The Theory of Prayer

Not in the streets, not in the white streets
Nor in the crowded porticoes
Shall we catch You in our words,
Or lock You in the lenses of our cameras,
You Who escaped the subtle Aristotle,
Blinding us by Your evidence,
Your too clear evidence, Your everywhere.

Not in the groves, not in the flowering green groves
Where the pretty idols dwell
Shall we find the path to Your pavilion
Tented in clouds and fire:—
We are only following the echo
Of our own lyres.

The wise man’s blood
Freezes in every vein and artery
With the blue poison of his own indelible prudence.
And the lover,
Caught in the loop of his own lie
Strangles like a hare:
While the singers are suddenly killed,
Slain by the blades of their own song—
The words that clash like razors in the throat
Severing the tender strings.

For the things that we utter turn and betray us,
Writing the names of our sins on flesh and bone
In lights as hard as diamonds.
And the things we think have sold us to the enemy
Writing the names of our sins on the raw marrow
In lights as sharp as glass.
And our desires,
Uncovering their faces one by one
Are seen to be our murderers!
How did you break your jails, you black assassins?
How did you find us out, you numbered men?

Logic has ruined us,
Theorems have flung their folly at us,
Economy has left us full of swords
And all our blood is gone:
Oh, how like a death, now, is our prayer become!
We lie and wait upon the unknown Savior
Waking and waking in the guarded tomb. . . .

But the armed ocean of peace,
The full-armed ocean is suddenly within us.
Where, where, peace, did you get in?
And the armed ocean of quiet,
The full armed ocean, stands within us:
Where, from what wells, hid in the middle of our essence,
You silences, did you come pouring in?

But all our thoughts lie still, and in this shipwreck
We’ll learn the theory of prayer:
“How many hate their own safe death,
Their cell, their submarine!”
“How many hate Your Cross, Your Key, the only one
To beat that last invincible door
That will surprise us, Peace, with Your invasion
And let us in those soundless fathoms where You dwell.”

-- Thomas Merton (1915-1968) Roman Catholic monastic, priest, poet, and author

Prayer and Time

If we really want prayer, we’ll have to give it time. We must slow down to a human tempo and we’ll begin to have time to listen. And as soon as we listen to what’s going on, things will begin to take shape by themselves. But for this we have to experience time in a new way.

One of the best things for me when I went to the hermitage was being attentive to the times of the day: when the birds began to sing, and the deer came out of the morning fog, and the sun came up – while in the monastery, summer or winter, Lauds is at the same hour. The reason why we don’t take time is a feeling that we have to keep moving. This is a real sickness. Today time is commodity, and for each one of us time is mortgaged. We experience time as unlimited indebtedness. We are sharecroppers of time. We are threatened by a chain reaction: overwork–overstimulation–overcompensation–overkill.

We must approach the whole idea of time in a new way. We are free to love. And you must get free from all imaginary claims. We live in the fullness of time. Every moment is God’s own good time, his kairos. The whole thing boils down to giving ourselves in prayer a chance to realize that we have what we seek. We don’t have to rush after it. It is there all the time, and if we give it time it will make itself known to us.

-- Thomas (Father Louis) Merton, (1915-1968), American Roman Catholic Trappist monk, mystic, priest, poet, and author, found at The Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine University, from The Merton Seasonal: A Quarterly Review,  https://merton.org/ITMS/Seasonal/35/35-3Thurston.pdf  

There Is A Light Within You

I've said many things, but at the heart
of them all is this: There is a light
within you, in your soul, uncreated
and uncreatable; it simply is. If you wish to know yourself,
look for this light in the dark;
it is ever present, even when
you've lost sight of it. Look
away from what you think
you are, and look deeper into
the darkness that is within. There you'll find that light
which is ever radiant,
even if no one—not
even you—notices.

--Meister Eckhart (1260-1328) German Dominican academic, theologian, preacher, and mystic, from Meister Eckhart's Book of Darkness & Light: Meditations on the Path of the Wayless Way, 2023, edited by Jon M. Sweeney and Mark S. Burrows.

