“- in the Life and Prayer of .”

“God permit that the symbol of my life be a candle, that spends itself, that consumes itself while there is still wax to burn; when nothing more remains to be consumed, that my flame, yet an instant, dare to remain alive and afoot, to rumble after, happy in the conviction that one day the force of Right will conquer the pretended right of force."

How much the force of Right seems to be conquered in our times by the pretended right of force.

During his address to the US Congress on September 24, 2015, Pope Francis lifted up

Thomas Merton as one of four “great” Americans who “offer us,” as he put it, “a way of seeing and interpreting reality” that is life-giving and brings hope. The others were Abraham Lincoln, Martin

Luther King, Jr., and Dorothy Day. For many Catholics like myself, who have long admired all four but especially look to Merton and Dorothy Day as exemplary models of Catholic intellectual and spiritual life, it was a thrilling moment: that Pope Francis would celebrate Merton and Day in such a context was quite extraordinary. It suggests something, I think, not only about Merton and Day but also about Pope Francis: that is, it throws light on the kind of witness that Pope Francis believes we need most in our times, as we face an uncertain future. Francis described Merton as a man of paradoxes, “a man of prayer, a thinker who challenged the certitudes of his time and opened new horizons for and for the church. He was also a man of dialogue, a promoter of peace between peoples and religions.” Though he didn’t say it on this occasion, the pope might have also lifted up

Merton’s legacy as a peacemaker between human and the Earth: Merton the contemplative who gives us, if you will, a spirituality of the earth, who reminds us of the elemental communion we share with the soil and water, the wind and sunlight, with all creatures on our fragile planet.

I/ The Song of Faith

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I’d like to begin with a passage that introduced me to the rhythms of faith as I first discovered them in Merton’s life, and eventually, my own. I was just 15 when my mother put an old copy of The Sign of Jonas into my hands, and a few days later I came to a meditation called “Fire

Watch, July 4, 1952,” one of the most-celebrated meditations in Merton’s vast body of work. [It begins with Merton putting on his sneakers. . . ascends to the tower.] [slide]

And now my whole breathes the wind which blows through the belfry, and my hand is

on the door through which I see the heavens. The door swings out upon a vast sea of darkness

and of prayer. Will it come like this, the moment of my death? Will you open a door upon the

great forest and set my feet upon a ladder under the moon, and take me out among the stars?

Even today, when I sink into “Fire Watch,” it is like walking into the church of my childhood: the words steady my pulse, deepen my breath, slow my mind, and open my imagination. [slide]

Mists of damp heat rise up out of the fields around the sleeping abbey. The whole valley is

flooded with moonlight and I can count the southern hills beyond the watertank, and almost

number the trees of the forest to the north. Now the huge chorus of living beings rises up

out of the world beneath my feet: life singing in the watercourses, throbbing in the creeks

and the fields and the trees, choirs of millions and millions of jumping and flying and

creeping things. I lay the clock upon the belfry ledge and pray cross-legged with my back

against the tower, and face the same unanswered question. Lord God of this great night: do

You see the woods? Do You hear the rumor of their loneliness? Do you behold their

secrecy? Do You remember their solitudes? Do You see that my is beginning to

dissolve like wax within me?

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“The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” writes the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Merton’s lesson is: “Pay attention, you might miss it.” Like the biblical prophets and poets of old,

Merton calls us back to ourselves in God, in one another, in the natural world, before it is too late.

II/ Son of a Century

[slide] Already some sixty years ago, Merton had described the world we inhabit as a “post-

Christian” world. “Peace in a Post-Christian Era” was the title of the book he had prepared for publication but which the Trappist censors judged too controversial to publish. And no wonder.

Merton confronted his contemporaries with some very uncomfortable questions: Does faith have a future? If so what kind of faith will it be? Faith in God? Faith in the markets? Faith in technology?

