Some Notes for Further Reflection

1. Wallace Stevens, a major American poet of the 20^th century, wrote a poem entitled “Connoisseur of Chaos.”  The poem begins like this:

“A. A violent order is a disorder; and
B. A great disorder is an order. These
Two things are one. “

Usually I find Stevens’ sensitivities and vision to be deeply flawed and misleading, but now and then there is an insight or a flow of words that jars one into an awareness inviting new explorations.  This dialectic between order and disorder is one of them.  

Consider this line from another of his poems, “The Idea of Order at Key West”:

“Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon, The maker’s rage to order words of the sea…” 

As one critic points out: “This line highlights what Stevens calls the human ‘rage for order’—our deeply ingrained, creative urge to use art, language, and imagination to make sense of a chaotic and indifferent universe.”  

And:  “In ‘The Idea of Order at Key West,’ Wallace Stevens explores how the human imagination creates meaning and structure in a chaotic world, using a singing woman to represent the artistry that interprets raw nature. The poem emphasizes that the world is given shape through human perception, as the speaker observes that the sea’s indifferent noise is transformed into art, highlighting our inherent drive to organize existence.”   (My ancient Chinese poet friends and I would beg to disagree with most of this wording!)

 Yes, the urge to order, to organize, the reality that we encounter, to organize existence,  is truly deep in us…and not just in artistic sense.  Walk into a messy room and immediately you feel the need to “straighten things up.”  But the “disorder” of a “messy room” may sometimes be preferable to the “order” which we create.  The order of a fascist or communist police state is in fact a profound disorder.  But the disorder of an anarchic commune which supposedly frowns on any organizing principle has nevertheless a concealed order within it that is toxic to human flourishing.  Our notions of what constitutes order and what is disorder certainly depends on something even much deeper in us.

Consider this:  The first Europeans who came to this continent looked upon the wilderness as a “great disorder” that badly needed ordering.  It was a “chaotic and indifferent” world (actually for many it was also the realm of Satan).  So: trees cut down, fences built, land plowed, this part is “mine,” that is “yours,” etc.   Most Native Americans saw all that activity as a profound disorder because they had their own different organizing principles.

 

Consider this:  A wall is really an instrument of an organizing principle, dividing “mine” from “yours,” inside from outside, this country from that country, etc.  Robert Frost wrote a poem, “Mending Wall,” in which he is puzzled and laments why his neighbor wants this wall between their two farms.  The poem begins: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” and concludes with this: “He says again, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’” 

Consider:  Two different gardens. 

This: 

And then this:

They illustrate two very different organizing principles and two very different senses of “order.”   They come from what could be called two different wisdom traditions.  Both require extensive human engagement; both reveal the deep human urge to organize; but each emerges from a distinctly different vision of the man-nature relationship.

Now consider someone like John Muir, who entered the wilderness of Yosemite and saw not “raw chaos” (Stevens) or a resource to take possession, but rather he said it was his “cathedral.”  When we enter a cathedral we enter a space profoundly organized for worship, for prayer, for a realization of the Presence of the Holy Mystery.  Obviously Muir discerned and experienced a profound order in the encounter with wilderness.

Finally:  in the Western Tradition, the Absolute Divine Reality is the Great Organizer, using Divine Wisdom which produces out of chaos various dimensions of order we call “creation” and whose agent in this work is a mysterious figure named Sophia.  She is named in the Wisdom literature in the Old Testament, and some Russian theologians and writers (Solovyev and Bulgakov and even Pasternak) have built a whole theological/spiritual vision around her:  the sophianic vision.

2.  Cosmos and Paradise

Cosmos: The word comes from the Ancient Greek word kósmos, which translates to “order,” “good arrangement,” or “beauty”. The Greek philosopher Pythagoras was the first to apply this word to the universe to describe its inherent harmony.  Today the term cosmos primarily refers to the entire physical universe viewed as a complex, orderly, and harmonious system.  In modern science and astronomy, we define cosmos as the universe as a whole. While “universe” simply refers to all matter and space, using “cosmos” implies that the universe follows strict structural organization and physical laws rather than existing as chaotic chaos.  It is interesting that this very early view of the cosmos we live in saw it as beautiful, as something that fills us with wonder.