Wonder as Wander

At dusk, on those evenings she does not go out,

my mother potters around her house.
Her daily helpers are gone, there is no one
there, no one to tell what to do,
she wanders, sometimes she talks to herself,
fondly scolding, sometimes she suddenly
throws out her arms and screams—high notes
lying here and there on the carpets
like bodies touched by a downed wire,
she journeys, she quests, she marco-polos through
the gilded gleamy loot-rooms, who is she.
I feel, now, that I do not know her,
and for all my staring, I have not seen her
—like the song she sang, when we were small,
I wonder as I wander, out under the sky,
how Jesus, the Savior, was born for, to die,
for poor lonely people, like you, and like I
—on the slow evenings alone, when she delays
and delays her supper, walking the familiar
halls past the mirrors and night windows,
I wonder if my mother is tasting a life
beyond this life—not heaven, her late
beloved is absent, her father absent,
and her staff is absent, maybe this is earth
alone, as she had not experienced it,
as if she is one of the poor lonely people,
as if she is born to die. I hold fast
to the thought of her, wandering in her house,
a luna moth in a chambered cage.
Fifty years ago, I'd squat in her
garden, with her Red Queens, and try
to sense the flyways of the fairies as they kept
the pollen flowing on its local paths,
and our breaths on their course of puffs—they kept
our eyes wide with seeing what we
could see, and not seeing what we could not see

-- Sharon Olds (1942- ), American poet and teacher, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

OK Let's Go

Let’s go to Dawn School
and learn again to begin

oh something different
from repetition

Let’s go to the morning
and watch the sun smudge

every bankrupt idea
of nature “you can’t write about

anymore” said my friend
the photographer “except

as science”
Let’s enroll ourselves

in the school of the sky
where knowing

how to know
and unknow is everything

we’ll come to know
under what they once thought

was the dome of the world

-- Maureen N. McLane, American poet, professor, and academic

Meditation for the Silence of Morning

I wake myself imagining the shape

of the day and where I will find

myself within it. Language is not often
in that shape,

but sentences survive somehow
through the islands of dark matter,

the negative space often more important
than the positive.

Imagine finding you look at the world
completely different upon waking one day.

You do not know if this is permanent.
Anything can change, after all,

for how else would you find yourself
in this predicament or this opportunity,

depending on the frame? A single thought
can make loneliness seem frighteningly new.

We destroy the paths of rivers to make room for the sea.


--Adam Clay, American poet and professor at the University of Southern Mississippi.

The Value of Sparrows

“Are not two sparrows sold for a penny?”- Matthew 10:29

The Almighty, and my professor,
have enticed me to commit
to thirty minutes of daily unstructured prayer.
For Episcopalians, this may almost
sound heretical, but I put away
my prayerbooks and liturgies, and sit in silence
at dawn, to discern the tender voice of God
in whatever guise she assumes
by this pond
in the middle
of this campus
on this rainy mountaintop,
clouds above, clouds below.

At first all you can hear
are the intrusions crafted by humans:
the ringing of an unattended telephone, the
garbage men greeting one another, heavy
machinery belching diesel fumes aloft,
revving engines, egad--
and it’s not even six a.m.

Re-center, the wind murmurs,
stippling the face of the pond like hammered silver,
and the poplar leaves flash pale
as they shrug over in unison,
hands cupped in gratitude to midwife the coming rain.

But then, the voice of God hovers
just behind my ear:
fish crows chiding “ah ah” just over my shoulder;
Carolina wrens’ liquid song arrowing from the underbrush
as Bachman’s sparrow—named after a preacher-- trills;
a red-winged blackbird’s alarm whistle
blending perfectly into the sound
of the garbage truck reversing,
upending any smug certainty
of the comparative value of sparrows.