Faith in atomic weaponry, drone strikes and the national security state? Fundamentalist faith, which is to say, faith not in God but in our idea of God, in the absolute truth of one’s own faith, all others be damned? As a parent, as a teacher and Catholic theologian, these are questions I think about a lot, and which I’d like to offer for our conversation today. What kind of faith might kindle a fire of love and hope, of God’s own hope, in the next generation? I don’t pretend to have an answer to these questions, but what I’d like to do is lay down some markers with Merton as our guide. What is striking to so many readers is the degree to which his life and writings, so shaped by events of the twentieth century, still resonate so powerfully today, as Pope Francis suggests. Indeed, Merton’s story emerges as a kind of lucid window into the journey itself of seeking, and being found, by God.

Pope Francis described Merton as a man of paradoxes, “a man of prayer, a thinker who challenged the certitudes of his time and opened new horizons for souls and for the church. He was also a man of dialogue, a promoter of peace between peoples and religions.” But as you and I know,

Merton did not become these things all at once, nor perfectly, without risk and error. Merton’s journey in faith was a lifelong journey, and at times a terrific struggle. As a model for Christian

3 holiness, he was far from perfect. He was a restless monk, who often chafed against his vows of stability and obedience. In his later years he would distance himself from his more pious earlier writings—including the autobiography that made him famous in 1949, The Seven Storey Mountain— insisting on his right not to be turned into a myth, a kind of porcelain saint, for the edification of

Catholic school children. Not a few Catholics were angered at his writings on race, the Cold War and the peace movement. What emerges I think for most readers from the broadest tapestry of his life is a beautifully human journey before God, like ours, beautiful in its imperfections and struggles.

Williams: “The great Christian is the man or woman who can make me more interested in God than in him or her. Merton is a great Christian because he will not let me look at him for long: he will, finally, persuade me to look in the direction he is looking, toward a world everywhere haunted by

God”—toward God and human possibilities.

Of course, as with any classic writer, every reader will have a different favorite book or passage that hooked them or still haunts their imagination. For me it was “Fire Watch,” and later

New Seeds of Contemplation and, perhaps my favorite, Raids on the Unspeakable, which gives us Merton, I think, at his most mature and prophetic best. For many readers of my parents’ generation it is his autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, which marks a pivotal signpost or even a major turning point in their life’s journey. An elder African American woman and former nun in my parish told me that Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander was her “Bible” during the 1960s, when she was an activist for racial justice and felt increasingly alienated by her religious community. “Merton got it,” she said to me, “when few others did.” [By which I took her to mean: few other white Catholics.] The renowned Jesuit peace activist Fr. Daniel Berrigan likewise remembers Merton’s role as “pastor to the peace movement” in those years. “It was a long, hard road, and we needed help along the way, and he gave it. He was very important to all of us.”

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III/ God with Us [slide]

Perhaps Merton’s most-oft cited passage comes from Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, when he describes an extraordinary moment in March of 1958, when he was standing on a busy street corner in Louisville, KY, and suddenly it is as if scales falls from his eyes.

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. . . . This sense of liberation

from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out

loud. . .“Thank God, thank God that I am like other [human beings], that I am only a man

among others.” . . .

By all accounts this was a pivotal moment in Merton’s faith journey. From this moment forward, he would lend his voice to the most contentious social issues of the day: the Cold War, Viet Nam, the

Civil Rights Movement and the race crisis exploding in cities across the country during the 1960s.

Fourth and Walnut was also, we might say, the anticipatory flowering in Merton of the Church’s own revolutionary turning toward the world at Vatican II, inspired by Pope John XXIII and a host of Catholic ressourcement theologians. Theologically, the common melody line in this symphony of the church’s engagement with the world is the dignity of the human person, a profound theology of incarnation, Emmanuel, God with us. Again, from Fourth and Walnut: [click]

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 a member of the human race. A member of the human race! As

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if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now I realize

what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is

no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.

