liturgy, art and architecture. In that particular issue was a set of photos of life in an Orthodox monastery. One of the photos showed a heavily-bearded Athonite monk who looked older than Abraham. He was standing behind a long battered table in the refectory, while in the background was a huge fresco of the Last Judgement. The monk’s head was bowed slightly. His eyes seemed to contain the cosmos. There was a remarkable vulnerability in his face. “Look at him,” Merton said. “This guy has been kissed by God!”

My visited ended abruptly. A telegram came from New York with the news that President Kennedy had announced the resumption of atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons, thus another escalation of the Cold War and yet another indication that nuclear war might occur in the coming years. Anticipating such a decision, I was part of a group of New Yorkers who had planned to take part in an act of civil disobedience, a sit-in at the entrance to the Manhattan office of the Atomic Energy Commission, the federal agency responsible for making and testing nuclear weapons. The abbey provided money for our return to New York by bus rather than thumb. Not many days later, now with a slight stubble of hair, I was in a New York City jail known locally as “The Tombs.”

* * *

The Rome of the Martyrs

We're starting our pilgrimage journal with an account of pilgrimage.

At the end of May and the first eleven days of June, we were in Rome. The trip was partly to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary and partly to rejoice in the success of the kidney transplant eight months earlier. We did all this by taking part in a small pilgrimage group organized by the Canadian Thomas Merton Society.

Merton was in Rome only briefly, but it holds an important place in his life. He had come to Rome in 1933, when he was eighteen. At first he was mainly bored -- as would be the case with a great many eighteen-year-olds. But his discovery of one of the city's more ancient churches and its mosaic iconography -- the basilica of Sts Cosmas and Damian -- on the edge of the Forum -- astonished and challenged him to such an extent that he began searching out similar churches, of which there are many in Rome. This quest proved to be a turning in his life. It was in Rome that he first wondered what it might be like to be both a Christian and even a monk.

The following essay is about only one of the churches Merton visited, San Lorenzo Fuori le Mura. A folder of photos relating to that church are here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/sets/72157605610802861/

The full set of photos taken during our days in Rome are posted here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimforest/sets/72157605352157251/

The Rome of the Martyrs

[H]ow to compare the Rome of the Caesars with the Rome of the martyrs… I was entering a city that had been transformed by the Cross.
--Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain (p 106)

The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.
-- Tertullian (155-222 AD)

“Look to your left, look to your right, and try to enjoy.” Nancy and I heard this brief instruction from a fast-moving guide leading a dazed tour group through one of the long galleries of the Vatican Museums. If those in her charge had time to look on either side, at that moment they would have had a blurred glimpse of colorful frescoed maps of various cities and regions of Italy, including two views of the entire Italian peninsula in the days when much of Italy was under papal rule.

Luckily, two weeks in Rome gives time to move slowly. We not only looked to our left and looked to our right but ahead and behind and up and down, more often than not doing so slowly or not moving at all.

What touched us most deeply was a consequence of visiting ancient churches founded on places where martyrs of the early church were either killed or buried. Some of their names are familiar to any Christian — Paul and Peter, Stephen, Cosmas and Damien, Laurence, Agnes, Theodore, Cecilia — while others are hardly known (for example the sisters Prassede and Pudenziana). All these names and others daily took on greater significance.

In Rome, the only ancient churches not named after martyrs are those dedicated to Mary. Each of the martyr-linked churches is a place for passing on memories and stories of those who lives inspired the conversions of many others, not only in ancient times but today as well. Such churches serve as points of access to what might have seemed the remote past, but then suddenly becomes part of the present day. This happened to us. We left Rome with a far more acute and intimate sense of connection not only with the martyrs of the early church who are remembered by name, but with a deepened sense of being linked to the many thousands, though now forgotten, who are part of what St. Paul called “the cloud of witnesses.”

