“A Psalm” by Thomas Merton

A friend asked me for my definition of hope, and I found myself talking about covenant. Hope is the love of neighbor and the world that keeps you going, despite all of the reasons for despair. During an interfaith panel that I sat on a student asked how the panelists different traditions maintained hope in the midst of political conflict, war, and climate change. I found myself talking about the eschaton. I said that Christians make a huge claim when we say that we know the end of the story. We believe that Christ will come again in great glory to judge the living and the dead. We believe that the story of humanity on this earth has a meaning that will be revealed at Christ’s coming. I also said that while I yearn to learn that meaning, I am afraid of the end of the world, and am in no hurry to get to the eschaton. I live in the tension of loving the world and grounding my hope in that love, while at the same time being reconciled to the notion that many things are beyond my control, and that the love of God will be made most plain at the end of all that we know.

Merton’s poem speaks directly to this tension. At the beginning of the poem, a psalm leads him into a revery of love:

New eyes awaken.
I send Love’s name into the world with wings
And songs grow up around me like a jungle.
Choirs of all creatures sing the tunes
Your Spirit played in Eden.

But it is a brief revery. Soon, in his imagination, the universe dies of excellence. All of that beauty, all of the singing of zebras and antelopes and birds of paradise lead these creatures, and Merton, into communion with God. As if, for him, it is the very love of the world that leads us beyond it.

The stanzas that follow describe the eschaton:

Sun, moon and stars
Fall from their heavenly towers.
Joys walk no longer down the blue world’s shore.

Though fires loiter, lights still fly on the air of the gulf,
All fear another wind, another thunder:
Then one more voice
Snuffs all their flares in one gust.

This is not a reassuring vision of the parousia. Not a painting of a renaissance Christ descending on a cloud. The destruction is real, the abandonment of joy is real, the fear is real, and the end is real. But the poet makes a claim for continued existence:

And I go forth with no more wine and no more stars
And no more buds and no more Eden
And no more animals and no more sea:

While God sings by himself in acres of night
And walls fall down, that guarded Paradise.

That “I” is important. Wine-less, starless, exiled from growing things and gardens, from animals and oceans, the person persists. If it is an “I”, a person, who falls into a trance at the beginning of the poem, it is that same person who enters paradise through fallen walls. The person who loves is the person who will be judged worthy of eternity.

Is that the way out of the tension that I feel? To go further into love of neighbor, of family, of the world as a whole, and trust that such love will be what remains of me at the ending? Is hope the covenant that draws us into heaven? Merton attests that it is. I try to love that vision enough that I can believe it, and set my fear aside.

Here is the poem in its entirety:

A Psalm

by Thomas Merton

When psalms surprise me with their music
And antiphons turn to rum
The Spirit sings: the bottom drops out of my soul.

And from the center of my cellar, Love, louder than thunder
Opens a heaven of naked air.

New eyes awaken.
I send Love's name into the world with wings
And songs grow up around me like a jungle.
Choirs of all creatures sing the tunes
Your Spirit played in Eden.
Zebras and antelopes and birds of paradise
Shine on the face of the abyss
And I am drunk with the great wilderness
Of the sixth day in Genesis.

But sound is never half so fair
As when that music turns to air
And the universe dies of excellence.

Sun, moon and stars
Fall from their heavenly towers.
Joys walk no longer down the blue world's shore.

Though fires loiter, lights still fly on the air of the gulf,
All fear another wind, another thunder:
Then one more voice
Snuffs all their flares in one gust.

And I go forth with no more wine and no more stars
And no more buds and no more Eden
And no more animals and no more sea:

While God sings by himself in acres of night
And walls fall down, that guarded Paradise.