-- Leslie Barnes Scoopmire; this was first published at Episcopal Journal and Cafe's Speaking to the Soul on June 22, 2023.

Image: the pond at which I was praying at Sewanee during my summer school session there.

Sabbath Poem, 1985, V (How Long Does It Take To Make the Woods?)

How long does it take to make the woods?
As long as it takes to make the world.
The woods is present as the world is, the presence
of all its past, and of all its time to come.
It is always finished, it is always being made, the act
of its making forever greater than the act of its destruction.
It is a part of eternity, for its end and beginning
belong to the end and beginning of all things,
the beginning lost in the end, the end in the beginning.

What is the way to the woods, how do you go there?
By climbing up through the six days’ field,
kept in all the body’s years, the body’s
sorrow, weariness, and joy. By passing through
the narrow gate on the far side of that field
where the pasture grass of the body’s life gives way
to the high, original standing of the trees.
By coming into the shadow, the shadow
of the grace of the strait way’s ending,
the shadow of the mercy of light.

Why must the gate be narrow?
Because you cannot pass beyond it burdened.
To come in among these trees you must leave behind
the six days’ world, all of it, all of its plans and hopes.
You must come without weapon or tool, alone,
expecting nothing, remembering nothing,
into the ease of sight, the brotherhood [and sisterhood!] of eye and leaf.

--Wendell Berry (1938-2026), American Baptist, farmer, poet, agrarian, and English professor

The Contemplative Life

Abba Jacob said:
Contemplation is both the highest act
of being human, and humanity’s highest language.
If the language of things reaches beyond things
to designate the Absolute,
the silent interior mantra
bespeaks a profound communion
with that Someone further than ourselves—
and communion within
ourselves, for the two go together.
When we meditate, we enter
paschal mystery, the frontier between death and life.
Egyptian mythology has a wonderful image
of the pass from life to death: a great ship
which bears us to eternity. Charon
is the great passer of Greek mythology,
helping souls cross the River Styx from life to death.
Christianity turns it around: Christ
is the greatest passer, helping us pass
from death to life.
Contemplative life is always making the passage
from death to life, from humanity to divinity.
It is always taking the risk of being human.

There is an extraordinary message from the grave
as to what it takes to be human: a letter
from a Cistercian monk, one of seven
who had their throats cut
by Muslim fundamentalist terrorists
in their monastery in the mountains of Algeria
about ten years ago. Their prior
left a letter, just in case:
they knew it was probably coming,
they knew they were at great risk.
The letter was found and published.
Here is how it ends:

     To the one who will have killed me:

     and also you, Friend of my final moment,
     who would not be aware
     of what you are doing,
     yet, this: Thank you.
     And adieu to you.
     For in you, too,
     I see the face of God.

Abba Jacob wiped his eyes.
Interval of birdsong from the veranda.

He’s seeing not an abstract God,
but a God who has assumed a face,
a God who shows him this face
in every one of those Muslim brothers and sisters,
including the one who kills him.

Contemplative life has no frontiers.
And it is the heritage of all humanity.
Through contemplation we enter
into communion with everybody.
And this leads to service.
But that’s a subject
for another day.

--Marilyn Nelson (1945- ), African American poet, teacher, author, children's author, and poet laureate of Connecticut 2001-2006, from Best Spiritual Writing 2009.

The Contemplative Life

Abba Jacob said:
Contemplation is both the highest act
of being human, and humanity’s highest language.
If the language of things reaches beyond things
to designate the Absolute,
the silent interior mantra
bespeaks a profound communion
with that Someone further than ourselves—
and communion within
ourselves, for the two go together.
When we meditate, we enter
paschal mystery, the frontier between death and life.
Egyptian mythology has a wonderful image
of the pass from life to death: a great ship
which bears us to eternity. Charon
is the great passer of Greek mythology,
helping souls cross the River Styx from life to death.
Christianity turns it around: Christ
is the greatest passer, helping us pass
from death to life.
Contemplative life is always making the passage
from death to life, from humanity to divinity.
It is always taking the risk of being human.

