Yesterday, August 29th was the Memorial of the Passion of St. John the Baptist, and you can read and pray more about it here at Catholic Culture.
In
my reading of the accolades to St. John the Baptist, I was also directed to a
poem Thomas Merton wrote on St. John, not on his beheading but on his leap in his mother's womb
when the Blessed Virgin arrived at her visitation to Elizabeth. I was
absolutely floored by the beauty of this poem, "The Quickening of John the
Baptist." I want to present it here
and provide a little analysis. First the
poem.
The
Quickening of John the Baptist
On the Contemplative
Vocation
By Thomas Merton
Why do you fly from the
drowned shores of Galilee,
From the sands and the
lavender water?
Why do you leave the
ordinary world, Virgin of Nazareth,
The yellow fishing boats,
the farms,
The winesmelling yards
and low cellars
Or the oilpress, and the
women by the well?
Why do you fly those
markets,
Those suburban gardens,
The trumpets of the
jealous lilies,
Leaving them all, lovely
among the lemon trees?
You have trusted no town
With the news behind your
eyes.
You have drowned
Gabriel’s word in thoughts like seas
And turned toward the
stone mountain
To the treeless places.
Virgin of God, why are
your clothes like sails?
The day Our Lady, full of
Christ,
Entered the dooryard of
her relative
Did not her steps, light
steps, lay on the paving leaves
like gold?
Did not her eyes as grey
as doves
Alight like the peace of
a new world upon that house, upon
miraculous Elizabeth?
Her salutation
Sings in the stone valley
like a Charterhouse bell:
And the unborn saint John
Wakes in his mother’s
body,
Bounds with the echoes of
discovery.
Sing in your cell, small
anchorite!
How did you see her in
the eyeless dark?
What secret syllable
Woke your young faith to
the mad truth
That an unborn baby could
be washed in the Spirit of God?
Oh burning joy!
What seas of life were
planted by that voice!
With what new sense
Did your wise heart
receive her Sacrament,
And know her cloistered
Christ?
You need no eloquence,
wild bairn,
Exulting in your
hermitage.
Your ecstasy is your
apostolate,
For whom to kick is contemplata tradere.
Your joy is the vocation
of Mother Church’s hidden children -
Those who by vow lie buried
in the cloister or the hermitage;
The speechless Trappist,
or the grey, granite Carthusian,
The quiet Carmelite, the
barefoot Clare, Planted in the night of
contemplation, Sealed in
the dark and waiting to be born.
Night is our diocese and
silence is our ministry
Poverty our charity and
helplessness our tongue-tied sermon.
Beyond the scope of sight
or sound we dwell upon the air
Seeking the world’s gain
in an unthinkable experience.
We are exiles in the far
end of solitude, living as listeners
With hearts attending to
the skies we cannot understand:
Waiting upon the first
far drums of Christ the Conqueror,
Planted like sentinels
upon the world’s frontier.
But in the days, rare
days, when our Theotokos
Flying the prosperous
world
Appears upon our mountain
with her clothes like sails,
Then, like the wise, wild
baby,
The unborn John who could
not see a thing
We wake and know the
Virgin Presence
Receive her Christ into
our night
With stabs of an
intelligence as white as lightning.
Cooled in the flame of
God’s dark fire
Washed in His gladness
like a vesture of new flame
We burn like eagles in
His invincible awareness
And bound and bounce with
happiness,
Leap in the womb, our
cloud, our faith, our element,
Our contemplation, our
anticipated heaven
Till Mother Church sings
like an Evangelist.
The poem is in free verse with ten stanzas, or perhaps more accurately, ten sections that are separated by a space since they are so irregular I’m not sure “stanza” would apply. The poem starts with the Virgin Mary off on her visitation to her cousin Elizabeth, who pregnant with St. John the Baptist. If you number the sections of the poem from one through ten, I can summarize the narrative flow and gist of each. Here is my section by section gist.
1 – Addressing the Blessed Virgin, the poet asks why are you traveling across the country?
2 – Still addressing the Virgin, the poet highlights points on the journey and asks her why her clothes are like sails?
3 – The poet narrates her arrival.
4 – The poet narrates Mary’s greeting and the awakening of St. John in the womb at the sound of her voice.
5 – The poet addresses John and asks how in his enclosed space could he see and hear the Blessed Mother?
6 – The poet still addressing John asks what her voice did to him, and to know she was carrying Christ?
7 – Still addressing John, the poet acknowledges the child’s in ability to speak except through the kick in the womb.
8 – Perhaps the key section of the poem where the poet contemplates John’s silence and enclosure and identifies it with the plight of humanity.
9 – The poet continuing his contemplation connects John’s pre-birth existence with the existential nature of humanity.
10 – The poet concludes his contemplation with a final identification of John, the poet, and the reader before Christ.
