Tag: bible

“A Psalm” by Thomas Merton

~ KPB Stevens ~ 1 Comment

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.

A Priest at the End of Christendom

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Published May 22, 2023 on Substack

“I’ve come to realize that I don’t need to reform the church. I just need to love people.” This is what I said when interviewing for my current position as the rector of a small, urban Episcopal church in the midwest. Eight years before I had begun working for our diocese as a “missioner,” a kind of free-floating staff position charged with figuring out what was coming next for the church. I worked with a brilliant priest named Jane Gerdsen, whom I credit with saving my ministry. When I met Jane I was in the midst of one of my periodic moments of wondering whether I was truly called to the priesthood. I loved preaching and celebrating, but I didn’t love, or even like, the institution of the church. I would go to clergy meetings and everyone would be competing with each other, bragging about the importance of their ministries so that the bishop would hear them and send them a trickle of resources so that they could keep going, at least for another year. This spirit of competition made it hard to make friends. And, at least twice, retired priests had approached me when at these gathering and told me all of the things that they didn’t actually believe. They had spent their lives preaching and teaching these things out of a sense of plodding duty, even as they began to question, then doubt, then cease believing altogether. What was I doing, I wondered, competing for scant resources in a church that couldn’t be honest about its fundamental hopes and dreams?

Jane saved me by bringing me into a creative, hopeful, relationship-based network that was sometimes called Fresh Expressions and sometimes called Praxis Communities. We read Diana Butler Bass and Brian McClellan, and agreed that we were living on the cusp of a third reformation (the first being an attempt at centralization that took place in the 11th and 12th centuries, the second being the one with Martin Luther that you’re probably familiar with). We talked seriously about improv and play. We founded urban farms and art galleries. We met for dinner church and Art of Hosting trainings. I really believed in this work. I still do. But a strange thing started happening. We thought that we were creating a church for young people, but older people kept showing up to our events and conferences. It seemed that the yearning we were feeling didn’t have an age requirement. So I began to wonder if the practices we had learned, the wisdom circles and shared leadership and community organizing skills, could make its way into the parish. There was a practical side to this. We were able to do this work because we had a visionary bishop. Any new bishop might not support it. And the parish is still the basic economic unit of the church. If the work was to continue, it had to find a home in the parish. Hopefully it would do so to the parish’s benefit.

But I wasn’t lying when I told the search committee at my parish that I wasn’t hoping to reform the church. For one thing, I was pushing fifty, and reformation is the work of young people. For another, I had, and have, a real sense that the church I want to live in can be a model for compassionate understanding, and compassion isn’t unidirectional. One has to be as compassionate towards the grief of a way of being that is ending as one is towards the uncertainty of a way of being that is emerging. Any reformation without love isn’t a real reformation, and if one has to pick, I will pick love every time.

Does that mean that the first two reformations weren’t real? Well, neither ended the church’s historic alliance with empire. We call that alliance “christendom,” and it was as strong in the kingdoms and states that abandoned Roman Catholicism as it was in Italy or Spain. Both previous reformations were periods of great violence and persecution. Both ended up constricting the boundaries of what could be thought or said. Both had their dogmas, their witch hunts, their antisemitism, their racism, their unexpected and bewildered scapegoats. Both tied themselves to wealth, status, and power. Perhaps this is because they were led and enacted by human beings, and any human endeavor will have its share of violence and oppression. But why start there? Why start with the violence of telling people that their opinions don’t matter, their practices are old and stupid, and that everything they love will die if they don’t change?

I was honest when I said that I would choose love over reformation. I try to make that choice every day. Yet the end of Christendom is arriving. Perhaps it’s already arrived. And many things are changing as a result. I am fortunate that I serve a church that is progressive and open to change, at least in some ways. But every group has its third rails and sacred cows, and new people arrive with fresh ideas and passions, which means that serving any church is a continual tightrope.

So I walk the tightrope, day by day, and I am choosing to reflect on that balancing act here, in this newsletter. I will tell stories of daily encounters, with respect and with permission. I will delve into liturgy, into religious anthropology, into the contemplative tradition, and into art and poetry. These are the things that interest me. Fortunately, many of my parishioners share these interests. Or at least they’re polite and complimentary when I preach about them. But mostly I will reflect on what it’s like to live through the end of Christendom, a fifth of the way into the twenty-first century, in a liberal city in a conservative state, in a progressive denomination within a religion that is widely thought of as reactionary. I hope to do so in community with you, honoring your thoughts and opinions, and learning from you as I go.