In Genesis we find the creation story that in many ways undergirds Western Civilization.  We see the making of the “cosmos” as an “ordering” of a primordial chaos, the ultimate “messy room”!….it is all organized and laid out in a careful, deliberate way.  And the Divine Artificer calls it all “good.”  This “divine order” comes to be known as “Paradise.”  And it is also called a “garden,” and of course we all know the rest of the story.

In the Wisdom books of the Old Testament we return to this creation story but in a more subtle and more elaborate way.   Creation is totally the work of God’s Wisdom, and this has a mysterious feminine aspect.  In the Hebraic books (like Proverbs and Ecclesiates) she is named Hokmah; in the Greek work, the Book of Wisdom, she is Sophia.  And Divine Wisdom is not God somewhere “out there” beyond all human existence.  No, she infuses all creation; she is the principle of organization for what is real.  

Consider:  Sophia(Hokmah) is God’s Master Artisan.  In Proverbs 8, she states she was brought forth before the earth was made.  She is present alongside God during creation, acting as a “master worker” or artisan through whom the world is structured. This signifies that wisdom is built into the very fabric of reality. To live with Sophia (Hokmah) is to align your life with the natural, moral, and spiritual architecture of the universe designed by God.  

She rejoices in the inhabited world and delights specifically in the human race. 

Divine Wisdom is not some secret, esoteric reality for an elite few; it does not call for special powers or capabilities.  On the contrary, Sophia(Hokmah) is highly accessible and vocal.  In Proverbs 1 and 8, she stands at the city gates, crossroads, and marketplace, shouting to passersby to abandon their foolishness.  In Proverbs 9, she builds a seven-pillared house and prepares a banquet of wine and meat, inviting the simple to eat, drink, and gain insight.  

In Wisdom 10, Sophia is credited with steering salvation history, directly rescuing Adam, Noah, Abraham, and Lot, and guiding Moses and Israel through the Red Sea. 

The Book of Wisdom describes her as a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty, and a reflection of eternal light. 

Sophia is the source of good governance and order.  She provides the blueprint for a just society. Through her, monarchs reign and lawgivers decree what is just (Proverbs 8:15-16). King Solomon famously loves her and begs God for her company to help him rule justly.

3. The Order of Jesus vs. the Order of the Pharisees

In the Synoptic Gospels the Pharisees represent and manifest a profound disorder.  But this disorder looks and feels like a solid order with cultural, economic, political, and religious underpinnings both then and now.  In the Gospel of John this disorder is basically called “the world.”….what people generally call “the real world.”  Social relations and our relationship with God is totally distorted.  Questions do arise: who does this ordering? (Certainly not Sophia!)  And how does this happen?

The language of Jesus, his teaching, comes as a jolt, almost incomprehensible then and now.  Think of the Beatitudes, the Sermon on the Mount, the Parables….the last shall be first….gain is loss, loss is gain…pray for those who persecute you…. forgive endlessly, etc.  In all this we are called, invited, to an order we no longer can even recognize.  We are once more invited to Wisdom’s banquet.

In the Letters of Paul, specifically 1 Corinthians, we are told once more about God’s wisdom as contrasted with what Paul calls human wisdom—two very different kinds of order.  But not only that….the Divine Wisdom will appear as utterly foolish, an absolute absurdity, in contrast to the well-thought-out, thoroughly calculated, pragmatic human wisdom.  Paul of course is focusing on the Cross of Christ where what we see is the execution of a criminal.