Merton is a poet of the liminal spaces of our lives, where holy mystery breaks in, casting everything in a different sort of light. Whether standing in the midst of the secular city, enjoying a picnic in the monastery woods with friends, or standing barefoot and alone before the great statues of the

Buddha at the shrine of Pollanaruwa, just a month before his death, what Merton describes in so many classic passages is not a chain of “peak experiences,” here one moment, gone the next, but rather a whole-bodied way of being in communion with reality, where time touches the eternal.

[slide] Much later in my life, during doctoral studies, and quite unexpectedly, it was Merton’s prose poem of 1961, , which, like a kind of magnetic north, drew my imagination back into itself, again and again. The flowering in Merton of long meditation on the Bible, patristic and

Russian Orthodox theology, and Zen, the poem seemed at once to multiply and silence all my questions. Rather than succumbing to my preconceived categories and preconceptions of God, it broke them open. Set in four sections according to the liturgical hours, it begins in a hospital room at dawn, where the speaker is awakened “out of languor and darkness” by the soft voice of a nurse.

[click] There is in all visible things an invisible fecundity, a dimmed light, a meek

namelessness, a hidden wholeness. This mysterious Unity and Integrity is Wisdom, the

Mother of all, Natura naturans. There is in all things an inexhaustible sweetness and purity, a

silence that is a fount of action and joy. It rises up in wordless gentleness and flows out to

me from the unseen roots of all created being, welcoming me tenderly, saluting me with

indescribable humility. This is at once my own being, my own nature, and the Gift of my

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Creator’s Thought and Art within me, speaking as Hagia Sophia, speaking as my sister,

Wisdom.

For years the poem has haunted me, and I have struggled and broken my head trying to get inside the text to explain its particular magic. But there is nothing to explain, and no magic; there is only the music of divine Mercy, realized in each of us according to our willingness to receive it. [slide]

O blessed, silent one, who speaks everywhere! We do not hear the soft voice, the gentle

voice, the merciful and feminine. We do not hear mercy, or yielding love, or non-resistance,

or non-reprisal. In her there are no reasons and no answers. Yet she is the candor of God’s

light, the expression of His simplicity.

If it is true, as the late Fr. Andrew Greeley writes, that “the artist is a sacrament maker, a creator of emphasized, clarified beauty designed to make us see,” then Merton in Hagia Sophia is the consummate artist, helping us to see—that is, to feel in our whole person—that while the world is stricken deeply by sin, it is also limned in the light of resurrection. What would it feel like to think and pray with a God who is not fixed like a Great Marble Statue in the elite or far-away spaces where power is exercised but who enters without reserve into the stream of our humble tasks, decisions, and commitments? Perhaps such a God would re-ignite our hope, our capacity to imagine again.

[slide] “Gentleness comes to him when he is most helpless and awakens him, refreshed, beginning to be made whole. Love takes him by the hand, and opens to him the door to another life, another day.” The poem offers a kind of quiet protest, the protest of Life itself, we might say, against a world that seems no longer able to slow down, to be quiet, to rest in wonder.

IV/ The Dawning of Wisdom-Sophia [slide]

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For the next few minutes I want to step back and trace just briefly, in broadest strokes, the story of Merton’s awakening to Sophia, her breakthrough into Merton’s consciousness. In truth, it was not a sudden “breakthrough” but rather more like a dawning, a slow birthing, a remembering of something deep in Merton – in all of us - that has been forgotten. Careful readers of Merton’s journals during the late 1950s cannot help but be struck by the frequency and poignancy with which the feminine Wisdom-child of Proverbs 8 and other Wisdom passages begins to haunt his writings—this, thanks not only to his renewed interest in Judaism and the Hebrew Scriptures, but above all, his close study of Russian writers such as Pasternak and Dostoyevsky, and theologians of the Sophia tradition.

