Australian feminist, author and journalist Julia Baird says it is not easy to maintain faith, especially for women and members of the LGBTQI community. But her faith endures, she says, because she has a sense of God as ‘large, expansive, forgiving, infinite, and both incomprehensible and intimate.’ Author and retired bishop Graeme Rutherford* reflects on her use of the word ‘phosphorescence’, which is also the title of her recent book, and how it has illuminated his understanding of faith, contemplation, St Paul and 20th century mystic Thomas Merton.
Julia Baird, in the title of a recent book coins a new word for contemplative prayer: ‘Phosphorescence’. It describes, for her, being ‘gobsmacked’ by the astounding beauty and diversity of creation. She says, ‘Some of us need to teach ourselves how to wonder again, how to be ready for that sensation. When was the last time you had goosebumps?’[1]
I resonated with Julia’s love of starting each day with a morning swim. After her first major surgery for cancer, she yearned to slip back into the sea. Swimming for her, as for me, is a form of meditation. Chlorinated pools will never have the same charm as the wide blue sea.[2]
I was relieved to hear the Archbishop of York Stephen Cottrell say that he is not much good at sitting still and sinking into deep silent contemplation. He admitted that his mind jumps from one thing after another. He shared his experience of walking the Camino and says he meditates best as he walks.
During the Covid lock-down, I walked nearly every street North, South, East and West of where I live, and in my quest to become phosphorescent, (to use Julia’s word) I made a favourite poem my prayer as I started off each day. It was written by the First World War padre, Fr Studdert Kennedy, entitled Sursum Corda – Hearts Upwards. It has nothing to do with altitude and everything to do with attitude – an attitude of exploration, gratitude and the celebration of creation. It captures for me something of the wonder and marvel of creation:
There are cowslips in the clearing with God’s green and gold ablaze and the distant hills are nearing through a sun-kissed sea of haze.
There’s a lilt of silver laughter in the brook upon its way, with the sunbeams tumbling after like the children at their play.
There’s a distant cuckoo calling to the lark up in the sky and his song comes falling, falling to his next a happy sigh.
Sursum corda, how the song swells through the woods that smile and nod. Sursum corda ring the blues bells. Lift ye up your hearts to God’.
From a small window in his cell at Gethsemane Abbey, in the Kentucky hills, Trappist monk Thomas Merton looked out at the sky with its moving clouds and changing colours and the green leaves of the trees and was awestruck, aware that he was part of a universe unfathomably larger than himself.
This was the apostle Paul’s experience when he reflected on the unfolding plan and purpose of God: 'O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgements and how inscrutable his ways!' (Romans 11:33) When you come into this ambience, into the atmosphere of God, the first thing you recognise is you don't know where you are, you don't know what's going on, this is bigger than you can manage, you haven't got the words for it. And it's that dimension of being out of your depth that is so easily lost sight of if the life of the church simply becomes routine and drab, another thing that you just do.
Through his contemplative attention, Merton also became aware of people in their hour of need.
He was busy writing to the rhythm of Martin Luther King’s freedom marchers. He saw that the campaign for non-violent action, if successful, would free whites from fear as well as blacks from oppression. It was God’s ‘kairos moment’ in America and he believed that no monk could stand aloof from the civil rights movement, the peace movement, the war in Vietnam without incurring guilt. If he did, he would become a guilty bystander, which forms the brilliant title of one of Merton’s books - Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander.
Christianity is at its most powerful when it is at the margins, or periphery, not the centre of power. Jesus condemned leaders who were power hungry. As Julia Baird puts it: ‘He dined with sex-workers, not CEO’s’. She movingly goes on to say, ‘The church must be a sanctuary for the abused, not a refuge for abusers … It is not easy, especially for women, or members of the LGBTQI community to maintain faith in the midst of ugly politicking and hateful sentiments. … complicity in the colonization and exclusion of Indigenous people, has caused deep and rational cynicism about the church. My faith has endured despite all the rubbish I’ve heard about women and my queer friends, despite all of the hate mail and insulting messages I have received from conservative Christians who despise my feminism. My faith continues to exist because I have … a sense of God as large, expansive, forgiving, infinite, and both incomprehensible and intimate’[3] – i.e., Phosphorescence!
Which leads me thirdly to Merton’s humanity and vulnerability.
Some of Merton's more pious followers who had been making hagiographic attempts to turn him into a saint were shocked when it was discovered after his death that he had fathered an illegitimate child during his student days at Cambridge University in 1934. It appears that the censors in the Trappist Order to which he belonged had cut out from his autobiography the more scandalous of his youthful excesses. Hence, there is no mention of ‘the party in the middle of the night’ in his book: The Seven Storey Mountain.
In a will made soon after he entered the monastery Merton gave instructions to his guardian for money ‘to be paid by him to the person mentioned to him by me in my letters, if that person can be found’. The illegitimate child (apparently a son) was a factor which loomed large in Merton's subconscious for years. In fact, he was interviewed a few weeks prior to his death and the interviewer said:
‘Merton helped me by telling me that when he was at an English University, he had an affair with the girl who made beds in his dormitory, and she had a baby, and he said to me, "You know my son would be such and such an age right now and I don't know whether he survived the blitz or not". And he carried that with him. That was on his mind. And he let me know that this was the key to his life.’[4]
From all this we can see that Merton was no Plaster-of-Paris saint. His was a very spotted form of virtue and if that is worrying to a pious elite it has been very consoling to me throughout my ministry. It is far easier and certainly more encouraging to relate to the saints in their weaknesses than in their strengths.
William Shannon, who has edited many of Merton's literary works and is in a position to be able to draw some helpful conclusions as to why people are keenly reading and re-reading Merton, summarises his humane appeal in this way:
‘In him we find an earnest, genuine, no-holds-barred human being struggling, like the rest of us, to find meaning, seeking to confront the absurdity that life so often appears to be. He knew loneliness, homelessness and alienation ... He was human in his strengths, but also in his weaknesses. His clay feet are there for us to see. Like ourselves he had attachments he had to rid himself of and illusions he had to unmask. He was vulnerable in his humanness: a reality he never tried to hide or deny.’[5] Spiritual guides who speak most personally speak most universally.
In saying these things, I am not suggesting that we are free to rationalise under-achievement or spiritual mediocrity. In his letter to the Philippians the apostle Paul implied that no-one is perfect. He certainly admitted that he was not perfect. But what follows from that is not along the lines of an attitude which rationalizes failures. On the contrary, in a favorite verse of mine, the apostle says. ‘Not that I have already obtained this or have already been made perfect; but I press on to make it my own. Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus’. (Phil.3:12-14)
May we keep ‘pressing on’, like Merton, in phosphorescent prayer in our respective lives and ministries, for the glory of God and the enrichment of God’s people. Amen.
*Graeme Rutherford was formerly Assistant Bishop of Newcastle and Bishop on the Central Coast of New South Wales, Australia. He studied theology at Ridley College Melbourne and Durham University. He is the author of several books, including Watchers in the Morning: A Spirituality for Contemporary Christians, A Little Book about A Big Story, and Beloved Father: Beloved Son: A conversation about faith between a Bishop and his atheist son.
References
[1] Julia Baird, Phosphorescence, Fourth Estate, 2020, p.62
[2] Ibid, p.29
[3] Ibid, p.249
[4] Michael Mott., The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton, 1993, Harcourt Brace, p.576
[5] William H. Shannon., Something of a Rebel, 1997, St Anthony, p.49