Paul explicitly states that the “word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing” (1 Corinthians 1:18). To the intellectual Greeks, a crucified Savior was illogical; to the status-seeking Jews, it was a stumbling block. Yet, Paul argues it represents the absolutely paradoxical fullness of God’s Presence and Power. True divine wisdom is a hidden mystery that cannot be discovered via human senses or intellectual study.

So:  every time we make the Sign of the Cross, we invoke Divine Wisdom, we proclaim Divine Wisdom, we entrust ourselves to Divine Wisdom.

And then this:  among the last words of Jesus on the Cross to a human being trapped in the order of the Pharisees:  “Today you will be with Me in Paradise.”

4. Merton and the Sophianic Vision

Not surprisingly, Thomas Merton has a profound grasp of the sophianic vision.  And we can witness this especially in two of his writings.  The first is a short meditation in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander.  Merton writes a beautiful reflection, entitled “The Night Spirit and the Dawn Air,” in one section of this collection (p. 131-132).   Merton is meditating in his hermitage during the quiet transition from night to morning. He describes the “point vierge” (the virgin point) of the dawn, where nature awakens in a state of pure innocence before human activity and technology take over the day.  While modern humans wake up to clocks, thermostats, and the static of electric shavers, they completely miss the divine proclamation happening right outside their windows. 

Important background matter:  In the Eastern Orthodox liturgy, the deacon stands before the congregation right before the Gospel is read and loudly proclaims “Wisdom! Let us attend!” (or Sophia!) to command the absolute focus and reverence of the people. Merton uses the rooster’s first crowing and the early morning birds as this “dawn deacon,” shouting out a liturgical warning that the brilliant, sacred light of a new day—and God’s presence—is about to unfold:

“’Lights on. Clocks ticking. Thermostats working. Stoves cooking. Electric shavers filling radios with static. ‘Wisdom,’ cries the dawn deacon, but we do not attend.’”

The second instance is a long poem he wrote in 1962 entitled “Hagia Sophia,” Holy Wisdom.  At that time he was deeply into the Russians, like Bulgakov and Solovyev, who helped him articulate this beautiful vision of a sophianic order which transcends all our art, all our knowledge, all our calculating…..

You can find the full poem here (though poorly laid out):

https://www.centerforinterfaithrelations.org/2022/05/06/reflect-hagia-sophia-by-thomas-merton/

The poem is structured (“ordered”) along a monastic day beginning with the first prayer of the dawn, Lauds.  So it begins:

“Dawn. The Hour of Lauds.
There is in all visible things an invisible fecundity, a dimmed light, a meek namelessness, a hidden whole-ness.
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 Creator’s Thought and Art within me, speaking as Hagia Sophia, speaking as my sister, Wisdom.

I am awakened,
I am born again at the voice of this, my Sister, sent to me from the depths of the divine fecundity.”

And it concludes at the end of the day with Compline:

 “Sunset.  The Hour of Compline.  Salve Regina. 

Now the Blessed Virgin Mary is the one created being who enacts and shows forth in her life all that is hidden in Sophia.  Because of this she can be said to be a personal manifestation of Sophia, Who in God is Ousia rather than Person. 

Natura in Mary becomes pure Mother.  In her, Natura is as she was from the origin from her divine birth.  In Mary Natura is all wise and is manifested as an all-prudent, all-loving, all-pure person: not a Creator, and not a Redeemer, but perfect Creature, perfectly Redeemed, the fruit of all God’s great power, the perfect expression of wisdom in mercy. 

It is she, it is Mary, Sophia, who in sadness and joy, with the full awareness of what she is doing, sets upon the Second Person, the Logos, a crown which is His Human Nature.  Thus her consent opens the door of created nature, of time, of history, to the Word of God. 

God enters into His creation.  Through her wise answer, through her obedient understanding, through the sweet yielding consent of Sophia, God enters without publicity into the city of rapacious men. 

She crowns Him not with what is glorious, but with what is greater than glory: the one thing greater than glory is weakness, nothingness, poverty. 