Everywhere in Russian literature Merton found the haunting presence of Sophia, the divine feminine, whose presence haunts the marginal spaces of the Bible. One of the earliest clues to the impact of the

Russian theologians appears in Merton’s journal of April 25, 1957: [click]

Bulgakov and Berdyaev are writers of great, great attention. . . . These two men have dared to make mistakes and were to be condemned by every church, in order to say something great and worthy of God in the midst of all their wrong statements. They have dared to accept the challenge of the sapiential books, the challenge of the image of Proverbs where Wisdom is “playing in the world” before the face of the Creator.

The Russian writers seem to have unlocked a door deep inside of Merton that had never been fully opened, at least not in such a radically personal way. The image of Christ as Wisdom of God, as Sophia, began to haunt Merton’s religious imagination. [dreams and drawings – ref. PP]

In the journal of February 28, 1958, Merton describes a hauntingly erotic dream of a young

Jewish girl named “Proverb” who “clings to me and will not let go.” A week later, he addresses her a

“love letter” of surprising intimacy and devotion: [slide]

How grateful I am to you for loving in me something which I thought I had entirely lost, and someone who, I thought, I had long ago ceased to be. . . . your lovely spontaneity, your

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simplicity, the generosity of your love. . . . you are utterly alone: yet you have given your love to me, why I cannot imagine. . . . Dearest Proverb, I love your name, its mystery, its simplicity and its secret . . .

To feel himself loved in such a way by one, it seems, had broken open Merton’s capacity to love the many. Two weeks later (March 18, 1958), she comes to him again in the famous epiphany in “Louisville, at the corner of 4th and Walnut,” when Merton is “suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, even though we were total strangers.” [click] A few months later, in a letter to the Russian novelist Boris Pasternak, Merton shares the experience at Fourth and Walnut with

Pasternak, invoking the name Proverb to describe to him the “beauty and [secret] purity” he saw reflected in the faces of the passersby on the street corner: “And they did not known their real identity as the Child so dear to God who, from before the beginning, was playing in his sight all days, playing in the world.” From this point forward Merton would associate Her name with the divine image alive and at play in the world, in people, inhering in the earth, the rocks and trees, the soil and wind: [slide]

[For] She is in all things like the air receiving the sunlight. In her they prosper. In her they glorify God. . . She is the Love that unites them. She is life as communion, life as thanksgiving, life as praise, life as festival, life as glory. . .

All of these Wisdom passages come to fruition in a very striking way one day in early 1959, when Merton was visiting his friends Victor Hammer, the Viennese artist, and his wife Carolyn, at their home, of course right here, in Lexington. As they sat together at lunch, Merton noticed a triptych that Victor had painted, its central panel depicting the boy Christ being crowned by a dark-haired woman. As the artist later recalled, Merton (“Father Louis” to the Hammers), while looking at the triptych, “asked quite abruptly, ‘And who is the woman behind Christ?’ I said, ‘I do not know yet.’

Without further question he gave his own answer. ‘She is Hagia Sophia, , who crowns

Christ.’ And this she was – and is.” Some days later Hammer wrote to Merton, asking him to expand on his response. Merton obliges in a letter of May 14, 1959: [slide] “The first thing to be said, of

9 course, is that Hagia Sophia is God Himself. God is not only a Father but a Mother. He is both at the same time. . . .[T]o ignore this distinction is to lose touch with the fullness of God. This is a very ancient intuition of reality which goes back to the oldest Oriental thought. . . For the ‘masculine- feminine’ relationship is basic in all reality – simply because all reality mirrors the reality of God.”

By the time he concludes the letter, Merton seems to realize that their conversation has given birth to something significant, and asks Hammer: “Maybe we could make a little broadsheet on Sophia, with the material begun here???” This is just what would happen. Drawing material from the letter and his journal entries, Merton completed Hagia Sophia during Pentecost in the Spring of 1961, and a limited number of copies printed on Hammer’s hand press. The poem would be published in 1962 as the centerpiece of a book called Emblems of a Season of Fury which includes devastating poems on racism

(“And the Children of Birmingham”), genocide (“Chant to Be Used in Processions around a Site with

Furnaces”), and political oppression (“A Picture of Lee Ying”). Why place “Hagia Sophia,” a strange poem evoking the feminine divine, at the very center of this remarkable collection? Why is faith in

Sophia, as Merton suggests, “the great stabilizer for peace,” in an era of unspeakable suffering and violence, not least violence against the earth? This is the question that haunted me when I first began to discover and really engage this material. In a word: why Sophia?