To write about all the churches we visited would require either a book-length text that might take a year to write, or a something brief but no more interesting than a catalogue. Instead I’ll focus on the church we visited on June 10th, our last full day in Rome, the Basilica of San Lorenzo Fuori le Mura (St Laurence Outside the Walls).

All over the world there are churches that bear Laurence’s name (including the medieval cathedral a hundred meters from our house in Alkmaar, Holland), but this particular church to the northeast of the center of Rome is the first and oldest.

It was about a three- or four-kilometer walk from the convent hospice on the Via Cavour where we were staying. Setting off after breakfast, we walked past the nearby Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, then down a boulevard of shops and street venders that led to a neighborhood park, then up a side street to a tunnel that allowed us to pass under the tracks that lead to Rome’s main train station, Termini, then through a gate took us outside the Aurelian Wall, the barrier that enclosed the city’s seven hills, protecting Rome from barbarian invaders. Finally we were walking along one of the old roads connecting Rome with the world beyond, the Via Tiburtina. A few hundred years ago, we would have been passing not apartment buildings, shops, cafes and bus stops, but enjoying the open air of the Italian countryside. Now it’s a densely populated area. After a fifteen-minute walk, we found ourselves standing before the gates of the Campo Verano, Rome’s biggest cemetery and also the place where San Lorenzo’s was built.

Not at first seeing the church, we entered the cemetery, thinking the church must be somewhere within. Instead we spent half an hour or more looking at gravestones. The ones that we were most drawn to were decorated with photos of people who had died in the nineteenth century — usually colored ovals, an elderly matriarch in one, an equally aged patriarch in the other, and carved in the stone not only particular names but again and again the word “Famiglia” — family. Old graves or new, the cemetery seemed more than anything a monument to families, though there were also numerous indications of those families being Catholic (crucifixes and images of the Madonna). There were also monuments dating from the Italian equivalent of the Victorian era whose main message was one of intense sentimentality. On one elaborate gravestone there was a carving not only of grandma’s face peering out (no longer ruling the family — at least not from this world, though who knows what influence she still has) but of two children, a grandson with clasped hands and a distressed eyes looking at grandma’s determined face, while his younger sister, stricken with grief, sits to the other side, looking away.

This place of burial is older than the church we had come to visit. It started out as an extensive ancient catacomb, far beneath our feet. It was here in the year 258 that the roasted body of Laurence was brought, carried by a procession of Christians who followed more or less the same route we had just walked. His body was placed in a narrow niche along one of the underground passageways, then walled in with mortar and an inscription made, probably on that day just his name plus the word “sanctissimi” — most holy — done quickly in red lead paint applied with a brush. Only later on was the marble sarcophagus provided that the pilgrim approaching the saint’s relics sees today.

In Laurence’s day, the bodies of most Romans would have been burned and their ashes placed in urns, but the Christians opted for burial. In Rome, partly thanks to geological factors, almost all Christian burials were in catacombs — a less costly and more democratic option, both of which greatly appealed to the Church at that time. The catacombs — narrow passageways craved out of soft tufa stone with shallow niches, six or seven stacked one above the other — could be extended horizontally, and also be extended downward, gallery beneath gallery. Many thousands were buried in a single catacomb.

By the end of the second century AD, the Church in Rome had founded burial societies in order to be sure that even the poorest baptized person would be properly buried in one of the many catacombs that existed outside the city walls. Rank was of no consequence. In the catacomb of St. Callisto, a few kilometers outside the city walls to the southeast along the Appian Way, six popes and many martyrs were entombed among thousands of ordinary people, many of them children.

By accident, we had approached the Basilica of San Lorenzo in what probably is the correct way, not going directly to the church, as we had intended, but first wandering among the countless people of Rome who had either been buried in the catacombs or, after the late-fourth century, when catacombs had become places of pilgrimage rather than of burial, been lowered into graves dug from the surface.