She sends the infinitely Rich and Powerful One forth as poor and helpless, in His mission of inexpressible mercy, to die for us on the Cross. 

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.”

There is a beautiful short video on the monastery of Daitoku-ji in Kyoto.  It is one of the very few flourishing Rinzai Zen centers in Japan.  Here is the link to the video:

https://dharma-documentaries.net/daitoku-ji-temple

If you have but just one contemplative bone in your body, you will find this video enchanting and maybe inspiring.  However, there is a problem:  what you find at Daitoku-ji and what you see in this video is but a remnant of something that once was dominant and pervasive in Japan.  If I were doing this video, I would have interspersed scenes from downtown Tokyo….as a contrast to where we really are as modern humans.  The situation is akin to what has transpired in Catholic contemplative life, monastic or otherwise, with some obvious differences.

I am not going to go into the numbers game: how many monks and nuns there were at some point in the past, how many there are now….  I am not going to waste my time on various studies from think tanks and academics citing the demise of formal religiosity say in the U.S. and its supposed growth in the 3^rd world….and other studies claiming to find unexpected growth of “spirituality.”  All of this kind of stuff, if any of it has any validity, misses the essential problem; and in place of that we get various diagnoses and various programs and various versions of a story we tell ourselves.  There is a so-called “liberal” version, and there is a so-called “conservative” version.  All useless, unless we see these studies, these reports, these headcounts  themselves as a symptom of the problem.

And I don’t mean to reduce or restrict that which we call “contemplative life” to monastic life or any kind of formal religious life.  The reality of which I speak can come in any “color or shape” and be lived in any circumstances.  Two very interesting examples coming from two very different traditions are Milarepa, a Tibetan Buddhist, and Benedict Joseph Labre, a Catholic.  The former never became formally a monk but is now the paramount exemplar of realization in Tibetan Buddhism (and actually his teacher, Marpa, was also strictly a layman and married).  The latter tried to enter the Trappists and the Carthusians and was rejected by both and became a vagabond on the streets of Rome going from church to church and continually praying.  So what is at issue is a certain state of mind and heart which can be called “contemplative,” can be called a possibility for a transformation of awareness, can be called a living within an Absolute Holy Mystery, and so on….  It can be put in many different ways.  In St. Benedict’s Rule for monks the newcomer is faced with a question:  what do you seek?  In the Rule it says: “The concern must be whether the novice truly seeks God…..”  This will involve a profound interior change. (Echoing the Gospel of John 1:38—“Jesus turned and saw them following, and said to them, ‘What do you seek?’ And they said to him, ‘Rabbi, where are you staying?’  He said to them, ‘Come and see.’”)  As Merton argued, the essence of monastic life is not “embedded in buildings… or even a rule” but in “total inner transformation.”

It is with this kind of “seeking” that we begin to get a sense of what is really at stake and why we are in deep trouble.  “The Problem” is not that we are living in “bad times.”  This has been the case since we were expelled from the Garden:  wars, chaos, human cruelty, delusion, etc.  The age of the Desert Fathers, the age of Lady Julian of Norwich, the age of the ancient Chinese Taoist and Chan hermits were all “bad times.”  The difference is that modernity practically obliterates the social and cultural and intellectual conditions for the possibility of such a “seeking,” such a transformation.  Modernity has no room, no time, no reason to support a cultural environment in which such a seeking is “normal.”   Mostly this negation is accomplished in a “benign” way, and there is a conservative version and a liberal version of this subtle marginalization of a profound human need.  In both cases you usually end up with a narcissistic parody of the real journey or nothing at all.  Of course most of modern American culture simply ignores any such “seeking.”

“The Problem” resists naming. When we do try to name it, we miss its real depth, its unimaginable scope, its bewildering faces with their innumerable masks.  Best just to use a simple label like “modernity” and maybe reflect just a bit on its most egregious and most toxic manifestation: the evisceration of the contemplative heart “seeking” in the depths of human life. 

