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

50 страница из 65

All our rough earth with wakeful grace.

And look, the ruins have become Jerusalems,

And the sick cities re-arise, like shining Sions!

Jerusalems, these walls and rooves,

These bowers and fragrant sheds,

Our desert’s wooden door,

The arches, and the windows, and the tower!¹³

Christ became the center of Merton’s life. During the first years at the abbey he devoted most of his literary inspiration to the writing of poems which express his longing for an intimate union, persevering in his spiritual path and in the hard effort to reach his own detachment. The next poem is one of the most touching examples of this.

Within a symbolic natural context of vineyards and wheat fields, which clearly allude to the bread and wine of Holy Communion, this poem celebrates a love feast, the wedding of Christ and man which takes places in the mystery (the “bright secret,” says the poem) of the Eucharist or sacramentum unitatis,¹⁴ offering us the gift of love and the joy of being reborn in Christ, as He Himself announced: “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them” (John 6:56). This ardent chant starts with an exclamation: “O sweet escape! O smiling flight!” An escape from where? we may wonder. The poet seems to clarify that it is an escape from the jails of flesh, the prison of the individual body and of the individual soul (since there is not an individual body if there is not a soul which owns it). We do not know what “body” is; we really do not know for it plunges into the deepest depths and is beyond all our superior powers: intelligence, understanding and will. In addition, terms with negative connotations such as “death,” “dark,” “night” are juxtaposed through these verses with other words hinting at the divine Majesty.