Having had our fill of gravestones, at last we found our way to the basilica. It proved to be a surprisingly simple structure. Most ancient Roman churches have been modified and embellished over the centuries by popes, cardinals and wealthy benefactors: side altars added, gilded ceilings created, up-to-date art substituted for old, unfashionable art. The many churches the lily had not only been gilded but regilded, then regilded yet again. The basic shape of the church was usually retained but simplicity had been replaced by complexity, austerity by lavish displays of wealth.

But here at the Basilica of San Lorenzo, a small miracle had occurred. Both inside and out, no overlays or major renovations had been made — no decorative overlays for the facade, no elaborate, gilded ceiling, no cherubs, none of the theatrical interventions of the counter-reformation or baroque periods.

Probably all this is thanks to its providential location as a church outside the city walls in what was for most of its history a rural area. When the population of post-imperial Rome plummeted to just a few thousand people, the monastery of San Lorenzo (now a Franciscan friary) remained active but isolated. No wealthy philanthropist ever bothered to “improve” the church. The result is perhaps the most unspoiled ancient building in Christian Rome, though a few churches inside the walls — such as Santa Sabina, San Clemente, Ss. Cosmo e Damiano and Santa Prassede — come close.

Under a tiled roof held up by six tall pillars, the visitor steps down a meter or so below ground level into a spacious porch built in the thirteenth century. On the inner wall of the porch, access to the church is provided by smaller doors to the left and right plus a large entrance in the center that is guarded at floor level by two Romanesque stone lions, neither of whom seem on their way to baptism. One has a child in its claws, the other a lamb — graphic images of the world which condemned people like Laurence to death. One is reminded of a passage in one of the letters of Peter: “Brethren, be sober and watchful. Your adversary, the devil, like a roaring lion, goes about seeking to devour you. Resist him strong in the faith” (Note that not all lions are seeking someone to devour. Inside the church, close to the altar, there is another pair, but these seem to have taken the New Testament to heart. Their eyes are deeply thoughtful and, in the case of the lion on the left, meek and compassionate.)

The main event on the church porch isn’t its pair of lions but the frescoes, those concerning Stephen, the first Christian martyr, on one side, and Laurence one the other. (Stephen relics were brought to this church in the seventh century, at the time when Palagius II was pope.)

One can almost see the crowds of people who have gathered on this porch down through the centuries listening to those who knew the stories the frescos illustrate. No doubt the stories were recited unhurriedly and passionately, and with great attention to every detail in each fresco. Thus actual entry into the church was proceeded by a visual and verbal immersion in the lives, deaths and burials of the two great saints. (Fifteen years ago, when our daughter Anne was ten and we were all visiting a cathedral in Palermo, she called a similar set of linked images “the first comic book.”)

Sadly, these days it must be rare for visitors to hear such recitations, but if one knows at least the bare bones of the stories, a visitor fill in many of the blanks by “reading” these panels in sequence.

The Stephen narrative is on the left side of the porch, with his stoning in Jerusalem part of the top row. Other panels portray the later bringing to Rome of the body of Stephen in order to place it side-by-side with another deacon and martyr, Laurence.

On the right hand side of the door, the subject is Laurence, a Roman who received his religious instruction in preparation for baptism from Archdeacon Sixtus, later Pope Sixtus II. When Sixtus became Bishop of Rome in 257, he ordained Laurence a deacon (from the Greek word for servant), entrusting him with administration of the material goods of the local church and, still more important, care of the poor.

In a panel that shows Lawrence washing the feet of a poor man, it is striking that Laurence concentrates his attention not on the man’s feet that he is washing so gently, but on the man’s face, in whom no doubt he recognizes Christ.

Other panels focus on the persecution initiated by the Emperor Valerian in 258. As a result, many Christians were put to death, while Christians belonging to the nobility or the Roman Senate were deprived of their goods and exiled. Among the first victims of this persecution was Laurence’s mentor, Pope St Sixtus II, who was beheaded on August 6.

