Sign of Jonah Retreat Sunday

The monthly Retreat Sunday found me again, dipping into “The Sign of Jonas”. (10th Aug 2008)

If I am supposed to be keeping a kind of Chronicle of the community, I can hardly find a better template than The sign of Jonas, ‘The Journal of Thomas Merton – day experiences and meditations’, as the blurb of the first Edition has it. The hard-back cover is now a collector’s piece so I have laminated it before it gets any tattier.

The Sign of Jonas.

The monastic life is by its very nature "ordinary." Its ordinariness is one of its greatest blessings. The exterior monotony of regular observance delivers us from useless concern with the details of daily life, absolves us from the tedious necessity of making plans and of coming to many personal decisions. It sets us free to pray all day, and to live alone with God.

But for me, the vow of stability has been the belly of the whale. I have always felt a great attraction to the life of perfect solitude. It is an attraction I shall probably never entirely lose. During my years as a student at Gethsemani, I often wondered if this attraction was not a genuine vocation to some other religious Order. It took me several years to find out that all con­templative Orders have much the same problems. Every man called to contemplation is called to some degree of solitude. God knows well enough how much each one needs. We need faith to let Him decide how much we are to obtain. My own solution of this problem is the main theme of the present book. Like the prophet Jonas, whom God ordered to go to Nineveh, I found myself with an almost uncontrollable desire, to go in the opposite direction. God pointed one way and all my "ideals" pointed in the other. It was when Jonas was travelling as fast as he could away from Nineveh, toward Tharsis, that he was thrown overboard, and swallowed by a whale who took him where God wanted him to go.

A monk can always legitimately and significantly compare himself to a prophet, because the monks are the heirs of the prophets. The prophet is a man whose whole life is a living witness of the providential action of God in the world. Every prophet is a sign and a witness of Christ. Every monk, in whom Christ lives, and in whom all the prophecies are therefore ful­filled, is a witness and a sign of the Kingdom of God. Even our mistakes are eloquent, more than we know.

The sign Jesus promised to the generation that did not understand Him was the "sign of Jonas the prophet" - that is, the sign of His own resurrection. The life of every monk, of every priest, of every Christian is signed with the sign of Jonas, because we all live by the power of Christ's resurrection. But I feel that my own life is especially sealed with this great sign, which baptism and monastic profession and priestly ordination have burned into the roots of my being, because like Jonas himself I find myself travelling toward my destiny in the belly of a paradox. (Prologue - concluding paragraphs)

. . .

The blessings of my Cistercian vocation are poured out on me in Scripture and I live again in the lineage of Bernard and I see that if I had been deeper in Scriptures all my past temptations to rune to some Order would have more quickly lost their meaning, for contemplation is found in faith, not in geography: you can dig for it in Scripture, but you will never find it by crossing the seas. (Aug. 8 1949).

It is a pity that Merton never had the chance of staying in the Holy Land. Bernard’s antipathy to monks going to the Holy Land seems to have rubbed off on Cistercians. Merton shared Bernard’s literary eloquence in the description of the Biblical sites but neither can claim asense of the physicality of the land trod by Chris. Bernard and Pope Eugene were to regret their mobilization of military forces for the Crusades but not the monks to serve in the lands of the Bible. By way of some compensation the monks at Latroun in Israel today preserve a precarious foothold of that Cistercian presence.

. . .

There is no reason why a monk should not have a definite attitude towards the place which, in relation to his monastery, is “town.” I do not think that being a monk means being living on the moon. (Nov 11, 1950)

In ‘Fire Watch’ Epilogue Merton reproaches himself first for failing in silence and then for filling that emptiness with talk about it.

Have men of our age acquired a Midas touch of their own, so that as soon as they succeed, everything they touch becomes crowded with people. (Epilogue ‘Fire Watch’)

Was Merton a monk? Was Merton a hermit? Or was he a full time browser? Very soon he would have become a star Blogger. Or would his Abbot been after him in the manner of a very recent headline, “Priestly Blogging – Has it Got Out of Hand”, (Catholic Herald Auf 1, 2008).

I had never heard of FILLION, nor I am sure had Merton but his ‘POST’ on the subject is a gem from the blogosphere of his day.

. . .

Fillion, a Scripture scholar whom I am appointed to read, encourages young priests to study Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic, Itala, Arabic, Syriac, Assyrian, Ethiopean, Coptic, Armenian, Persian, Slavonic, Gothic, and the three main Egyptian dialects, namely Salidic (spoken at Thebes), Fayoumic, (spoken in the oasis of Faymoum), and Memphic (spoken at Memphis. Besides being grounded in oriental archaeology and ethnography, the young priest should also possess a smattering of botany, zoology, geology, and have more than a nodding acquaintance with the Talmud. Also he says one ought to read a few Yiddish novels, by way of recreation.

When you have mastered all this you will be able to elucidate the ivy passage in Jonas, for instance, and you will come to the conclusion that Jonas in Nineveh sat down under a castor oil plant (ivy) and became attached to its shade.
On the whole, I think Saint Teresa's interpretation of Jonas's ivy is more interesting, and she didn't know one word of Egyptian either.
Yet on the other hand, at Mass this morning, I was momentarily distracted with a mild fit of compunction over the Little Flower's statement that if she were a priest she would learn Hebrew and Greek in order to read the revealed word of God in the original languages.

From Fillion, The Study of the Bible, p. 220:
"One day Cardinal Fillion, Archbishop of Lyons, said to me: 'Why is the cat, that charming animal, not mentioned in the Bible?' (Is it so charming after all?-Fillion's comment.)

"I answered: 'Your Eminence, it is mentioned in the Book of Baruch or to be more exact in the letter of Jeremias at the end of that book; the prophet shows it walking over the heads and bodies of the Babylonian idols.' "

So I rush to the Book of Baruch (6:20-21) and find:
"Their faces are black with the smoke that is made in the house.
Owls and swallows and other birds fly upon their bodies and upon their heads, and cats in like manner."
It is the first time I have read the sixth chapter of Baruch and it is a wonderful chapter, written by Jeremias to the Jews going to Babylon, into captivity, to preserve them against temptations to idolatry. "For as a scarecrow in a garden of cucumbers keepeth nothing, so are their gods of wood and of silver, laid over with gold. They are not better than a white thorn in a garden upon which every bird sitteth ... ." .(Aug 19, 1949)

. . .

Daniel delivered Susanna by a judgement inspired by the Holy Spirit and Christ came down to the Temple from the Mount of Olives to deliver the adulteress with the grace of counsel. The Mount of Olives is the mount of chrism, of anointing, of inspiration and counsel and the gifts of the Holy Spirit. (March 18 1950).

I walked the Mount of Olives as often as I could and it became my special place in Jerusalem. By paradox, even if Merton never set foot in the Holy Places, his few words on the Mount of Olives seem to resonate beautifully.

Monthly Retreat:
To be continued: Simon bar Jonah - more on the sign of Jonah.