There is an extraordinary message from the grave
as to what it takes to be human: a letter
from a Cistercian monk, one of seven
who had their throats cut
by Muslim fundamentalist terrorists
in their monastery in the mountains of Algeria
about ten years ago. Their prior
left a letter, just in case:
they knew it was probably coming,
they knew they were at great risk.
The letter was found and published.
Here is how it ends:

     To the one who will have killed me:

     and also you, Friend of my final moment,
     who would not be aware
     of what you are doing,
     yet, this: Thank you.
     And adieu to you.
     For in you, too,
     I see the face of God.

Abba Jacob wiped his eyes.
Interval of birdsong from the veranda.

He’s seeing not an abstract God,
but a God who has assumed a face,
a God who shows him this face
in every one of those Muslim brothers and sisters,
including the one who kills him.

Contemplative life has no frontiers.
And it is the heritage of all humanity.
Through contemplation we enter
into communion with everybody.
And this leads to service.
But that’s a subject
for another day.

--Marilyn Nelson (1946- ), African American poet and translator, Poet Laureate of Connecticut

Trappists, Working

Now all our saws sing holy sonnets in this world of timber 
Where oaks go off like guns, and fall like cataracts, 
Pouring their roar into the wood’s green well. 

Walk to us, Jesus, through the wall of trees, 
And find us still adorers in these airy churches, 
Singing our other Office with our saws and axes. 
Still teach Your children in the busy forest, 
And let some little sunlight reach us, in our mental shades, 
   and leafy studies.
When time has turned the country white with grain 
And filled our regions with the thrashing sun, 

Walk to us, Jesus, through the walls of wheat 
When our two tractors come to cut them down: 
Sow some light winds upon the acres of our spirit, 
And cool the regions where our prayers are reapers, 
And slake us, Heaven, with Your living rivers.
                                                                            (1946)

--Thomas Merton (1915-1968) OCSO, American Trappist monk, priest, essayist, memoirist, and poet, from In the Dark Before Dawn: New Selected Poems, 2005. His feast day is today.

The Contemplative Life

Abba Jacob said:
Contemplation is both the highest act
of being human, and humanity’s highest language.
If the language of things reaches beyond things
to designate the Absolute,
the silent interior mantra
bespeaks a profound communion
with that Someone further than ourselves—
and communion within
ourselves, for the two go together.
When we meditate, we enter
paschal mystery, the frontier between death and life.
Egyptian mythology has a wonderful image
of the pass from life to death: a great ship
which bears us to eternity. Charon
is the great passer of Greek mythology,
helping souls cross the River Styx from life to death.
Christianity turns it around: Christ
is the greatest passer, helping us pass
from death to life.
Contemplative life is always making the passage
from death to life, from humanity to divinity.
It is always taking the risk of being human.

There is an extraordinary message from the grave
as to what it takes to be human: a letter
from a Cistercian monk, one of seven
who had their throats cut
by Muslim fundamentalist terrorists
in their monastery in the mountains of Algeria
about ten years ago. Their prior
left a letter, just in case:
they knew it was probably coming,
they knew they were at great risk.
The letter was found and published.
Here is how it ends:

To the one who will have killed me:

and also you, Friend of my final moment,
who would not be aware
of what you are doing,
yet, this: Thank you.
And adieu to you.
For in you, too,
I see the face of God.

Abba Jacob wiped his eyes.
Interval of birdsong from the veranda.

He’s seeing not an abstract God,
but a God who has assumed a face,
a God who shows him this face
in every one of those Muslim brothers and sisters,
including the one who kills him.

Contemplative life has no frontiers.
And it is the heritage of all humanity.
Through contemplation we enter
into communion with everybody.
And this leads to service.
But that’s a subject
for another day.

--Marilyn Nelson (1946-) African American poet, teacher, children's book author, and former poet laureate of Connecticut, from Best Spiritual Writing of 2009