One of the early accounts of Laurence’s life was told by St Ambrose of Milan. Laurence, he related, met Pope Sixtus on his way to his execution and asked him, “Where are you going, dear father, without your son? Where are you hurrying off to without your deacon? Before you never mounted the altar of sacrifice without your servant, and now you wish to do it without me?” Pope Sixtus responded, “After three days you will follow me”.

Following the death of Pope Sixtus II, the prefect of Rome demanded that Lawrence turn over the riches of the Church — meaning it chalices, candlesticks and anything else of monetary value. Laurence asked for three days to gather together the church’s treasure, during which time he worked swiftly to distribute as much church property to the poor as was possible in order as to prevent its being seized by the government. Then, on the third day, he presented himself to the prefect, bring no gold or silver but the poor, whom he assembled in ranks — the crippled, the blind, the suffering, the widows and orphans, all of whom were cared for by the Church. “These were the true treasures of the Church,” he told the prefect. “In its poor, the Church is truly rich, far richer than your emperor.”

It was this act of defiance that led directly to Laurence’s martyrdom. The prefect told the young deacon that not only would he follow the path of martyrdom as Pope Sixtus had done, but in his case, it would be “a death by inches.”

Lawrence, bound to the grill of an iron outdoor stove, was roasted over a low fire. During his torture, Lawrence is said to have told his executioner, “I am already roasted on one side. If you would have me well cooked, it is time to turn me on the other side.” Laurence’s final prayer was for the conversion of Rome.

Later that day, as the porch panels relate iconographically, Laurence was buried in a section of catacomb under what later became the Basilica of San Lorenzo Fuori le Mura.

The panels also display the impact of Laurence’s death on the people of Rome. According to Prudentius, Laurence’s martyrdom and his patient endurance of torture had immense impact on the people of Rome, high and low, and in fact marked a decisive moment, Church Father Prudentius declares, “in the death of idolatry in Rome.” The catacomb in which Laurence was buried immediately became a place of pilgrimage. People who had been indifferent to Christianity, or hostile to it, were among those now praying with tears at the saint’s tomb.

Though not at San Lorenzo’s, at many other ancient churches in Rome we heard visitors and their guides expressing skepticism about the traditional stories and legends of saint’s lives and relics. In fact it’s hard to know what today could be regarded by a detached scholar as “actual history” regarding the narratives that come down to us about many of the saints. No doubt some of the stories are indeed legends, in the sense of being non-historical stories that compact events or portray a saint’s particular traits in high relief or even pure invention. Yet even the most incredible stories reveal in a memorable way something of the actual character and courage of a particular saint.

For example, while it is unlikely that the fourth-century bishop, St. Nicholas, reassembled the bodies of several murdered and dismembered children whose remain as were being cooked in a huge cauldron and brought them back to life, what is made clear in the tale is that St. Nicholas was fearless in his efforts to protect the lives of others, and perhaps most of all children. This trait stands behind the modern link of St Nicholas with gifts to children. Nicholas is also the patron saint of sailors. Bishop as he was of a port city, Myra in Asia Minor, he must have has a special care for sailors nor is it surprising that many of them credited his prayers of their behalf with saving their ships during great storms.

In the case of Laurence, did he actually ask to be turned over so that he might be better cooked? Perhaps. Perhaps not. But what is obvious not only from the story but from the impact Laurence had on the Romans of his day is that, both in the way he lived and the way he died, he gave so remarkable a witness to his faith in the risen Christ that it touched Romans in an extraordinary way and indeed contributed to the conversion of a many people from every class. For eighteen centuries, even in the long period when Rome was little more than a village, the tomb of St Laurence has been a place of pilgrimage. (Remarkably, Laurence and Stephen’s relics are among the few that were never transferred inside the city walls even at times when the city was under siege.)

Having done our best to decipher the porch frescoes, we entered the church.

It’s a breathtaking view that must stop most visitors, perhaps even most tour guides, in their tracks. The space is deep, quiet, austere and multi-layered, a place unlike any other we have ever seen. While we had been in many beautiful churches in Rome, none made us move so slowly and quietly as this one. The space seems just a deep breath away from heaven.

