Finca de Sueños Encontrados

Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it. It will talk as long as it wants, this rain. As long as it talks I am going to listen.

-- Thomas Merton (Trappist monk and Catholic theologian), from Rain and the Rhinoceros)

     I was in college when I first found Thomas Merton. I was a student at Ohio State University browsing in Long’s Book Store on a cold autumn afternoon. A picture of a bald, thin young man in white with a black cowl, the uniform of a Trappist monk was on the cover of a paperback pocket sized book, The Seven Story Mountain. I was fascinated by the thought, as I read, browsing the pages, that someone of such intense spirituality was so close to my own neighborhood, just down the road a few hundred miles in Kentucky. I bought that book and his Seeds of Contemplation. It was my first understanding that the spirituality I was looking for was not simply in exotic and distant lands but was local.

Merton introduced me to a different and contemporary Catholic mystical thought and laid the foundations for a long journey back to Christianity. He showed me that faith, even Christian faith, is truly ecumenical and that one can reach out across the artificial barriers of denomination and even religious practice and meet God.

In his life time he was often in conflict with those at the monastery due to his ecumenicalism, though now the monastery capitalizes on his fame and name. He grew deeply over the years in his faith and in his later years, those practicing the "narrow Christianity" he had stepped away from,often attempted to bring him back into the fold. Finally he moved out of the Chapter House and built his hermitage in the rolling hills of the monastery grounds. One of the last pictures I have seen of him is at his hermitage sitting under a tree, his monkish robes gone, dressed in the bib overalls of the local Kentucky farmers. If one were to meet him on the street one would have simply mistaken him for an ordinary man and not the internationally famous writer, priest and monk. Maybe that is really the spiritual message of life, the Divine lives in the ordinary.

I am not sure why Merton came to mind today. Maybe it is because I thought I refused the call he accepted. In my secret heart I felt a calling to a spiritual life and assumed it meant the priest hood or a ministry but being a priest or minister did not "fit" with the other desires of my heart. I thought that such a life would cramp my "style," not understanding that I could lead a deeply spiritual life and a perfectly ordinary life and God would fulfill my heart through both. I was afraid of the commitment I felt this spiritual calling was asking of me and I felt would miss something if I answered, yet it never went away no matter how much I ignored it. In the end, wrestling between the desire for a "muscular" outdoor and physical life and a quiet and contemplative life I almost missed both and also almost missed the most important thing as well, God is in the ordinary. That too was Merton's message.

So, I sit now on my little farm, my own small hermitage, in New Mexico and realize that the "holy life" was a life I was living all along and that the fight was mainly against myself. No matter the form my life/faith walk has taken it seems to inexorably to have moved me to be what I was in my secret heart and so now I live a somewhat monkish life, having fought it every step of the way and find myself come to accept it and in the accepting seeing things open to me which were only hopes and dreams: travel, home horses, friends, work that matters, a physical life and a contemplative life.

I have learned along the way that the spiritual life and mucular life are really one. The forms we take upon ourselves, our roles in life, are pretty meaningless, whether it is a wooded hermitage in Kentucky, an active priesthood in Manhattan, an artist or teacher in Florida or a busy psychotherapy practice in New Mexico. Our lives simply are the patterns of the expression of the Divine if we will only surrender to the will that guides our lives.

Like Jacob, maybe like you, I have wrestled with God and demanded that before I let Him go He bless me on my terms. It worked out for Jacob so I too refused to let go, only recently realizing the blessing comes once one lets go and that the blessing for Jacob, as for us, was in the ordinary world, not in some far off after death life.

I think we all are drawn to the spiritual life in some manner, called in some way. Our struggle is that we divorce the Divine from the ordinary. Merton stated once that advertisers treat products like we should treat the sacraments. We think that somehow "the world" that Jesus told us to be "in" but not "of " is either to be embraced or rejected, not realizing the world He spoke of is the world of selfishness and greed, not the world of God’s creation.

I have seen in others as well as myself the potential we all have to experience and express the Divine. I have wanted it all, not getting it all because I though it "all" was two separate things. In spite of myself, I have had a "full life," yet at times I catch myself thinking I have nothing to show, neither pew nor bank account. Other moments I think, What is there for any of us to show when we have everything to show by just being? Yesterday a hummingbird was in my back yard. A flash of green, a gentle blur on the landscape, is that not enough to have to show? Here and gone but glorious for the being.

The worst battles of our lives are within ourselves, our inability to surrender to good orderly direction and realize there is a balance in living life, not over embracing it and not rejecting it. Knowing that even the simple act of casting a lure to a bone fish, taking a child to school, holding the hand of a dying friend, photographing a bride on her special day, doing what we do well and as a service to others as the hummingbird draws nectar from the flower as a service to her young, is Divinity.

Life is strange. I am mystic, reprobate, husband, father, grandfather and bachelor. I am healer, scoundrel, cowboy, fly-fisherman, dog trainer, redneck and intellectual. The list goes on and I am certain that your list would be as long and varied if you made it. The labels and titles do not matter any more than the name hummingbird means to that flash of green, or Jehovah or Jesus or Christ or Vishnu or Brahma or Allah means to God. It is not in a name but in being that He and we matter.

Being is really best when focused on the ordinary where God is daily found. Even the hummingbird knows Divinity.

It is interesting to reconcile the opposites of my life - the mystic who is cowboy, the reprobate who is healer. I like both guys though the reprobate and the mystic, cowboy and healer coming together, seeming opposites, confuse me as well as you some days. In the reconciliation of opposites is the Divine.

Maybe I thought of Merton again because in this hermitage like farm and in the life I am beginning to live the conflict of self begins to reconcile. Like Merton, as I grow and deepen in my faith walk, I discover I am becoming an "ordinary local" training a gun dog, a horse in the back field, a part of the local flow and character indistinguishable from the ordinary, just one of the "boys."