“The Quickening” in the title refers to the moment St. John in the womb is enlivened by the presence and voice of the Virgin carrying her own child, the Christ. So much of the poem is about contemplation. The subtitle of the poem is “On the Contemplative Vocation,” which identifies John as fetus, in a contemplative vocation. Perhaps all fetuses have the vocation—at least for those “cloistered” nine months—of a contemplative. Indeed, in section seven, Merton identifies contemplative and cloistered religious orders: Trappists, Carthusians, Carmelites, and Poor Clares. We know that Merton himself was a Trappist monk bound to the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky. And while it is not true that Trappists are never allowed to speak, they are required to limit their speech to only what is necessary. So you can see how Merton as poet connects with John in the womb, the “small anchorite.” An anchorite (or anchoress for feminine) is someone who is locked in a cell for the rest of their lives to pray and contemplate.
There is also the contemplation identified with the Blessed Mother of God. “But Mary kept all these things and pondered them in her heart” (Lk 2:19). The Blessed Mother was witness to most of Christ’s life and His death, and so contemplated much. Contemplation for Catholics starts with Mary. In the poem she is identified with the sea—which connects with her title as Stella Maris, Our Lady of the Sea. The vast sea has often through the ages been seen as an instrument that inspires contemplation. To be on the sea and on a boat is to be isolated from society, and of course being submerged or drowned is a metaphor for the act of contemplation or being lost in thought. (See the poem, “The Love Song of J. AlfredPrufrock” by T. S. Eliot and how he associates drowning with contemplation.) When in section two Merton addresses Mary as having “drowned Gabriel’s word in thoughts like seas,” he is referring the Archangel’s words to Mary at the Annunciation. She hasn’t discarded Gabriel’s words, but submerged them in her consciousness for later meditation. Why are her clothes like sails? Because she is navigating an ocean of introspective thought.
###
The first seven sections of the poem establishes the context for the last three sections as they culminate to a thesis. Let’s look at the last three more closely.
“Night is our diocese and silence is our ministry/Poverty our charity and helplessness our tongue-tied sermon.”
Who is “our” referring to? The poet as he identifies with St. John in the womb, and I would venture all of us reading who can similarly identify. The darkness constitutes their church, and silence the ministry, that is the administering of a religious action. “Poverty” and “helplessness” convey a beatitude in the limitations of transmitting the message, almost an echo of “Blessed are the poor in spirit” (Mt5:3).
“Beyond the scope of sight or sound we dwell upon the air/Seeking the world’s gain in an unthinkable experience.”
Again, the “we” unifies the poet, St. John, and the reader, caught in a moment of anticipation, waiting for what I would guess is the incarnation of the second Person of the Trinity, building to the last four lines which need to be quoted together:
We are exiles in the far
end of solitude, living as listeners
With hearts attending to
the skies we cannot understand:
Waiting upon the first
far drums of Christ the Conqueror,
Planted like sentinels upon the world’s frontier.
Absolutely
breath-taking lines. The reference to
exiles is twofold at least. Not only are
they exiles because they are contemplatives in a world that is hardly
contemplative—or perhaps even anti contemplative—they are exiles from their
true home of heaven where the first parents were cast out to be exiles. They (and we) are the “poor banished children
of Eve,” but now “sentinels” on the “frontier” waiting for Christ to come and conquer
death. That moment of anticipation has
now come, as we see in the ninth section.
But in the days, rare
days, when our Theotokos
Flying the prosperous
world
Appears upon our mountain
with her clothes like sails,
Then, like the wise, wild
baby,
The unborn John who could
not see a thing
We wake and know the
Virgin Presence
Receive her Christ into
our night
With stabs of an intelligence as white as lightning.
Perhaps that is the poem’s climax; “We wake and know the Virgin Presence/Receive her Christ into our night.” The statement is not just referring to the contemporaneous moment for St. John in the womb, but for all of us when every moment we realize and contemplate the incarnation, when in prayer the Blessed Mother visits us to bring Christ to us.
Finally in the tenth section we have a denouement.
Cooled in the flame of
God’s dark fire
Washed in His gladness
like a vesture of new flame
We burn like eagles…
Purified
in fire and water presumably from contemplation, we now become like eagles, a
symbol of transformed strength.
…in His invincible
awareness
And bound and bounce with
happiness,
Leap in the womb, our
cloud, our faith, our element,
Our contemplation, our
anticipated heaven
Till Mother Church sings like an Evangelist.
We too in Christ’s awareness leap with joy at our now knowledge of our anticipated return to “home.”
What a brilliant poem. I have to admit I laughed out loud to this line in section seven: “Your ecstasy is your apostolate,/For whom to kick is contemplata tradere.” As a Lay Dominican, I particularly understand the reference. One of the Dominican Order’s mottos is Contemplata aliis trader, which translates into English as "to hand down to others the fruits of contemplation." A Dominican is not supposed to just contemplate, but the fruits of that contemplation are supposed to be passed on to others. So Merton refers to St. John’s kick in the womb as a passing on the fruit of the fetus’s contemplation. I thought that was funny.
Finally
John Michael Talbot turned that extraordinary eighth section into a song, “We
Are the Exiles.”
John
Michael must have found that passage breathtaking as well. It's a beautiful song but he did take some liberties with the lyrics to
fit it better into song form. I did find
this blog post by an unfamiliar blog called Peaceable Wisdom where he posted the lyrics as sung as sung by JMT. If you’re interested in the lyrics, you can
check it out.
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