The oldest part of the basilica, the section at the far end, was built in the seventh century by Pope Palagius II. It replaces another structure built in the fourth century with the support of the first emperor to respect Christianity, Constantine the Great. Though Constantine was not himself baptized until he lay on his deathbed, beginning in 313, with publication of the Edict of Milan, he had made Christianity a privileged rather than persecuted religion.

Digging into a hillside, the seventh-century church was built so that Laurence’s catacomb tomb would be immediately beneath the church’s altar, with steps leading down to the crypt beneath so that pilgrims could pray in the very place where Laurence’s body was placed on the day of his martyrdom.

Later, in the thirteenth century, another church (the one with the porch) was built adjacent to the old one. In time the two buildings were unified, creating the single large building that exists to this day (though parts of the building and its monastic cloister had to be restored due to damage caused by allied bombs in July 1943).

The building is something like a Russian matriushka toy — a doll within a doll within a doll within a doll. At the its core is the altar and the relics beneath. Standing around and over the altar is a ciborium — a stone canopy supported by columns. The most famous of Rome’s ciboriums, made by Bernini in the seventeenth century, rises monumentally over the altar in St. Peter’s Basilica. The one at San Lorenzo’s is smaller and lighter, not at all a triumphal monument but a delicate structure that serves as an airy border marking the heart of sacred space. The four columns of purple marble are said to have been part of a similar ciborium that stood over the altar of the fourth-century church Constantine had sponsored.

On three sides of the sanctuary are two deep galleries, one above the other, through which light filters from windows that are out of sight. Above the upper gallery, just beneath the low-pitched roof, is a row of arched windows containing a pattern of small circles filled with light-bearing selenite. (The same material is used in a similar way at the fourth-century Basilica of Santa Sabina on the Aventine Hill.)

Crossing the border from the thirteenth-century area of the church to the part built in the seventh century, the visitor passes under an arch on the altar side of which is a mosaic spanning the width of the church. As is the case with nearly all the church mosaics of the early centuries, Christ is in the center with saints on either side. In some of these, Christ is standing, but in this instance he is seated on a blue globe that represents the whole of creation. His right hand is raised in a gesture of blessing while the left holds a thin staff which, when looked at closely, proves to be a cross. On his left and right, again following the pattern of other ancient churches in Rome, are Peter and Paul — Peter (also holding a cross) with his familiar dense, close-cropped grey hair and beard, and Paul, bearded but nearly bald, with a scroll in his left hand representing the many letters he sent to local churches. To Peter’s left is Laurence, also holding a cross, and next to him, but without a halo, Pope Pelagius, holding a model of the seventh century church. On the other side, to the right of Paul, is the proto-martyr Stephen, and then, on the far right, Hippolytus, shown holding a golden crown. While there are various saints named Hippolytus, this is probably the Roman army officer named in “The Acts of St Laurence” who had been assigned to guard Laurence while he awaited execution and who, soon afterward, was converted to Christianity and died as a martyr.

As is always the case with iconography, there is a deep quietness and stillness about the mosaic. It seems to exist in a place where all means of measuring time have vanished or have no meaning, suggesting “is-ness” rather then temporality. The background of the mosaic is gold, symbol of the eternity and the kingdom of God.

The altar end of the church is higher than the thirteenth-century nave. Steps take the visitor up into the area surrounding the altar, while a narrower set of steps lead down into the small chapel-like space beneath the altar where the relics of Stephen and Laurence are located. In earlier times, from dawn till nightfall, there must have been a continuous ribbon of pilgrims walking slowly around the wrought iron enclosure that surrounds the relics, each visitor briefly touching the sarcophagus and the red cloth that is laid across its open top, each touch a gesture of prayer. Perhaps the most common prayer made by all these pilgrims was the appeal that, when the time comes in one’s life to lay a bed of fire, to do so as Laurence did — or, when rocks fell on one like rain as they did on Stephen, to die forgiving those who threw them and to hope one’s death might help bring others to conversion. (Such things happen. The Apostle Paul, as a young man, was present at the stoning of Stephen. In the porch fresco of Stephen’s stoning, Paul is standing to the left, not hurling a stone but his right arm extended in what appears to be a gesture of approval.)

