Retreat, Day One: In Which James Taylor and Carole King Sing, and I Say Yes

The bell has rung for grand silence.

But I’ve spent the whole day in silence, and the bell only loosens my tongue, makes me want to begin recording impressions of the day.  Impressions: touches in silence; silent touches; the pressing of (im-pressio) other spirit on mine.

Breaking the grand silence by writing in this way—knowing I will be talking to others through what I write—I remind myself of stories I heard about Merton on my first visit to Gethsemani Abbey.  That pilgrimage was in 1970.  (And this day of silence, waiting for the press of spirit on my spirit, has been all about following one memory after another back to its source, in an unhurried, non-harried Augustinian way that allows memory to tag memory, moving ever closer to the source of what the soul seeks to re-member at the font of memory.)

Four of us, crazy, Christ-haunted, distinctly odd students from Loyola drive from New Orleans to Gethsemani.  A cranky little Volkswagen, no air conditioning, tapes of Simon and Garfunkel and Peter, Paul, and Mary to wile the miles as moist air full of the smell of growing corn roars through the open windows.

Because the car shimmies if we try to drive anywhere near 60, we arrive late.  We can’t ask for lodging at Gethsemani.  Not this late in the evening.  Nothing to do but rent a hotel room, a cheap hotel room, because we have, between us, only a few dollars.

Teresa of Avila says that life is like a night spent in a bad inn.  She’s partly right: life is a night spent in a very bad inn in Bardstown, Kentucky, with a flashing neon sign beneath the open window, through which the cloying odor of sour mash pours all night in the humid warm air of a Kentucky summer.

A night spent in a very bad inn with three other people you only partly know—a young woman who loves the young man who owns the car, but who barely sees her now, though they’ll marry later; and a young man with whom I’m secretly in love and who will decisively repudiate me when that becomes apparent.  

But no one talks about such love in those years.  Except when the young man who owns the creaky Volkswagen and who has no eyes for the woman who loves him talks about going into his closet and praying—literally, since it says he should do so—and about the devil and how “those people” need exorcism.

One does not talk about some loves in these years.  Certainly not on a pilgrimage to Gethsemani.

We sleep all night, all four of us, in our clothes, crosswise on one bed.  Perhaps someone sleeps.  I don’t.

Then morning comes, the first day.  After entering the monastery guest house through a pathway surrounded by pachysandra, a plant I’ve never seen, whose cool green becomes the memory of Gethsemani for me (along with a beautiful solo rendition of “Whispering Hope,” which a monk sang as he played the guitar, as a meditation song at Office), we drive back into town to deliver a gift to Colonel Hawk—Louis “Hawk” Rogers, who owns a restaurant in Bardstown.

The gift is from a Poor Clare who’s in love with a Jesuit, whose brother was a monk at Gethsemani.  The brother died tragically young in a fall from a ladder.  The love of the cloistered nun for the teaching priest who will marry someone else and break her heart, and the brother’s death, are all part of the pilgrimage in ways I can’t fully tell here, because I don’t fully fathom them even now.  But I remember them as I allow memory to lead me along the pachysandra-lined path to the heart of silence.

And this is where Merton first comes into the picture—not at Gethsemani.  At Col. Hawk’s restaurant.  He insists on offering us a noontime meal of his famous fried chicken.  We insist on accepting the offer. 

We eat voraciously—the first real meal we’ve had in several days—and Col. Hawk regales us with tales of Merton.  Specifically, with tales about how Merton routinely sneaked away from his hermitage to come into town and drink beer with Col. Hawk.  Where they’d talk the grand silence away with stories of love and love lost.  Of war and rumors of war.  Perhaps of God, though I doubt it. 

Col. Hawk doesn’t talk about God as he talks about Merton.  Merton evidently didn’t talk about God as he drank beer with Col. Hawk.

Words all too often betray the presence that shines brighter in the absence of naming.

And later, when I read Fenton Johnson’s remembrance of how monks from Gethsemani would steal away from the abbey to visit his parents’ bar in Bardstown, to drink bourbon and dance with his vivacious mother—and talktalktalk—I feel at home in those stories, having heard Col. Hawk years ago tell similar ones about his friend Tom Merton.