And I think the answer has to do with hope, that is to say, faith’s affirmation of divine and human possibilities even, if not especially, in those places and moments of our lives that seem by all rational accounts God-forsaken, devoid of hope, void of life, of goodness, of humanity. When prefaced his teachings with the words, “let those with eyes to see, see, and those with ears to hear, hear,” scholars tell us he is speaking as a teacher of Jewish wisdom, appealing not just to the head but to the heart and imagination, the body and the senses, the whole person of the listener. This too is Merton’s gift, but it is not necessarily an easy or pleasant gift to receive, neither from Jesus or

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Merton. To be “born again” is to break free of the stultifying womb of conventional wisdom; it is to risk seeing beyond the surface of things, “the way things are,” it is to embrace the vulnerability of a covenantal faith that holds no guarantees. In effect the wisdom teacher invites us to sit in the belly of a paradox: listen to the silences, hear the forgotten voices, let things seen and unseen speak to you.

God is here, and everywhere present; God comes to us in the wind on the air, the rustle of the trees, in the voice of the stranger; nothing is impossible with God. But can we believe it? [slide]

The imagination that bears hope, hope in the key of Wisdom, sees promise rising in life itself and in life’s protest, the sacred longing for life and communion that pulses in the very substance of things, beckoning freedom forward, daring us to imagine and make room for another possible future.

By contrast, the imagination that produces despair and world-weary cynicism is like a tightening barbed-wire circle, a series of closing doors that promise nothing new but only more of the same, the same horizontal flight across the dull surface of history. Despair cannot see beyond or imagine a way out. It infuses life with a dread weariness. And still she dances before us, Sophia, the feminine child, is playing in the world, obvious and unseen, playing at all times before the Creator. Wisdom stands at the crossroads and cries out to all, beckoning us to join our lives and our gifts in the rebuilding of the world. From the third section of the poem: [slide]

Now the Wisdom of God, Sophia, comes forth, reaching from “end to end mightily.” She

wills to be also the unseen pivot of all nature, the center and significance of all the light that

is in all and for all. That which is poorest and humblest, that which is most hidden in all

things is nevertheless most obvious in them, and quite manifest, for it is their own self that

stands before us, naked and without care. . . . But she remains unseen, glimpsed only by a

few. Sometimes there are none who know her at all.i

The final scene of Hagia Sophia is a scene of haunting “beauty, and piercing loneliness,”ii suggesting a God who shares freely without reserve the poverty of the human condition. [click]

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The shadows fall. The stars appear. The birds begin to sleep. Night embraces the silent half

of the earth.

A vagrant, a destitute wanderer with dusty feet, finds his way down a new road. A homeless

God, lost in the night, without papers, without identification, without even a number, a frail

expendable exile lies down in desolation under the sweet stars of the world and entrusts

Himself to sleep.iii

The Canadian poet Susan McCaslin sees in these lines “a strangely modern figure of the exile or God as exile in us”iv—suggesting that human destiny in a world exiled from Sophia is not altogether different from that of Jesus, the Son of Man who “has nowhere to lay his head.” In a similar vein,

Merton scholar Patrick O’Connell cites Philippians 2:6-11, Paul’s striking hymn of kenosis, to draw a similar reading: “In identifying fully with the human condition, Christ is the perfect epiphany of

Sophia, embodying and extending to all the redemptive mercy of God.”v [slide]

In sum, for me, the significance of Wisdom-Sophia in Merton’s life is not primarily a psychological question, though it is surely that; nor is it a strictly literary or poetic question, though it is certainly that. At its core it is the question of God, which many others of his time were asking, and which people today are asking with great urgency. Where is God? Who is God? Or simply: Is God?