[eviscerate:  to take away the vital or essential parts of something, making it severely weak or meaningless]

Consider the following quotes:

“The direct experience of being is a ‘non-experience.’ It is a ‘no-knowledge.’ It is a ‘void.’ It is not an object. It is a ‘poverty.'”
— The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton

“The void which I then entered was so total that I could not even say I was entering it… It was the end of all ‘I,’ the end of all ‘God.’ Only the ‘IS’ remained.”
— Abhishiktananda’s Diary (Ascent to the Depth of the Heart) 

“The Christ we seek is within us, in our inmost self, is our inmost self, and yet infinitely transcends ourselves. . .. Christ Himself is in us as unknown and unseen. We follow Him, we find Him … and then He must vanish and we must go along without Him at our side. Why? Because He is even closer than that. He is ourself.”

From a Merton letter to D. T. Suzuki

From T.S. Eliot’s masterpiece “Four Quartets”

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,
The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,
The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,
Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,
Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,
And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha
And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,
And cold the sense and lost the motive of action.
And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,
Nobody’s funeral, for there is no one to bury.
I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,
And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away-
Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;
Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing-
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.

                                             You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.

Human beings totally committed to the self-understanding of modernity, to its structures and maps of human existence, will find this kind of language incomprehensible and irrelevant.  It may be allowed a certain kind of marginal existence (even in a religious community) but it is definitely not the “real world” as they say.  We as a people, as a culture, are aggressively noncontemplative.  Mostly we are lost in the routines of a purely active existence centered on money-making, self-affirmation, power, sex, etc.  That there is more to human life than just “getting somewhere” is a quaint notion allowed only on the margins of society.  And of course people who still seek to realize some sort of religious/spiritual path through the ruins of modern civilization will nevertheless also be seriously affected by this toxic vision of human existence.  No one’s “religious life” is left unscathed.  What is left is to recognize one’s “wounds” amid the psychological and spiritual devastation. 

The serpent lurking in this modern paradise has tainted all the fruits of modernity with various poisons….like meaninglessness, angst, loneliness….a fragile emptiness that needs to be filled as quickly as possible with distractions, entertainment, consumerism….   Thoreau, almost two centuries ago, already diagnosed some of the symptoms of “The Problem.”  He already observed the repercussions:  “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country,…. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things”

Yet you might want to say to me, “What about all this new interest in spirituality and religion springing up here and there?  And more books on spirituality are being published than ever before!”  And you would be right about the numbers.  And yes some of this phenomenon has some real positive value.  But the deep contemplative life does not manifest itself and does not flourish where the self is promoted, “improved,” taught psychological maneuvers, etc., which is what most of this stuff is all about.  The real thing is something quite different. But in a culture that’s obsessed with self-improvement, self-observation, self-imaging, there’s a strong tendency to see spirituality as a means of creating a better, faster, stronger, more productive version of ourselves. Spiritual practices, concepts, or achievements are used to reinforce and build up the ego rather than transcend it.  Instead of letting go of self-importance, the ego treats spirituality like a capitalist shopping spree. It treats wisdom, rituals, and traditional practices as shiny new possessions to collect, control, and show off.  But the deeper life is not about another “version” of who we are; rather it is a matter of total transformation, a matter of “life and death.”  A contemporary Tibetan Lama described his authentic path like this: open heart surgery with no anesthesia!

When I was a small boy, I saw an old(1933) cheap sci-fi movie called “The Invisible Man,” in which a mad scientist somehow makes himself invisible.  In order to let people close to him know that he is “there” and exactly where he is in a room, he wraps himself in bandages.  Amazingly enough Merton uses this image in New Seeds of Contemplation:

“Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self… I wind my whole life around this false self like bandages. I give it my name, my academic degrees, my deeds, my office, my business, my triumphs… I treat it as if it were a solid reality, whereas it is nothing but a phantom made visible by my bandages.”

Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out of there.
—DEUTERONOMY 5:15