(And where have those days gone—days of mere human decency—in the church that has come into being at the dawn of the 21st century, in which men inform women that their duty is to die with their fetus, leaving four children motherless and both themselves and their unborn child dead, for what?  To serve an abstract principle?  One imposed by men on women without the consent of the women on whom it’s imposed?  And imposed to what end?  To prove the existence of what bloody God not worth worshiping? 

And where have those days gone when the men inventing these iron rules to imprison women—in the name of a God of love—claim the right to investigate nuns going about their business, while not investigating themselves?  Whose business the whole world now knows . . . .

I’m an old man who says it, one made foolish by age and the gilt-edged remembrance of age.  Still, I will say it: the church of Thomas Merton and the Trappists who drank and danced secretly in a local bar was a more humane church than the one in which we have come to live now.  A church in which the presence that shines beyond words was more readily available to more people than it is now, locked as it is today behind the iron bars of male logic that excludes the viewpoints of the women whom it’s designed to entrap.  A presence that the male logic now ruling the church imagines it can entrap forever behind those iron bars.)

And that’s day one. Day one of my retreat.

Well, not entirely.  As the day ends, before the grand silence begins, I do my usual stint on my torture machine (aka treadmill) while watching Ellen.  Ellen has invited James Taylor and Carole King to sing today (I record the episodes; this was several days ago).  “You’ve Got a Friend.”

More pachysandra-lined paths: it was Steve who introduced me to James Taylor—who first told me Taylor’s story, so that I began to hear the words beyond the words as he sang.  This was a year after the pilgrimage to Gethsemani, at another abbey, another retreat, where Steve and I first talked.  First spoke, soul to soul, lying in a field outside the retreat house, looking up at the stars.

Talking.  Just talking, in the way people did in those impossibly idealistic years in which he burned his draft card and set out on a pilgrimage to Mexico, hitch-hiking down the Mississippi River from Minnesota to New Orleans to a place in Chiapas where the Benedictine community to which several relatives of his belonged had some ties to a mission in which Steve hoped to work.  

And so we met in New Orleans, as he was on pilgrimage to Chiapas.  He, with his passion to combat the war in Vietnam, me with mine to resist racism.  And that strange, inexplicable fixation on a presence we both understood people sometimes encountered when they prayed. 

Steve read Flannery O’Connor and was enthralled by her Christ-haunted characters and their tattooed Jesuses.  He was enthralled by Franny and Zooey and the Jesus prayer.  My tastes ran to Newman, Waugh, Graham Greene, and Muriel Spark.  I already knew too many O.E. Parkers.  I grew up with them all around me.

And so I listen to James Taylor and Carole King on Ellen’s show yesterday, hearing resonances of the impossibly idealistic years of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, when I first became aware of vocation—and, at some level, of my attraction to men.  To Steve.

As Taylor and King perform, she sings,

Well they'll take your soul if you let them.
Oh yeah, but don't you let them.

And it’s as if she looks right at me as she sings those lines.  Right into my soul.

Yes.  Yes, I tell myself.  The silence is working.  The retreat is having an effect.

I needed to hear those words today.  I needed the way they add to and evoke more memories of the pachysandra-lined path into the life I have shared all these years with Steve.

I needed to hear these words today, after I spent the day reading William McFeely’s biography of Thomas Eakins.  Yes.  Yes, I say, for poor, tortured Tom Eakins, who could not name the love that illuminates his paintings, but who suffered nonetheless—terribly so—for that love, even after he married conventionally and did everything in his power to disguise his true nature.

Because they could.  Because men with whom he worked, men in authority over him, could make him suffer.  Because they could tell him that he counted less than they did, though his paintings (and the writings of Thoreau, who was treated with similar disdain by those who could) now far outshine those of the men who had him fired for being a gay man.

Yes, I say, for Tom Eakins and his grace-filled friendship with Walt Whitman.  Yes, for each and every gay and lesbian man and woman throughout history, whose love has gone unvoiced, or has been met with scorn—or with torture, with loss of jobs and loss of reputation, with death.

Yes for love. 

Because that’s the presence that continues singing beyond all the words we can possibly utter.  And which cannot be imprisoned behind the iron bars of logic and male power, no matter how hard men try to construct their obdurate prisons at this point in history.

To love, yes.