And if God is, then why is the world in such a damn mess? More precisely, how do we distinguish the true God, the One who is real and trustworthy, from the idols of sinfulness, violence, and death of our time? As Merton asked at Fourth and Walnut, how do you tell people living and surviving in such a world that they are, in truth, walking around shining like the sun? Merton would find his answer in the remembrance of Sophia, the brightness of God who shines in all things, like the air receiving the sunlight. She is the Child who is prisoner in all the people, and who says nothing.

[slide] There is a beautiful teaching in the Jewish tradition called tikkun olam, from the

Hebrew, “to repair the world,” “the rescuing to make good of what is left of this smashed world.”

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The wellspring of tikkun olam is love: love received and love freely given, a fierce love that seeks justice and the flourishing of life for all God’s children. If Merton were with us today, I dare say he would agree with Jewish feminist theologian Rita Gross, who writes, “When the masculine and the feminine aspect of God have been reunited and the female half of humanity has been returned from exile, we will begin to have our tikkun. The world will be repaired.” So much depends on our image of God, and so much depends on our idea of humanity. Drawing from the deepest wellsprings of the biblical and mystical traditions from East to West, “Hagia Sophia” dares us to imagine a faith fully reconciled with the body, with the feminine, with Earth.

V. The Face of Sophia in Our Times

I want to conclude, then, if I may, with a kind of litany, invoking the names of people and places in our world today, mostly hidden and marginal places, where Sophia, or what Merton calls the Night Face of Sophia, the protest of Life itself, of Earth, and a Mother-Love’s rebellion against cruelty and arbitrary violence, seeks to break through into a world increasingly engineered for war, for violence against women and children, and planetary destruction. [slide]

She rises from the threatened rainforests of the Amazon river basin, not least in their mournful lament for Sr. Dorothy Stang, murdered for her defense of the trees and indigenous peoples. [click] She speaks to us silently in the “Mothers of the Disappeared,” who dance together in the Plaza de Mayo of Buenos Aires in remembrance of their missing sons and daughters, husbands and grandsons, sisters and granddaughters. [click] She is Mary and she is all women, as in

Michaelangelo’s “Pieta,” who hold the broken bodies of their sons, or who cry out inconsolably, this day, at the US-Mexico border, for children who have been torn from them. [click] She rises defiantly in the witness of Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teenager and Nobel Peace Prize laureate who was shot in the head by the Taliban for her advocacy of girls’ education. Honored by the

United Nations on her sixteenth birthday, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said of Malala, “She

13 was targeted just because of her determination to go to school. The extremists showed what they fear most—a girl with a book.” In biblical terms Malala gives us another glimpse of the anawim,

God’s beloved poor, the still, small voice of Sophia breaking through in our time. [slide]

She whispers in the resplendent sophianic icons of the Russian Orthodox tradition, she sings with sass in Sojourner Truth’s still-electrifying “Ain’t I a Woman,” and in the poetry of the late great

Maya Angelou, who speaks for all such women in her poem, “Still I Rise”: [click]

You may write me down in history / With your bitter, twisted lies, You may trod me in the very dirt / But still, like dust, I’ll rise. . . I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide, / Welling and swelling I bear in the tide. Leaving behind nights of terror and fear / I rise Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear / I rise Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave, / I am the dream and the hope of the slave. I rise / I rise / I rise.

She cries out in the silent aftershocks of destroyed natural landscapes, the Earth, our sister, our common home, as Pope Francis laments in Laudato Si’, who now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her . . . the earth herself, burdened and laid waste, is among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor; she “groans in travail.”