We were fortunate to be in the church at such a quiet time of day. Later on in the morning, after we had spent time in the monastery cloister adjacent to the church, we came back inside to discover a well-attended funeral in progress, probably the first of several that would occur that day, given that the church is surrounded on three sides by Rome’s largest cemetery.

Some churches help one pray while others seem to make prayer more difficult. The basilica of San Lorenzo was one of those churches in which it seemed impossible not to pray.

For us, being at the church forged a much deeper sense of connection with both Stephen and Laurence. Much the same had happened to us in the other martyr-associated churches in Rome.

Thanks to one of our several guidebooks, later in the day we realized that the place of Laurence’s actual death was on Via Panisperna, just around the corner from our hospice. Late in the evening, we decided to walk along Via Panisperna to see if one of the several churches we had passed by time and again wasn’t built where Laurence had been martyred. The answer, of course, is yes, there is such a church. It was closed, but we stood at the locked gate, looking across a stone-paved courtyard with the church on the far side. It didn’t seem important that we were unable to go inside. It was blessing enough to be where we stood -- and where Laurence died.

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Photo: A view of the interior of San Lorenzo Fuori le Mura.

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For those inclined to do more reading, here are a few titles:

The Companion Guide to Rome
by Georgina Masson
Companion Guides / Harper Collins

Perhaps the best single guidebook to Rome. While not the book to choose for visual content, the text is outstanding. The book has been around for a long time (the edition we used is the sixth revision, published in 1980) and continues to be updated and revised by John Fort and kept in print even though Georgina Masson herself has since died.

Ancient Churches of Rome: From the Fourth to the Seventh Century
by Hugo Bradenburg
Brepols Publishers, Turnhout, Belgium, 2004

This is an expensive but extraordinary (and magnificently illustrated) book that would be essential for anyone with a special interest in Rome’s oldest churches.

The Geometry of Love: Space, Time, Mystery and Meaning in an Ordinary Church
by Margaret Visser
North Point Press, 2000

This is about the church of Saint Agnes Outside the Walls in Rome. We learned about this book from Patricia Burton, who writes: “Visser explores the meaning and symbolism of quite ordinary things, and presents it in an informative, un-stuffy way, thereby often awakening us to how much we take for granted or simply don’t see. In this case she walks through an ‘ordinary church’ and gives its meaning at each step.” Use the “look inside” features on the book’s Amazon page to read the book’s very engaging opening pages:

http://www.amazon.com/Geometry-Love-Mystery-Meaning-Ordinary/dp/0865476403/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1213285228&sr=1-1

But you may well prefer to buy a used copy via Abebooks — $5 instead of $50.

The Christian Catacombs of Rome: History, Decoration, Inscriptions
by Vincenzo Fiocchi Nicolai, Fabrizio Bisconti and Danilo Mazzoleni
Schnell & Steiner, Regensburg, Germany, second edition 2002

Probably this is the best study now available of the catacombs of Rome. It includes a great many well reproduced color photos plus many maps and drawings. The authors are members of the Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archeology.

Eyewitness Travel: Rome
published by Dorling Kinderly

This is a sturdily-made 450-page guide to Rome updated annually. It offers lots of photos, cross-sections and maps, short but useful entries on nearly all the places a visitor might wish to see plus details about how to get there and opening times, plus practical information about how to get around by bus, tram and metro, how to avoid being pickpocketed (but also what to do if it happens), how to find medical help if needed, etc., etc.

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The Wikipedia entry about the church of San Lorenzo Fuori le Mura is here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basilica_of_Saint_Lawrence_Outside_the_Walls

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