Читать книгу Thomas Merton's Poetics of Self-Dissolution онлайн

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However, by no means was Merton’s trip to the Trappist Jerusalem an evasion, but rather a way of exploring his own inner truth to find “the fullness of the Christ– life in the soul.”¹¹ Thus, he wrote in a later work, “I shall be lost in Him: that is, I shall find myself.”¹² As we will see, in the first stanza of “A Letter to My Friends,” Merton begins by establishing a comparison between the monastery, “Nazareth,” Jesus’s birthplace, and the “holy desert” whose inhabitants “more than we fear […] love […] these thorns, the phoenix’s sweet and spikey tree,” which might stand in the poem as a symbol of the Cross. These coenobites have gone deeper into this metaphorical wilderness in order to embrace Christ’s passion but also Christ’s immense love; they are described as “separate strangers,” “hid in their disguises,” who “have come to meet, by night, (that is to say during the divine office of Matins), the quiet Christ.” Their dwelling is the very mystical body, an indestructible temple which, despite any demolition, can be rebuilt in three days. “All your ruins are rebuilt as fast as you destroy yourselves,” stresses the poet, and he also introduces the metaphor of “our desert’s wooden door,” recalling the Biblical warning: “for the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it” (Matthew 7:14).