#gethsemani

How many vocalists are able to do such a thing as a cover of Gethsemani?

Our boy Jinho has a full playlist of videos on YT where he covers lots of songs in the most incredible way. It's pure art 💙.

The Waters of Siloe, Thomas Merton. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (ISBN: 9780156949545), 1979 (First published in 1949). Summary: A history of the Trappist monks, from Cistercian beginnings to the reforms at La Trappe, foundations in America, and the contemplative life. Thomas Merton entered the Trappist monastery at Gethsemani in 1941. Eight year later he penned this history of the Cistercians and…

On the east side of Jerusalem there is a deep valley and ravine called the Kidron Valley or the Valley of the Cedron.  Part of it is also called the Valley of Josaphat.  There are olive groves and cemeteries on the other side of the valley.  The Garden of Gethsemani was an olive grove. Church of the Sepulchre of Saint Mary North of the Garden of Gethsemani there are some first century tombs cut…

Why hast thou forsaken me? is one of seven sayings of Jesus on the cross. These words express the very essence of the tragic mode. (Northrop Frye)

Jesus Christ Pantokrator Agony in the Garden by El Greco The seven sayings of Jesus on the cross Ten years ago, I published a post on the Canonical hours and noted that literary critic Northrop Frye suggested that these words: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” express the very essence of the tragic mode. They express: a sense of his exclusion, as a divine being from the society of…

Finished “Seven Storey Mountain” by Thomas Merton. I heard about a guy writing a review/re-cap of sorts after every book he read. That’s what this is.

The one question that stands out and continues to linger in my mind is: So how do we know its Jesus?How can we be sure it isn’t the Buddha, or Zarathustra, or Muhammad, or that Moses was the right prophet to stop with?

That said, I really did enjoy the book. Merton was definitely a seeker and an intellectual. (Things I think about myself, then I read a memoir from a figure like Merton…) I also appreciate his innate aesthetic sensibility/ artistic proclivities, which are pervasive in all his experiences and writing. I’m remembering now how he wrote about playing piano (he noted his own feckless jazz style at one point), but he said very little about music in full. That’s strange to me. I always remember a postulation from one of Hesse’s books that music is the most sensual of the arts. It has certainly always been the most potent for me. I also feel like artists of ANY discipline always have a strong feeling for music too, while I don’t think musicians have a comparable reciprocal feeling for any particular discipline.

Reading about Merton’s belief in the power of prayer, about how the lives of prayer and contemplation carried out by the Cistercians reverberate in people’s lives around the world in a real way, is a powerful idea for me. I think about oft repeated “thoughts and prayers,” the platitude that’s gained more and more vacuity as the words are offered after successive gun tragedies in our country – and its disorienting in a way. It’s disorienting hearing God‘s name, prayer, and all these spiritual ideas invoked for vain purposes, in service of someone or others ego. Being disoriented spiritually, in a world like that (like this one)… well that makes a lot of sense.

I appreciate Merton’s fondness for Blake and Joyce. I very much enjoyed the historical aspects of the book and the local perspective, so much of his life being in New York. He struggles and talks about his draw towards taking his own life at one point. He talks about desiring some notoriety, some small fame, a cult hero in my mind. I’ve had the same desire. To quote:

“This is what I really believed in: reputation, success. I wanted to live in the eyes and the mouths and the minds of men. I was not so crude that I wanted to be known and admired by the whole world: there was a certain naïve satisfaction in the idea of being only appreciated by a particular minority.” P259

Here are more quotes that I thought to underline in my reading:

“…this terrible situation is the pattern and prototype of all sin: the deliberate and formal will to reject disinterested love for us for the purely arbitrary reason that we simply do not want it.”

“If what most people take for granted were really true—if all you needed to be happy was to grab everything and see everything and investigate every experience and then talk about it, I should have been a very happy person, a spiritual millionaire, from the cradle even until now.”

“Indeed, the truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most: and his suffering comes to him from things so little and so trivial that one can say that it is no longer objective at all. It is his own existence, his own being, that is at once the subject and the source of his pain, and his very existence and consciousness is his greatest torture.”

“…this terrible situation is the pattern and prototype of all sin: the deliberate and formal will to reject disinterested love for us for the purely arbitrary reason that we simply do not want it. We will to separate ourselves from that love. We reject it entirely and absolutely, and will not acknowledge it, simply because it does not please us to be loved.”

“I don't know if I ever got very close to needing a padded cell: but if I ever had gone crazy, I think psychoanalysis would have been the one thing chiefly responsible for it.”

“…the mental prayer I made was not systematic, but the more or less spontaneous meditating and affective prayer that came and went according to my reading, here and there. And most of the time my prayer was not so much prayer as a matter of anticipating ( . . . ) and a certain amount of imagining what it was going to be like, so that often I was not praying at all, but only day dreaming.” P312