Saturday Good Reads: “A Silent Action”

In my post Thursday on “The Un-Magic of Words,” I cited a quote from A Silent Action: Engagements with Thomas Merton by Rowan Williams, the former archbishop of Canterbury. I had planned that post to be followed today by this one on the book itself.  What I didn’t realize was that yesterday would have been Merton’s 99^th birthday. It must have been something in the air.

Merton, writer, poet and Trappist monk, was born in France in 1915.  His father was English and his mother American; they had met at art school in Paris. Merton converted to Roman Catholicism while attending Columbia University, and entered the Abbey of Gethsemani, a monastery in Kentucky belonging to the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance, commonly known as Trappist.

Merton wrote books – a lot of books, some 61 in all, not to mention hundreds of articles and poems. One of his best-known works is The Seven Storey Mountain (1958). He became well known in for his opposition to the nuclear arms race and his support of the peace movement in the 1960s.

You can learn more about Merton and his writing at The Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine University, which also has information on the International Thomas Merton Society. Beth Cioffoletti’s blog Louis, Louie is largely a tribute to Thomas Merton, and she includes articles, poems, photographs, and links to other Merton sites.

A Silent Action by Williams is a relatively short book of five previously published essays and a poem by Merton. Although they never met, Williams has spent 40 years reading, studying and writing about Merton. The five essays are:

·       ‘A person that nobody knows’: A Paradoxical Tribute to Thomas Merton

·       ‘Bread in the Wilderness’: The Monastic Ideal in Thomas Merton and Paul Evdokimov (who wrote about the rise of monasticism in the Christian church)

·       ‘New Words for God’: Contemplation and Religious Writing (and the one I cited in my post on Thursday)

·       ‘The Only Real City’: Monasticism and the Social Vision

·       ‘Not Being Serious’: Thomas Merton and Karl Barth

The poem included in the volume is “Summer 1966,” and a fine poem it is.

Bright post-examination weather; in the redundant
classroom, the only point seems here, the belly
of Kentucky heat, the shaven sweating mariners
singing Gregorian shanties in a slow
light evening.  What do I want?  What sixteen-year-olds want,
no doubt; but also: to learn how to sail that sweaty ship,
words falling moistly from the timber, shining,
Latin, American, French.  And the horizon that you think
(so slow the light, so slow the gestures and the voices)
night never quite closes on.

                      The same month
you made a landfall, emptied on to the shore,
gasping and heaving against a new hard element,
against the solid sand.  And now I read you, years on,
leap and flail, mouth wide, reaching - you once-fluent fellow --
for the words to fix it, finding in the unfixable
a bizarre homeliness.  You spent my sixteenth birthday
making a clean(ish) breast of things to the steel smile
of Abbot James.  You staged show after show
for friends, then cancelled.  Not to make sense is
what most matters.

                      What was I seeing,
then, that summer?  light from a dead star?
Not quite.  But who could tell the night, closing its mouth,
the hard sand, were, after all, where the hot songs
would lead?  Practise the Gothic scales for long enough
and they will conjure, surprisingly, this place, flat concrete
     blocks,
convenience foods, an empty page to look into,
finding the anger; painting, then blotting faces you might
     wear,
hers, yours, that only in fiction would stand still.
Not to make sense, inside the keel of sweating ribs,
not to make sense but room.

Finally, I would be remiss not to mention that I was recommended the book by my friend J of India. He also put me on to Cioffoletti’s web site. J blogs at Neither Use Nor Ornament.

Photograph: The Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine University.

The Un-Magic of Words

Most of my career has been in corporate communications, for several companies and as an independent consultant. It’s been an uneasy relationship, not the least for what may seem an odd and small thing.

Words.

It’s always been something of a mystery for me, and for 40+ years, why so many of the people I’ve worked with appear to have a fixation (bordering on mania) on words – finding exactly the right word, or saying something exactly the right way, as if the words by themselves contained a power that would explain and persuade.

If you saw what effort, what tortured effort, goes into creating the simplest news release, you would understand. If you’ve participated in the most basic of organizational activities, you know what happens.

It took Trappist monk, writer, and poet Thomas Merton, by way of the former archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, to explain it.

I’ve been reading Williams’ A Silent Action: Engagements with Thomas Merton. It’s a collection of previously published essays by Williams, and the five essays (and a poem by Merton) fit together well. In the chapter entitled “New Words for God: Contemplation and Religious Writing,” he quotes Merton:

“It is the businessman, the propagandist, the politician, not the poet, who devoutly believes in the magic of words. For the poet, there is precisely no magic, there is only life in all its unpredictability and all its freedom. All magic is a ruthless venture in manipulation, a vicious circle, a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

There it was, in all its simplicity. The uneasiness of my corporate relationships has, in part, been about how my employers and I have understood words. And we have seen them differently. I see them as Merton describes the poet seeing them; my employers have seen words as magic. When the words don’t work, when they don’t achieve the desired result, the reason must be we haven’t found the right words.

Rarely has the thought been expressed that we may be trying to get words to do something they can’t do.

It’s as if so many people in the workplace embrace “in the beginning was the word,” and stop there. Words and language aren’t magic so much as they are a means to understanding something greater.

Words are typically assigned a burden they cannot carry – to substitute for action or deeds. One CEO I worked for, and wrote quite a few speeches for, understood this. “Policy is not what you say,” he often pointed out. “Policy is what you do.”

Words don’t contain some inherent magic or power. If they did, we’d all be walking around casting spells. We can’t assemble the magic words like some shaman or witch doctor and make things happen.

Words work best when they represent something we believe, something we believe in, something we have done, something greater greater than ourselves.

Photograph by Piotr Siedlecki via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.