Hagia Sophia page 205-208
Sophia: The Hidden Christ of Thomas Merton
"Sunset. The Hour of Compline. Salve Regina."
"The Hour of Compline" invokes Hammer's image of the woman crowning the boy Christ. "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.” As Michael Mott observes, "Where Merton expects us to see the image from the painting" in these lines, "he also expects us to hear music.”128 When the Salve Regina is sung by the monks at the Abbey of Gethsemani, all lights in the abbey church are extinguished except for one, directed at the image of Mary in a window over the altar. 129
Yet Mary crowns her son "not with what is glorious, but with what is greater than glory: the one thing greater than glory is weakness, nothingness, poverty."130 It is thus through Mary's wisdom and "sweet yielding consent" that "God enters without publicity into the city of rapacious men:” Indeed, her "sadness" and "full awareness of what she is doing" reflect a wisdom well beyond her years, a wisdom deeply attuned to the "wisdom and foolishness" that will one day cause a sword to pierce her own heart. "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.”
It is Significant that Mary is depicted in Hammer's picture neither as the mother of an infant nor as a royal Queen of Heaven. Her crowning of the boy Christ, notes McCaslin, is "an act of feminine power;' subverting traditional depictions of "the Coronation of the Virgin" in which Mary is crowned by Christ, rather than she actively empowering him. In crowning the Child with his "human nature,” the poem reminds us "that all men and women come from a common womb (the earth, the Feminine) and are alike vulnerable, frail, and utterly dependent on the earth and the feminine matrix.”131 Moreover, by depicting the Child not as an infant but on the brink of adulthood, both the picture and the poem underscore our common humanity with Jesus-not only "as ones who have undergone birth,”132 as McCaslin suggests, but also as a people called to serve in a world riven by sin and contradiction. As the incarnation of divine Wisdom, "the Child goes forth to ... crucifixion and resurrection. As humanity the child goes forth, an Everyman or Everywoman, into exile from paradise.”133
Mary, in her "wise answer;' accepts the contradiction. Through her understanding, God enters "without publicity" into human history. The final scene of the poem, as Michael Mott notes, is a scene of haunting "solemnity, great beauty, and a piercing loneliness.”134:
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.”135
McCaslin sees in these lines "a strangely modern figure of the exile or God as exile in us,”136 -suggesting that human destiny in a world exiled from Sophia is not altogether different from that of Jesus, the Son of Man who "has nowhere to lay his head.” O'Connell makes a similar point, citing Philippians 2:6-11, Paul's striking hymn of kenosis, God's self-emptying in Jesus: "In identifying fully with the human condition, Christ is the perfect epiphany of Sophia, embodying and extending to all the redemptive mercy of God.”137
The final scene of Hagia Sophia unforgettably reprises Merton's celebration of Pasternak, whose protest is "the protest of life itself, of humanity itself, of love" against the "reign of numbers,"138 against the alienation and anonymity of mass society. What meaning can our lives have, after all, in "the vast expanses" of an evolutionary universe? Like the hospital patient in the opening section of the poem; like Mary, receiving with astonishment the message of the Angel Gabriel; like Joseph, who struggles in faith to make sense of it all; like Mary Magdelene, Peter, Nicodemus, John, all the hidden but crucial players in the narrative subtext of the gospels-when "night embraces the silent half of the earth;' everything depends on our laying ourselves down "under the sweet stars of the world" and giving ourselves over to the hidden Wisdom of God. Though our heads may pound with the clamor of many doubts and fears, and though it is more difficult than ever to see the stars, or even to remember to look for them through the glow of towering, sleepless cities, there is an inner music of Love, Mercy, and Understanding that rises up from the earth itself, Natura naturans, and from the still point of the human heart, asking to be set free in the world. She is Wisdom, our Sister: "God-given and God Himself as Gift.” When we attend to her tender voice and give our quiet consent, she effects in us a work greater than that of Creation: the work of new being in grace, the work of mercy and peace, justice and love.
Who, then, is Hagia Sophia? She is the Spirit of Christ but more than Christ. She is the Love joining the Father, Son, and Spirit that longs for incarnation from before the very beginning. She is Jesus our mother, and Mary, the Theotokos. She is the "pivot" (le point vierge) of nature, Natura naturans, and all creation in God from the beginning. Perhaps most of all, Merton's Sophia is our "true self;' when we (like Mary, seat of Wisdom) allow Christ to be birthed in us, and so realize the hidden ground of mercy, creativity, and presence in our very selves, the mystical Body of Christ. The moment her name awakens in us a sense of mercy, communion, and presence, Sophia is one Wisdom, one Child, one Meaning, one Sister" -is not symbolic, but real, more than literally real. The remembrance of Sophia opens onto a mystical political spirituality of engagement in the world.