What binds these diverse narratives into one wondrous mosaic is the affirmation of divine presence precisely, urgently, and most intensely, in those persons and places written off by conventional wisdom as expendable, inhuman, God-forsaken. Indeed where conventional wisdom registers no disconnect between our complacent worship of “God” and the systematic violation of women, children, and the planet itself, divine Wisdom cries out from the crossroads in protest, identifying herself especially with the little, the hidden and forgotten ones, and with suffering earth, the Mother of all God’s children. What would it mean to live together with Wisdom? It would be to live fully awake in the center of these contradictions of our times while refusing to be defined by them, to accommodate ourselves to the way things are, like so many numbers fed into a computer.

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For when I am home with her, says the , I can take my ease, for nothing is bitter in her company.vi [click] This is what Merton, citing Julian of Norwich, calls the “eschatological secret” of

Christian hope, and the very “heart of theology: not solving the contradiction, but remaining in the midst of it, in peace, knowing that it is fully solved, but that the solution is secret, and will never be guessed until it is revealed. The wise heart lives in Christ.” [click] Or, as Merton writes in the poem,

She smiles, for though they have bound her, she cannot be a prisoner.

To be clear, as a father myself, and more pointedly, as the son of a loving father, the biblical image of God as Father evokes beautifully for me Christianity’s sublime teachings about the gift of love, both human and divine. For many men, women, and children, “Father” is and will forever be an empowering divine image, a sustaining metaphor of divine presence, constancy, and loving care

(picture the father in Rembrandt’s incomparable The Return of the Prodigal Son). Yet it is also clear to me that for many whose experience of “father” is traumatic, domineering, or cold, the image does not evoke or make room enough for love. For many, the line between paternal imagery and patriarchal power is much too thin. We must remember that God is also Mother, Sister, Spirit, and

Shekhinah, lest we deny our maternal and feminine experiences of grace, and foreclose the imaginative flexibility of the Bible itself, not to mention the great mystical tradition of the church.

With Christians from East to West for nearly two millennia, my own prayer life has been enormously enlarged and enriched by the remembrance of God as Sophia, as Holy Wisdom. I hope the same will be true for my children.

This gathering sophianic vision of the world in God bursts forth in the final meditation of

Merton’s most-beloved book, New Seeds of Contemplation, where we meet the Wisdom-Child of

Proverbs 8, “playing in the world, playing before Him at all times.” [slide] “We do not have to go very far to catch echoes of that game, and of that dancing. When we are alone on a starlit night; when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and

15 eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children; when we know love in our own hearts.” All of these, “If we could let go of our own obsession with what we think is the meaning of it all,” no longer would appear trivial but would strike us as invitations to “forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the winds,” and join in “the general dance” of

Sophia, at play in the garden of the Lord.

There is much more to say, for example, about how we might realize her presence more palpably in the practices that shape our world and our church. We could talk about both the limits and the possibilities of male and female gendered language and the images and names we use for

God in the liturgy, which remains such a contentious issue in Roman Catholicism, as in many other churches. But what I hope is at least clear by now is that what is at stake in Merton’s remembrance of Sophia, and by extension, our own, is much deeper and more revolutionary potentially for our world and for our church than the exchange of masculine and feminine pronouns; or still less, the replacement of male images of God with female ones. But I will leave that discussion, and perhaps other more beautiful and difficult questions, for our conversation together. Thank you.

Q/A: Return to the PP DRAWINGS

i Merton, Emblems of a Season of Fury, 65–67. ii Michael Mott, The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984), 363. iii Merton, Emblems of a Season of Fury, 61, 69. iv McCaslin, “Merton and ‘Hagia Sophia,’” 250. v Patrick F. O’Connell, “Hagia Sophia,” in William H. Shannon, Christine M. Bochen, and Patrick F. O’Connell, The ThomasMerton Encyclopedia (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2002), 193. vi Wis. 8:16. See Merton’s remarkable fiftieth birthday journal, January 31, 1965. Thomas Merton, Dancing in the Water of Life: Seeking Peace in the Hermitage Vol. 5, ed. Robert E. Daggy (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997), 200-1.

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